City of Heroes had the rug yanked out today by it's parent corp NC Soft. Severs go dark November 30. All other support has been suspended and the staff was let got with no prior warning.
Guild Wars 2 just launched. Probably had something to do with it.
An old gamer buddy texted me and said, "I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does."
I said, "I know what you mean."
JG
It seemed to be ticking along quite nicely - all the development costs were long-since paid off when Cryptic were still running it, and it had a small but devoted subs base, who would be quite cheap to support. It should have been profitable.
Nice game. Shame to see it close; there was nothing else quite like it. DCUO is something else, and Champions Online... is just a bit rubbish.
Just looked at the CoH forums, 8000 people currently live on the forums.
Sooner or later, the "Game Over" page comes up for every online game.
That's sad.
I only ever played the trial account, back in 2007, but (1) I was amazed by how well they took the supers concept and squeezed an awesome MMO out of it; (2) I loved the City of Villains jailbreak starting area; and (3) I spent a good amount of my free trial hours playing with the character creator. (If there was justice in this world we'd get the character creator as a freebie to play with. Fuck Hero Machine and Fábrica de Heróis, this is the real deal)
I didn't stick around to see City of Rogues, but the Mission Architect expansion sounded amazing. Pity I didn't get to try it.
Oh well. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.
NcSoft are sorta in trouble outside Korea atm as other than Aion and the recently launched Guild Wars 2 they dont make much profit on mmo's these days(i believe they still rule the korean scene with lineage and Aion amongst others), City of Heroes is an old mmo that has a small dedicated fanbase but not enough that risking money on building a sequal game would be worthwhile so unfortunatly it's being put out to pasture alongside other older but still classic mmorpg's that just dont have the fanbase to survive this increasingly shinking market where in order to survive you either have to be a fantasy game or offer something another mmo doesnt offer better(which unfortunatly Champions Online and to a lesser extent Dc Universe do).
What makes matters worse is the fact rumours say Arenanet(creators of Guild Wars2) may be going it alone early next year which would mean even less profits for NcSoft.
As a long time player, it seems their are a lot of reasons why this has happened. NCSoft has lost a lot of money on AION, the licensing from Cryptic (now owned by a competing Korean corporation) looks like it is expiring, and the whole free to play thing produced good money, but takes continued support to keep making that money. Especially since the engine was never meant to allow many of the additions players wanted.
Now, I'm sad to see it go. I wish they'd have treated Paragon Studios (the people who did the local work) better, so even if they announced the reason they're shutting down COH1, to build COH2, they will lose customers. (Plus the likelihood of them creating a 2 is very small.)
The thing that kills me the most is all the time I spent and money on a digital game that doesn't even leave me a souvenir, only friends I made, and memories. (Unlike tabletop RPG's, where I have the book, and I have the character even if they "died.")
So I'm bummed, but I was expecting it, sadly.
Dedicating so much time to anything can be disappointing, but in this case more so since in the end we've no control over what happens to the game in the long run.
Though the game had it's flaws and ultimately the gameplay needed a bit more, it was done well. And it was a game i could run!
I'm surprised DCUO hasn't been cancelled yet.
Quote from: Silverlion;578968The thing that kills me the most is all the time I spent and money on a digital game that doesn't even leave me a souvenir, only friends I made, and memories. (Unlike tabletop RPG's, where I have the book, and I have the character even if they "died.")
The basic hazard of digital subscription media.
With the right setup you can capture video of a 3D game, but since so much of it is just tedious !@#$ing around, that's not all that satisfying.
The loss of the community is what's gutting me. Yes, you had trolls. Yes, you had idiots. Every community has these. But by and large, the community on the Virtue server was welcoming and fun. I made a lot of friends -- and yes, I consider them real friends; there are people on the other side of those words -- and, in particular, I was welcomed with warm and open arms by the community surrounding The Cape, a player-run radio station for Virtue.
I don't intend to lose these people. I've already gone into the Acceptance phase. No petition is going to stop this. No deal is going to save the game. It's going away. But I'm not going to let the community be ripped away from me by simple business decisions coming out of Korea.
Quote from: Ghost Whistler;578972Though the game had it's flaws and ultimately the gameplay needed a bit more, it was done well. And it was a game i could run!
I'm surprised DCUO hasn't been cancelled yet.
Sony online tends to keep games around way past the sell by date(everquest 1 is still active) so unless dc pulls the licence themselves i wouldnt expect them to shut it down for a fair while yet, also it actualyl isnt that bad of a game despite the fact its a sony mmo(and thus predisposed to being abit shitty).
