It’s patch day for the largest batch of City of Heroes rogue servers, as the Homecoming team has pushed live part of the beta patch that’s been cooking all month. The focus today is chiefly to update the client and launcher to use the 64-bit version of Wine so that the game can keep running for Mac and Linux players following the Mac OS X Catalina update that drops 32-bit support apps. Players logging in through Tequila as normal will see both the 32-bit and the new 64-bit client as well as a safe-mode version for really old operating systems. Anecdotal reports right now suggest even Windows players are benefiting from the new 64-bit support too. There are also a few tweaks to character flags and the promised physics fixes.
You might recall that the patch on the beta server had a lot more to it, including some pretty significant changes to snipe powers and Dominator archetype balance. That’s apparently been held over a bitsy. Here’s Homecoming’s Leandro:
“The new client and server binaries will go live during today’s maintenance, unless I find a last-minute problem. But just the code changes, not the data changes like powers, base items and so on. I’ve been going back-and-forth on this all week, but at the end of the day I think the safest approach is to hold back on the data changes for a week. By doing so, if a major problem is found with the new client, we can roll it back without data loss. While I don’t expect problems, I think an overabundance of caution is guaranteed when the internal changes are this extensive. If there are no problems with today’s patch, the data changes will go live next Tuesday, the 27th.”
As a fun side note, we’re told that multiple CoH rogue servers are currently waging a very serious war over pineapple pizza, and there might just be a little spoiler tucked into this patch for people playing along. Maybe take a peek around the Atlas Park tram, eh?
