Just got an e-mail from NCSoft that they are shutting down City of Heroes, and it looks like this site confirms it: http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n.../thank_you.php
It was a great game for it's time, but I don't think many people picked it up after it went free to play. Not sure how long it will be till the servers go dark, but I'll be bringing my heroes out of retirement to battle evil one last time.
Aw man, really? Lotta memories in City of Heroes. From the EU beta which didn't have an alien invasion (biggest jip ever), the first time I flew freely amongst the skyscrapers, the first time I landed a Dragonball Z style double hammer blow on another flying opponent and sent him careening straight to the ground for massive damage (hahaha!), those absurd special group quests which took twelve hours to complete, the discos organised by my good pal Hobojack, my uninspired Sarevok clone of a character...
It was indeed a great game for it's time. The sidekick mechanic was so simple, yet brilliant. I wonder why it wasn't adopted by every MMO.
~5000 hours, 11000+ forum posts, and a lot of memories. It really is a shame they're shutting it down, although personally I couldn't go back to it anymore.
This makes me so impossibly sad. It was my first MMO and the source of all my pre-RPS forum gaming buddies.
Beyond that though, it had so many innovations that have been cruelly ignored by the MMO genre since. Only in recent years has its sidekicking system been taken up by other games, but that is only one part of the game's cunning.
As original IPs go, it had a fascinating game world with some really memorable enemies and lore. Every part of the game scaled to the team's level and number - and it was a masterpiece of game balance, every part of the game could be completed with any combination of classes. It had user-generated content. It pioneered the abstractive disconnect between abilities and appearance, so you could look however you damn well pleased. It had ragdoll physics. It still has one of the best chat systems out there. So many good ideas.
I am sorely going to miss it.
I think I may be in the same boat. I lost track of the game when I went on a deployment in... 2007. I just played for a couple hours, first with my original main character (glad to see he's still around) and then with a new blaster. The game has not aged well.Originally Posted by MaXimillion
This is sad. I've been a bit of an advocate for the game, even when I haven't been playing it. As Screwie points out, the game did so many clever things, and solved so many of the traditional issues of the genre. It came out before WoW- why on earth didn't more developers pay attention?
I wasn't too happy with the way the game went F2P. I went back, hoping to be able to bop about on my favourite characters once in a while, but I found they had disabled all my set Invention enhancements, so that my characters were far too weak to be playable. I had the choice of using regular enhancements, thus losing all the effort it took to accumulate all those sets forever and nerfing the character, or to pay money. I wasn't sure I wanted to be spending money unless I started getting back into the game more seriously, so I chose option number 3- I uninstalled.
City of Heroes have special qualities that no one other mmo has done.
- CoH combat is very action-y dinamic and fun. On most mmos the combat is stale, and even the action ones don't have this rpg action and cool combat. Is just the best, by a wide margin, and all others are not even good.
- CoH friendliness so random groups of people can join to make a mission and make it happend. CoH manage to make people create groups almost efforless. All other mmos go a long way to force people to group, and fail.
- CoH character creator, and character creations. The character creator is soo good, and the stuff people have created with it are soo good, that losing this is losing a unique art creation. Somewhat like having a museum burn, destroying all creations inside, this is a reason to be very sad, even if not where for the others.
To sumarize, CoH was one of the few good mmos, and the last or unique one to support some good qualities. Withouth it, the mmo world is much, much more poorer and crappy.
I played it just after launch and again recently around the start of this year. It didn't grab me, but it's still a shame they have to shut it down. I realise there are probably all kinds of licensing issues for incorporated tech, but it would be nice if a community could take these old games over and stand for the costs themselves. Hmm. Though I suppose satisfied customers of community funded games aren't playing new MMORPGs. Yeah, it'd never work - unless you count Ryzom.
We witness the death of another world and culture. MMOs are strange. Once it's gone, it's gone. All we can do now is document it for future generations. I know from my own late night aimless internetting where obscure pointless things suddenly seem like the most interesting topics ever that there will be quite a few people in the future who will spend 4 hours reading and watching everything there is about CoH.
Where so many MMOs have a scarcity of content, City of Heroes had to invent the "Flashback" system so people could auto-level down and play the story arcs that they out-leveled the first time.
I think their over-stinginess with the F2P conversion killed a lot of good will. I'm in the same boat as arathain as far as that goes: Decided to pop in and check it out after it went F2P, and see if I wanted to re-sub, and found that the billions of $ of IO sets I'd slotted were turned off, and none of my Incarnate abilities were available. That pretty much snuffed my desire to go back.
Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. :(
Well, logged in tonight with the intent to buy a month of VIP (game has 3 months left before the plug is pulled) and NCsoft has totally shut down billing/purchases. You cannot buy VIP as of August 31. A real Brainiac move there, NCsoft. How many thousands who are like me and would have tossed $15 at you 1, 2, 3 times for old time's sake? No way in hell I'll try to play all my characters with all their IOs disabled (i.e. unenhanced powers.) May whomever is in charge of this choke.
So any interest in a last gasp RPS presence in CoH? I always enjoy poking around during an MMO's twilight days.
It has been reported (on the official forums I think...I'd check there before spending any moolah) that serial codes still worked to upgrade people to full status, at least this weekend. So if you can find a cheap copy of a paid release that you haven't already put on your account, (CoV, Going Rogue, maybe even the Mac version, or even time cards), it might do the trick. And some of those should be pretty cheap now. Can't say for sure myself, as I was still subbed.
Very sad state of affairs. Loved City of Heroes, it did so many things so well. I know a lot of developers and designers played and enjoyed it too. Kind of spoiled me for other games' sometimes clunky interfaces.
City of Heroes has been the MMO I've came back to every now and then, you could just pop in do some missions and pop out again at your leisure. I have some great memories with it, enjoying it a lot with my buddies, the community was also very nice.
This came really unexpected, with the Going Rogue and Freedom expansion and it's steady fanbase I thought CoX could survive for quite some time. You will be missed Paragon Studios. :(
Meanwhile Ragnarok Online has been alive for 10 years now.
Last edited by Ravelle; 04-09-2012 at 09:05 AM.
Steam | Origin: xRavelle | Skype: TheRavelle | PSN: Voltburn | Watch me struggle through my backlog
Me and my girlfriand had played a bit of WoW together. But we didn't renew our subscriptions as we didn't play enough to justify the cost.
CoH seemed like the obvious (in fact; only) alternative. She has a MacBook, and spare few MMOs work on Macs. It's f2p model suited us perfectly. We've only just got into it. As a long time gamer with an avid aversion to all things MMO, I've been pleasantly surprised by CoH. This is, indeed, shame.
that is truly shitty. maybe i should get back on it one last time :- /
Good times with Mastermind and Dark/Dark Scrapper.
It's a pity that the future updates never interest me enough, but I consider the two months spent there was fun enough.
I'll be back for a bit, I should think. I'd quite like to be there for the servers shutting down, but I may also try to finally get my first main (a grav/kin controller) up to 50. ;-)
City of Heroes and Villains is dead. Long live City of Heroes and Villains!
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