Quote from: Corvus;579018No petition is going to stop this. No deal is going to save the game. It's going away.
Given the game's age and lack of any sequel plans, either buying the IP or convincing them to release the source is at least in the realm of possibility. Wouldn't do jack for the community, but the community could then potentially run their own servers.
Quote from: CRKrueger;578933Just looked at the CoH forums, 8000 people currently live on the forums.
I don't know what 8k, live, on the forum at that moment means for total population, but I assume its at least 10 to one.
I figure most people never go to the forum.
So sad; I played COH ever since it released, right before WOW.
Just last week I was planning out a new character based on a new powerset scheduled for release in the next expansion.
Then.."Wham" ganked by NC soft!
Guildwars2 may get me on the rebound though.
Sad to see this one go. For some reason it seemed less intense and easier to play than WoW for myself and my friends. No rage, just sad.
This news hit me a lot harder than I ever would have expected it to.
It's not a "Losing a video game" feeling, it's more a "This really cool place where I used to hang out and had some great fun with great people during bad times just burned down" feeling.
Quote from: Silverlion;578968The thing that kills me the most is all the time I spent and money on a digital game that doesn't even leave me a souvenir, only friends I made, and memories. (Unlike tabletop RPG's, where I have the book, and I have the character even if they "died.")
Very good point.
None of these are really "Souvenirs" (They remind me of the game, not of what my friends and I *did* in the game), but just for old time's sake I opened the closet to inventory all the CoH paraphernalia that I collected during the five years that I was into the game
hardcore:
1)The two paperback novels. The Robert Weinberg one was fun (The CoX universe had Napoleonic superheroes?!!), the Robin D. Laws one seemed phoned in.
2)All the HeroClix figures, including both Statesmen.
3)The two three-ring binders. Yeah, kinda got suckered on that. But they're sturdy and look nice.
4)Two issues of the (Not very good) comic book.
5) The quick-play packet/preview for the aborted tabletop RPG. Ugg. Graceless mish-mash of the MMO with the Eden house system. Worked against each other. Probably for the best that it never came to pass, but I was really looking forward to it at the time.
6)@Four or five hundred cards for the (Very well-done, underrated) CCG.
7)The Collector's Edition box of CoH, with the first HeroClix figure, a Scott Kurtz PVP mini-comic, and a small poster-map of Paragon. That map just might get framed...
8) The Collector's Edition big box of City of Villains, with a pretty little art book and other gew-gaws.
9) For the first two years that I played I didn't even have a debit card, so I have scads of those one-month plastic illustrated Game Time Cards that you could get at Gamestop. I even have three of the boxes they used to come in. Such a trivial piece of cheap ephemera...As silly as it sounds, I'm really glad I didn't throw these out.
Oh, man. Remember back when there was even talk of a CoH TV series?
Why do I get the feeling that while City of Heroes probably made a profit, it didn't make enough of one? I've seen that happen where corporations jettison decent products simply because it wasn't bringing in enough money to make it sexy in Wall Street's environment.
I am saddened by the loss of CoX. I never played hero-side, but I friend strongarmed me into buying a Villian side box. I enjoyed the included month of play. Even though I haven't played it in a long time, I have a warm spot in my heart for CoV and it's always occupied the absolute top on my list of games I'd like to give a second chance, time permitting.
Quote from: flyerfan1991;579582Why do I get the feeling that while City of Heroes probably made a profit, it didn't make enough of one? I've seen that happen where corporations jettison decent products simply because it wasn't bringing in enough money to make it sexy in Wall Street's environment.
For instance, D&D 4th Edition. :D
JG
I want to be in Atlas Park when the servers go down for the last time on November 30... kinda like Ultra-Man bravely facing down that white wall of nothingness in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I played CoH for several years. It was a lot of fun, but it was also aging fairly poorly. I thought they were busy making CoH2, but I guess not. In any case, I had a lot of fun playing that game.
I do hope the devs all quickly find new jobs. Corporations that just shut down an entire sub-company with no warning in order to make a quarter's profit look good are truly scum, IMO.
Quote from: danbuter;579983I do hope the devs all quickly find new jobs. Corporations that just shut down an entire sub-company with no warning in order to make a quarter's profit look good are truly scum, IMO.
Bear in mind that the video game industry is extremely volatile and the people who work in it know this. It's pretty rare for a developer studio to exist for longer than the one game they were assembled to produce. And I'd be willing to bet the writing was on the wall internally at NCSoft long before this.
