First up was City of Heroes, a MMORPG that is being developed by Cryptic Studios that made its E3 debut this year. City of Heroes allows you to play as a super hero in Paragon city as you fight against 10 different evil organizations in various missions. You will be able to form up teams with other players and adventure together and earn fame, experience, and money by completing various missions.

Each character you create will be fully customizable for well over a billion combinations (2.44x10^24 combinations to be exact). These customizations will either come in the way of costume designs to the super skills that each hero will have.

Each server in City of Heroes will hold about 2000 active players and will be its own 'Continuity', meaning that each server will branch off differently depending on how the players on each server fare against various organizations.

City of Heroes is set for a Q1 2003 release.

The game that came up next was the Korean MMORPG powerhouse Lineage I and II. While Lineage I is already available stateside, NCSoft unveiled some of the new content that will be released for the game in the upcoming months through free downloads off the main site. Not only will the game area be increased due to new snow and underwater areas, there will be a number of new monsters to go with each one. One monster that caught my interest was a snowman that attacks with...you guessed it, its pointy carrot nose.

In addition to the new areas will be a separate server where players can join for tournament battle, which will allow people to get into the thick of the action without having to spend time doing anything else. The representative also hinted at the possibility of allowing Asian players to join North American servers after the US players get better organized and the average player is at a higher level.

Lineage II was still in its early stages and the only available content out for the game was a trailer and a demo area. The NCSoft representative showed off a number of customizations you can do to the player models as well as some special actions that the models can do, such as a victory pose and lying down and relaxing.

Since Lineage II will be set in a 3D world powered by the Unreal engine, the game promises more interesting battles with aerial units and catapults taking part of castle sieges. While Lineage II is a prequel set 150 years before Lineage I, I was told that there were no plans to link the two games together in any way and that the two games are to be completely separate entities.

Lineage II is also set for a 2003 release.

• City of Heroes Website
• Lineage Website
• Lineage II Website