City Of Heroes Moves Home

City of Heroes/Villains is moving house. The super superhero MMO IP has been fully bought up by NCsoft, who formerly shared ownership with the games' developer Cryptic. But unusually for a publisher buying a game from its developer, this doesn't seem like it's bad news at all.

According to Cryptic, NCsoft have offered everyone on the CoH/V team a job, and indeed a few of the top dogs have accepted. So lead designer Matt Miller, lead engineer Aaron Brady and lead artist Ken Morse have all made the transition.

NCsoft promse this signifies their continued interest in the games, with multi-year plans for their future, beyond continuing the free Issue updates (Issue 11 is coming soon). Employing wild speculation, you could see executive producer Brian Clayton's words - "we can’t wait for the 'City of' community to see all that we have in store for them" - implying the possibility of a third City being added to the franchise. Or you could say he's just abbreviating for the two existing games. Let's pretend it's the former, because that's more fun. [Edit: Content And Community Manager, Stephen Reid, tells us that a third city isn't very likely, but there are big plans for the existing locations]

NCsoft seem quite committed to the project. They're opening a new California-based studio for the games, and it seems unlikely that players will notice much difference. And it leaves Cryptic free to work on their Marvel license MMO. Which is all enough to remind me to wake up my account and take Nitefall out on the battle of crime once more. Super-jump!