Via Anjin in Exile and Bio Break I just got the news that City of Heroes is shutting down before the end of the year. This is the most depressing MMO news I've heard in a good long while. I really thought City of Heroes was doing OK given the steady update schedule. The latest update (Issue 24) is even supposedly ready to go and sitting on their test server.
City of Heroes still has, to my tastes, the best character generation system of any MMO on the market. The number of powerset combinations available to choose from is staggering, and the appearance generation system will let you come up with at least a rough approximation on pretty much any humanoid you can dream up. There are also some really unique archetypes in CoH such as controllers (extremely powerful crowd control specialists) and master minds (pet users that are can summon swarms of pets) that don't really have close analogues in other MMOs. Finally, the game has one of the most robust systems around for letting players create their own content. Some of the best story arcs to be found in CoH are in player crafted missions.
I will admit that City of Heroes is a MMO that I only ever seem to enjoy in one month stints. I think my overall problem is that the pace of advancement seems to slow to a crawl by some time in the mid levels. But those one month stints are always incredibly fun. Dreaming up a crazy new character design and taking it out for a spin is simply more of a blast in CoH than any other MMO I've played.
The sad thing is that I suspect that CoH is actually still at least a bit into the black. I don't see how Paragon could have put out so much content in the last year if it weren't. If CoH was under SOE, Funcom, Turbine, or really just about any MMO company apart from NCsoft I doubt we'd be having this conversation.
It's a bummer, but I haven't played CoH in years thanks to my account being hijacked. I just recently attempted to recover my account and had given some thought to seeing how CoH is going these days.
ReplyDeleteI did not see a date as to when the servers are going offline, but I figure I'll step foot one last time in game for nostalgia sake.
Date I have seen is November 30 for the shutdown. I am definitely going to be logging in and saying goodbye to some beloved toons in the next three months. It's hours later, but it still feels like a kick in the gut to me.
DeleteI saw these news now when I cam back home and it was a bit of a shock.
ReplyDeleteIs is indeed quite sad news and not the way I would have liked to see the game end. I am at a loss for words right now.
The news came completely out of the blue to me as well.
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