I was at DragonCon last weekend when I found out that City of Heroes is being closed down. (I was also at DragonCon last weekend when I was supposed to be making last week’s post, which is why, along with some boring work-related stuff, you haven’t heard from me in a while. But I digress.) It’s hard to really describe how I feel about this news; I don’t really have a whole lot to analogize it to. I was too young to be in organized fandom when ‘Doctor Who’ was canceled, and I had already lost a lot of my emotional investment in ‘Buffy’ by the time it went away. Even situations like the sunsetting of the WotC Star Wars TCG, or the various times that I’ve seen Shadowfist look like it was going to go the way of all flesh don’t apply, because I still had the cards I’d already bought. I can’t get new Netrunner expansions anymore, but WotC didn’t come to my house and burn my collection. This feels more like finding out that a new highway is coming through my neighborhood. My house isn’t being wrecked, but a lot of the places where I spent time with my friends over the last seven or eight years aren’t going to be there anymore.
Even if the game does go down, though (and I know of and approve of the various efforts to save the game in one form or another) I think that the people who worked on it can take a lot of pride in what they did over the last eight years. City of Heroes might not have been one of the biggest MMOs out there, but its influence was out of proportion to its subscriber base. It was the first MMO to really push the idea that you shouldn’t punish people for playing your game; lenient death penalties, casual-friendly loot systems, and a grouping design that pretty much everyone in the industry scrambled to emulate made it clear that MMOs could, if done right, appeal to a large audience. It might be an exaggeration to say that MMOs might be a much smaller genre without City of Heroes, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
I’m trying not to be angry at NCSoft over this. I’m certainly not a satisfied customer, and I don’t think they see it from the same perspective as I do, but I think it’s about as useful to get mad at a company for making a business decision as it is for getting mad at a shark for biting you. NCSoft is a business, their goal is to make the most money they can. They think something else will be more profitable than CoH is for them currently, and they have the numbers to back that up. I can get upset over that, but I can’t really argue with it. In some ways, I think the saddest thing about all this is the way that it’s revealed an ugly vein of racism in the fan community, as some people are muttering darkly about how the Korean-based NCSoft is somehow doing this because they don’t like their American playerbase. I know these people are upset, and I can sympathize with that anger, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying right or appropriate. They’re doing what any company does, trying to find the most profitable investment of their funds. City of Heroes is profitable, but it’s not a cash cow and it’s never going to be. Do I wish NCSoft cared more about its fans and the wonderful development team that have put years of effort into this game? Of course. But companies don’t work that way.
I know that if the various efforts to save the game fail, I’m going to spend a lot of time missing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. But I think what I’m dwelling on most right now, though, is the lost potential. I was still creating characters up through about three weeks ago, taking advantage of the new powersets and looking forward to the next issue (I already had an idea for a Chow Yun-Fat inspired Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster.) So many things that were teased and hinted at now may never be revealed. (Although I have to confess, I’m amused by the speculation that the “Coming Storm” and the mysterious enemy referenced over the last several issues was, in fact, the end of the game world at the hands of the developers.) Playing City of Heroes was always fun, but more than that, it seemed like a world of limitless possibilities that stretched out into the future. That’s gone, now, even though the memories are always going to be great ones.
What will I do with the time I spent playing City of Heroes? I don’t know. I probably won’t pick up another MMO. The setting was always a big part of the draw for me, and Champions Online never caught my interest in the same way. (As for DC Universe Online…I think I played it for five minutes, but that was only because it took me four minutes and thirty seconds to figure out how to quit.) I’ve already backed up my characters (thank you, mad genius who invented the character export tool!) and I’ll probably move on to other interests, and wait for the day when someone’s fond memories of this are strong enough that they make the game live again. Because to me, this game is worth waiting for.
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To all fellow City of Heroes players:
We’re still running Tanker Tuesdays on the servers until the end.
And I’ve still got Shardtober planned for Champion server this coming October weekends.
@Witty Librarian
Convert your characters to a tabletop system format (I like Mutants and Masterminds) and you can play him for as long as you can keep a group together.
I never played CoH, but I spent years on WoW (played from about 2005 until about two months ago) and I know what you mean. While I was playing it I was always amazed by how much stuff I still had never done, how much potential there was for my characters and in the world in general. Even over the months before I let my subscription lapse, as other things infringed on my WoW time and the “stuff I still had never done” list got closer and closer to the “stuff I don’t like” list, I felt good about the game and expected to come back with the next new content, or when I wanted to play with a different focus, or even as soon as I found more free time and money. The idea of WoW and my main characters not being there at all when I want to come back to it is a bit frightening.
But now, I’m surprised when I think about how easy it’s been. Other pasttimes took over most of the time I used to put into WoW, and I’m nowhere near bored with them yet. Real life has become more important, but mostly in a good way. I haven’t been particularly curious about the upcoming expansion.
So me quitting isn’t the same as the game vanishing, but still, you never know.
Well said. Glad to see City of Heroes players here.
Here are the links if anyone wants to sign the petition or learn more how you can help save the game.
Good article, John. I sympathize, though my experience with CoH goes as far as a hacked copy of the character creator from five years ago, and a foray into the game three days ago*. I think you’ve hit on the terrible truth of the current MMO-space, that the community investment required for a worthwhile experience simply isn’t profitable for any one sponsoring company. There appear to be a few reasons for that, but all I can say for sure is that it’s a damn shame. I think a lot of us grew up believing that videogames would let us share great stories we had a hand in building.
