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Posted By Shaun K. about 8 months, 1 week ago
Episode 8: City of Heroes: What Was, Is, & Might Be
Welcome back to the show where we introduce the debate and you continue it. This week’s topic: Shaun and Oda discuss & pay tribute to City of Heroes and consider what the future could hold for the venerable title.
Thumb Wars is a weekly show hosted/produced by Shaun Kronenfeld dedicated to starting and encouraging dialogue and debate on a wide variety of topics within the video game industry. Look for a new Thumbs Wars every Sunday. Comments, opinions, and thoughts are not only welcome, they are the entire point. Feel free to follow Shaun on Twitter @bigred_13 if you feel so inclined.
While you said it won’t hurt MMOs in general and I agree, I think it may hurt even further the ability for any company to try to get away with a subscription based MMO.
Because as you said, the game was still profitable. It may not have been hugely profitable but it wasn’t draining money from the company to keep it going. The fact that they would shut it down in spite of that, I think will make it much harder for anyone in the future to justify to themselves paying a subscription fee out of fear that all the money they’d spend in the game could so easily be wasted if the game is unexpectedly yanked out from under them.
Thank you for the coverage. It’s very much appreciated by the community
FatherXmas picked up some of the factual nitpicks, which in the overall scheme of things are somewhat minor – and when trying to do a quick discussion, understandable.
One of the things that I think needs to be said echoes a discussion on the COH boards themselves a while back – it would be very difficult to *plan* an MMO out that does what City of Heroes has done. Cryptic was, in essence, formed to make this game. They were newbies at this – of course, the MMO genre itself was fairly new, as well. And they made… I suppose we can call them “fortuitous mistakes.” Some came back to bite them later – the eternal nightmare of PVP balance in the game, for instance, because you’re not dealing with just, say, “A tanker does this, you can resist this, control does this, a defender does this.” No, a defender could heal. Or buff the team. Or debuff – sometimes quite nastily – the other team.
Other games may have a few trees, or cross-classes or whatnot, but just not to the extent the archetype/primary/secondary/pool powers system could create. Balance against control? Do you balance with the Mind/Psy Dominator in mind, or the Illusion/Empath?
They did stumble. And there were times it seemed they were just throwing things against the wall to see if it would stick – and as frustrating as that might get for some of us (including myself, honestly) on the inside, playing the game and wondering about what we might think of as “forgotten” systems, the flip side of it was just what you mentioned – they were there to take chances. They were quite willing to… and in a market where it seemed every other game that came out was meant to be “a WoW killer.” COH… just didn’t care about that.
There’s so much in COH that makes me hate the thought of it going away – from the character customization (having my *own* look, my *own* powers, as opposed to “Fighter #0439872″ or “Cleric #98739483″ really does cause you to care about the characters) to the interaction with the devs – who never seemed to be there for “just a job,” even when the team was down to 15 people prior to the NCSoft buy – to forums that, instead of giving comments like “lol noob” and flaming for simple questions, actually had people complaining to each other that someone else answered the person’s question first. People *falling over themselves* to help…
I’ve played Aion. TOR. APB. Guild Wars. Beta’d Earth and Beyond. CO, STO… no other game has had the combination of things that not just keeps me going, keeps me wanting to play, doesn’t force you into a grind, makes me *want* to interact with the community, that COH does. I don’t think I’ve lasted more than six months in any other game.
COH? February 26, 2005. TO now. With a few months of a break at the beginning of this year being the first time I’d left… and I still slipped in as a Premium to play.
City of Heroes is unique… which is why the community’s fighting the shutdown so hard.
-Thank you, again.
Memphis Bill
#saveCOH
Thank You for the Coverage. I don’t know about the industry, but I don’t see myself playing any other MMO if COH goes away. None has ever held my interest for more than an hour or 2. City Of Heroes has held my interest for over 6 years.
#savecoh
A couple of minor nitpicks.
City of Villains came out October 31st, 2005, not 2008 and zone PvP between Heroes and Villains was available day 1 of CoV.
Each game could play as a complete standalone game. In July 2008, 7 months or so after NCSoft bought out Cryptic’s share and formed Paragon Studios, players who owned only one of the two games got access to both. CoV owners could now make heroes and vice versa.
In 2010 the studio released Going Rogue, which when added to the game allowed heroes and villains to change alignment so to speak and do the content from the other side of the game. It also added a new start area, a parallel world – Praetoria, where a new character had access to all the standard “classes” from both CoH and CoV and at level 20 were given the choice to go Hero or Villain.
When the FTP City of Heroes: Freedom came out in 2011, the option of making characters with any of the once Hero only/Villain only “classes” and then choose which side to play was ported to Earth Prime.
Father Xmas
#savecoh
We are Heroes. This is what we do!