I almost have to wonder if this decision and the GW2 overselling weren't related. Sometimes it's not about "is this division profitable", it's "are the resources currently being sucked up by this division better used somewhere else". I could easily see the COO at NCSoft realizing that they'd underprovisioned for the GW2 launch, but there's all those CoH servers sitting there not doing anything important...
Quote from: James Gillen;579610For instance, D&D 4th Edition. :D
JG
I was thinking of 3.5 myself....
I've read rumblings on CoX in-game chat that the end may be coming sooner than Nov. 30.
Anyone know anything about that?
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;580686I've read rumblings on CoX in-game chat that the end may be coming sooner than Nov. 30.
Anyone know anything about that?
I dont think there has been any official announcement that Nov 30th was the last date either
It's a shame CoH is going, but it seems to me every MMORPG will go this way as they try to 'strike gold' and get WoW numbers then fall short and be declared a failure by someone doing the accounts.
Quote from: APN;581484It's a shame CoH is going, but it seems to me every MMORPG will go this way as they try to 'strike gold' and get WoW numbers then fall short and be declared a failure by someone doing the accounts.
Yeah, until one of them does blow past or equal to wow, like WOW did to Everquest.
I always have hopes we'd get more competition in design rather than repetition.
Quote from: APN;581484It's a shame CoH is going, but it seems to me every MMORPG will go this way as they try to 'strike gold' and get WoW numbers then fall short and be declared a failure by someone doing the accounts.
I've said it elsewhere: if you are not Blizzard, trying for #1 in the MMO market is a recipe for financial failure. You've got over a decade and billion dollars spent against you before you even start.
You aim for, say, #5. MUCH cheaper to develop and support, and there is still plenty of money to be made - Turbine, for example, are doing great with DDO and LOTRO, and Guild Wars has always been a solid earner. That's the model you should be looking towards.
Quote from: Silverlion;581486Yeah, until one of them does blow past or equal to wow, like WOW did to Everquest.
I always have hopes we'd get more competition in design rather than repetition.
The problem is that when new designs do come out, people don't support them. Look at The Secret World, for example, which is pulling in extremely low numbers.
I would love there to be more competition in MMOs, but I also suspect that unless there's a title that pulls in some new blood, MMOs will continue to cannibalize from each others' numbers. From that perspective, F2P makes more sense because a gamer can subscribe to one title (WoW is the default these days) while playing several.
Today is your last day. Servers go dark tomorrow December 1st at 3:00am.
I feel like I should drink a beer. This is kinda depressing, considering how many hours I had logged into that game.
Quote from: danbuter;604005I feel like I should drink a beer. This is kinda depressing, considering how many hours I had logged into that game.
Me too.
I remember getting all excited that a superhero mmorpg was being made back when I played dark age of camelot.
I was there in city of heroes on day one, and have played it ever since.
Too sad to play it this last month as it closes though.
It's like losing a close friend.
I kept meaning to log in to do screen caps of my beloved characters, but I've not been able to bring myself to do so. Somehow it makes it worse. Perhaps a clean break is best.
I'm going to miss this game. It's unlike any other MMO out there. It's actually fun, for starters, and manages to make it fun while keeping the "collect 5 rat tail" thing to a minimum (and virtually non-existent in most of the game instead of the norm) while offering dozens of options for things to do. Character creation is almost a mini-game unto itself, and you can come up with some seriously impressive designs with the tools available. And the pacing is fun and fast and the animations are fun and exciting. It's so unlike any other MMO on the market, and frankly, it's spoiled me for almost all of them.
Where else can you be a Supervillain and build a Hidden Lair from which you Travel Through Time to commit crimes?
So I'm totally bummed about this.
"You have been forcibly disconected from the server. Servers are shuting down".
Time of death called at aprox. 3.05 am US EST.
R.I.P.
Dear Santa,
Please bring back City of Heroes.
And Twinkies.
City of Twinkies.
JG
City of Twinkies for the win.
I don't think CoH/CoV isn't coming back, and that's a pity; but I'd love to see Santa bring an authorized, freeware version of their avatar builder. Fuck Hero Machine, that is the real deal.
I think I spent more time in my CoH/CoV trial account, creating new characters than actually playing the damn characters I created: Lieutenant Stone (real name Peter Laroche, smart-talkin' hard-hittin' 8-foot-tall cop made of rock) for CoH, and the Atomic Commie (Russian physicist mutated by nuclear energy accident, confined to a clunky 1950s-ish radiation-proof suit and gone mad from the loss of human contact).