* I really like playing with the character creators, to the point I’d pay a couple of dollars to see the CoH creator made freeware. I spent a lot of time on DCUOnline just collecting costume pieces, in the absence of an engaging game to play.
So… how can I save the characters I want to keep, in case the game does close?
@PaulW: This is a link to the Sentinel+ data extraction program:
http://cit.cohtitan.com/sentinelplus/
At present, there’s no way to make use of the data it extracts; as wyrmsine said, there’s no offline CoH character creator or private server version of the game. However, that may change in future, so I backed up my characters now and am keeping a hopeful eye out for something to do with that data. 🙂
The Netrunner reference in the first paragraph leads me to believe that you may not be aware of the game’s recent revival as a ‘LCG’ by Fantasy Flight Games but might be pleased to learn of that fact.
http://www.amazon.com/Android-Netrunner-Living-Card-Game/dp/1616614609/
CoH was an excellent game. It was very high on the number of enemies you could successfully pull at once, compared to a very wide variety of other mmorgs I have played. Other games have questlines or craftlines that felt more epic, but CoH actually felt the most heroic as you waded in. It gets too darn annoying if you have to flee all the time you pull one single extra mob.
Care to go into more detail about what you didn’t like about DCUO?
I to pray for the day when someone can come and ressurect City of Heroes. After my shock and then burning anger at NCSoft, my heart went out to Paragon Studios for all those great people who got tossed to the curb. I hope they all find jobs.
I for one will continue to play City of Heroes until they pull the plug.
What really bugs me is that people paid money for the game but can only play it for as long as the game company allows them to.
(Insert Digital Comics DRM discussion here)
I loved this game, especially the villains half. I hope someone finds a way to keep it going with private servers. I always wanted a single-player/co-op game set in a similar sort of way. Maybe like 5 players making their own characters, their own villains, and then getting their own open world wherein massive storylines occur, random events, and your own custom story progresses.
My Shadowfist brother!
@Dio: Didn’t like the control scheme. Not saying it’s bad; just saying that after years of playing a game that doesn’t have mouse-look, playing a game that does have mouse-look made the experience something like watching the feed from a camera strapped to the head of a squirrel that had been fed coffee beans instead of acorns. Not pleasant. 🙂
It figures. I picked up a discount copy of City of Heroes about a month ago, just haven’t gotten around to playing it. Looks like I’m gonna miss my chance.
DCUO has better writing, better stories, and better characterization than 90% of the comic DC is publishing right now.
And flying around Metropolis is right up there with the Spider-Man 2 game for giving me the, “Yay! I’m a superhero!” feeling. Just getting from place to place is more fun than most superhero games I’ve played.
The announcement hit me like a gut punch, even though I haven’t been actively playing the game for the last two years. I maintained my subscription all that time, figuring I’d just go back to it when I had the time..
The thing I loved absolutely the most about CoH was travel powers. No more plodding along wearily for ten minutes just to get to one side of a city from the other. Every time a new MMO comes out and doesn’t have those, my enthusiasm decreases by at least three notches.
Are you sure it’s really racism, and not the same generalized assumption that game developers hate their customer base that you see everywhere in the gaming community? You know, people say EA and Blizzard hate their customers all the time, no race involved. I’m pretty sure they would assume a motive of customer hatred if those in charge were manatees, mice, or advanced supercomputers incapable of human emotions.
I remember the last time I logged on. Truth be told, even then, I knew it couldn’t last. The game had gone free-to-play, and the servers, once teeming with fashion disasters, was now desolate.
Nonetheless, my ancient Storm-Summoning Corrupter, Thunderbolt Iron, awaited me like an old friend. I flew to high towers and danced, electrocuted mobsters and robots, joined up with some mates and robbed a bank… The elation when you level up and everyone “gratz”es you, the glee of hurling a hailstorm into the middle of a chaotic melee and watching the damage plink up, the joy of going into the costume creator and watching a new character take shape, the satisfaction of tearing the cape from the hero’s back and styling it into a symbol of fear…
And soon it’ll all be gone.
Dang.
I’mma go back on, even if only to say goodbye.
Obviously I’m coming to this discussion very late, but there are a few points that I’d like to make, as someone who has played the game since early 2005 (or Issue 4, if you know the game’s update numbering system).
One, I don’t think that it’s racist in any meaningful sense of the word to argue that NCSoft doesn’t really understand the North American/European market, and possibly never has. It’s a less hurtful theory, IMO, than that NCSoft is in fact a badly run business that regularly kills off games in the worst possible way, which would not only permanently alienate most of the current CoH player base, but also give it a bad rep that would affect sales of future games. (In fact, I know a number of CoH players who are switching over to Guild Wars 2, under the assumption that NCSoft couldn’t kill it off even if they wanted to, but not only do I not trust NCSoft in any way, shape or form now, but also I frankly want to punish them by boycotting their games.)
Two, this has been further supported by rumors in the month-plus since the cancellation announcement that NCSoft has simply refused to respond to offers to buy CoH. NCSoft’s spokespeople insist that they tried and failed to sell it, but for some odd reason people don’t trust a company that fired all of Paragon Studios’ staff on the Friday before the major American labor holiday. Between the fact that CoH was still making money after going free-to-play/freemium and the fact that other MMORPGs have managed to keep servers open for years after they stopped making money for their owners, it comes off as cruel indifference.