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City of Heroes EU Release Date Announced
GamesIndustry.biz has the news that NCSoft will be releasing City of Heroes in Europe on February 4th. The EU customers get all sorts of fancy doodads to offset the delayed release. From the article: "European customers will receive a special deluxe edition of the game, which includes all of the content updates to date, an 88 page comic, and a number of serial codes which unlock special items in the game."
As far as I have noticed over the last few months, the GMs pretty much stay the hell out of my business unless I ask for them. If I ever get stuck on a piece of terrain, or find a mission that could possibly be bugged I can call them. Their response times for me has usually been less than two minutes for just about any issue.
If the GMs are spawning the pre-scripted events then they're doing it very quietly.
My sentiments exactly. Since I have job and a spouse I can't play any game 24/7 like I used to do with MUDs 10 years ago. This means a MMO needs to be playable casually, and this is where City of Heroes excels. Only have 30 minutes? Fine, load up the game and go do a mission, or just arrest villains that plague the streets. No need to sit in PoK or whatever looking for a group first. On the other hand, if you like teaming up, CoH has it down pat, too. The team seek functionality is the best I've seen in any game, and the concepts of sidekicking/exemplaring mean that it is possible to team up with absolutely anyone else, no matter what level they are.
I am an European player. However, most likely I will not be joining the new EU servers. There are two reasons; first, my server (Justice) works without any noticeable lag, so there are no performance issues solved by switching. Second, Cryptic/NCSoft have announced that they will not be offering a chance to transfer characters to the new servers. Money is no issue for me.
I can understand this policy (it prevents ebaying), but I've put 4 months worth of my precious free time into my few characters. None of them are even level 40, but I've grown very fond of them. The idea of doing the lower levels again with them just is horrible. As I said, I'm not a powergamer per se, and don't have the option nor the motivation to quickly pump hundreds of playhours into the game just to get back where I am now. I play the game to have a fun, and the minute it turns into a chore, I'll quit.
> There's no good reason for the delays over here
You have multiple languages in your region. Just standardize to English and you'll see games hit your shores with much less delay.
English is the defacto language of the European Union already, anyways.
I've been playing the game for a few months now and I really enjoy it. The developers are fantastic. The official forums at http://boards.coh.com/ are a great source of information for gamers at any level, and for once the developers actually listen to what we suggest! It really is a beautiful thing. City of Heroes recently released Issue #3, which is a free expansion pack to the original game. That's right, you get free updates to the game. So far, they have released a new update once every 4 months, and with each update we've seen huge improvements. With the release of World of Warcraft, the number of players in City of Heroes has dropped..but when I look at the genre of game.. I'd rather be a super hero than an Orc.