Another interesting thing that didn't happen was the Eden Studios City of Heroes tabletop RPG. With Beyond Human coming out, maybe we could see a CoH/CoV sourcebook in the future? The setting wasn't particularly innovative but it looked like a great milieu for a superhero (or supervillain) sandbox game.
Anyway, I'm sad to see it go. It was a smart and innovative MMO which made the "grind" tons of fun. I only played the trial (I couldn't find the time to play MMOs regularly until recently, and then only one at a time), but I'm sad about it all the same.
One of my favorites was the descendant of German nobility, who invented a powered armor flight suit and was named "Fred Zeppelin."
JG
My main was an Egyptian Tank called...Tankh
he had alternate costumes.
I can't play any of the modern MMO's because i don't have a capable PC or anything close. Otherwise I'd love to give something like Secret World or even Star Wars a try. I wonder how many others feel the same.
Electro Chick was like a female, stompier, purple-and-cyan version of Iron Man, based around energy melee.
I'll kinda miss her, City of Heroes was a fun game that actually felt different to most MMO's, and I think it was mainly down to the incredible customization. Your hero felt unique, not just another refugee from PCville, and it let you feel powerful from the start. Even if you actually weren't.
Damn shame.
I also had a Mastermind with Zombies modeled after Alice Cooper and called "The Hopeless Necromantic."
JG
ah yes City of Villains, which was an interesting concept.
I had a Mastermind called Mr Saturday who was a zombie voodoo Joker lookalike.
And a Dominator called Baron 3vil who was a robot with a monacle.
Maybe we could have a thread in whch everyone stats up their CoH/CoV characters for whatever supers RPG they prefer. Pics optional.
What do you think?
Quote from: The Butcher;606048Maybe we could have a thread in whch everyone stats up their CoH/CoV characters for whatever supers RPG they prefer. Pics optional.
What do you think?
I played it for six years and had like 30 characters. Stat them all up? I don't have that kind of time. :)
I did, however, stat some of them up in various systems from Savage Worlds to MHR, so I could present a few, sure. Sounds like fun.
Eden Studios was working on a City of Heroes RPG. Too bad it died on the vine when Cryptic sold the whole enchilada to NCSoft.
I had over 40 characters....
Only two ever got to 50, though a couple were in their high 40's
I only played a year and had 20 characters.
Greatest game for alts ever made
Quote from: JeremyR;606902I only played a year and had 20 characters.
Greatest game for alts ever made
The character creator was like a mini-game unto itself.
COH was the first MMO I ever tried. My RL friends and I had a whole lotta fun in there for a few years. I never really stopped playing it, but after I hit 50 with a couple of toons my play dwindled off... people moved to playing WOW.
I did show up for the final countdown, stood in Atlas square under the globe like everyone else. It was sad. They just turned it off, boop.
COH had such a positive and casual atmosphere compared to WOW... none of the gear-addiction... way fewer assholes to contend with, other players seemed friendlier. It wasn't unusual to form up with a group of strangers and play for a few hours... which I've seldom seen happen in WOW beyond a single instance (and almost never since they started their random cross-server group nonsense).
I like MMOs for hanging out with friends and exploring... but we've all stopped playing WOW and right now no other MMO seems very inviting.
Quote from: JeremyR;606902I only played a year and had 20 characters.
Greatest game for alts ever made
Could have called the game City of Alts.
Some players literally had over 50 characters.
Quote from: Bill;608245Could have called the game City of Alts.
Some players literally had over 50 characters.
More's the pity. I only got to play one hero and one villain.
I'm a huge "altoholic" in WoW.
And damn, that avatar generator was awesome. I still want it.
I didn't have all that many, though my friend showed up as something different just about every time we played... the mentor/sidekick system was a boon for that sort of thing.
The costume design was a big part of the fun... not just what I could make but every time a group formed it was like a mini-fashion show to check out what people had done and the backgrounds they'd written up for their toons.
WOW won't even let you give your characters a last name...
Quote from: The Butcher;608272More's the pity. I only got to play one hero and one villain.
I'm a huge "altoholic" in WoW.
And damn, that avatar generator was awesome. I still want it.
The remarkable thing is that COH came out right before WOW, and very few, if any games to this day have better character generators.
APB might be the only one. And thats not a real mmorpg.
COH was king of character diversity:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=city+heroes+last&view=detail&mid=7227DF0606557C7B2DF97227DF0606557C7B2DF9&first=0