NCSoft Closes "City of Heroes" Publisher Paragon Studios

samazon writes "Earlier today, City of Heroes community manager Andy Belford announced that NCSoft is shutting down Paragon Studios. Over 7,500 individuals were viewing the official CoH forums as of 3:00 PM EST, and this thread from Belford, AKA Zwilinger, notes that 'In a realignment of company focus and publishing support, NCsoft has made the decision to close Paragon Studios. Effective immediately, all development on City of Heroes will cease and we will begin preparations to sunset the world's first, and best, Super Hero MMORPG before the end of the year.' A petition has already been created to save City of Heroes."

Comments

Being "Super"

[Anonymous Coward]

There will never be a game like City of Heroes that allowed you such a level of creativity in bringing the inner superhero to life. I played for 8 years. It will be missed.

Re:Being "Super"

[iamhassi]

agreed. And this is why I've never played a mmorpg more than a few hours. I'm scared to death I'm going to invest some real time in it and then have someone kill it someday and watch everything I enjoyed die in front of me. That's scary, watching a life I created and nurtured be killed with nothing to show for it.

Re:Being "Super"

[foradoxium]

I loved it too, at first.

The problem I had was it was tooo repetitive. That's what really made me move on..I absolutely loved the first 20ish levels.

But it had some great concepts, and the character building was ..possibly the best.

Re:Being "Super"

[Hatta]

We are missing a great many early films from the cultural record because they were simply thrown away. It seems the same thing is happening with MMORPGs. Unfortunately, preserving a social interactive work is much harder than film. History will likely be blind to many major works of this still early age of video gaming.

Re:Being "Super"

[SydShamino]

But but... wouldn't your karma persist long after the game was gone?

Re:Being "Super"

[bhcompy]

EVE.

Re:Being "Super"

[Teancum]

I would hate to think of all of the MUDs that have disappeared over the years... many of which also had tremendous communities and some impressive accomplishments.

Still, I'd have to agree with your sentiment here. My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.

There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?

Re:Being "Super"

[hairyfeet]

Sadly friends when it comes to gaming we're losing a hell of a lot more than just the MMOs and MUDs.

The big one that is gonna cause future game historians much grief is the incredible amount of Win9X games that will be gone. Tons and tons of games were released from 95-01 for that OS and sadly waaaay too many relied on "hacks" to boost the then weak performance of the systems. Thanks to Win9X being a 16/32bit hybrid with pracically nothing standing in the way of the coder getting "bare metal" you have games that used CPU clocks as times for events, used glitches in early OpenGL and DirectX implementations to boost graphics, its a fricking mess. Try to run games like i76 or Mechwarrior 3 or FFVII and you'll see what I'm talking about. And because so many of those companies were passed around from one publisher to another or died out the code is gone and the games themselves are often in a legal limbo where nobody knows who owns what, and of course the guts of Win9X were such a hodge podge and have so many copyrights and patents to deal with a DOSBox style solution for Win9X will most likely be impossible.

So I feel sad for those future gamers, the early MMOs and MUDs, the tons of small developer games and shareware titles, a huge chunk of the Win9X games, all will be lost and unplayable. Its just sad how much of that early history we are gonna see wiped out, its a damned shame and a real loss to our collective history.

Re:Being "Super"

[Robert Goatse]

There will never be a game like City of Heroes that allowed you such a level of creativity in bringing the inner superhero to life. I played for 8 years. It will be missed.

Indeed. I played for the better part of 5 years. Man, I loved that game. Sure there was some grinding (especially at the 45+ level), but I never felt so super in a video game. My level 50 tank (fire/ice FTW) could take on a shit-ton of bad guys and not break a sweat. They nerfed the shit out of that build and I slowly lost interest. CoH will be missed, thanks for the awesome memories Paragon.

Re:Being "Super"

[CodeHxr]

I would love to see something like this become an industry trend. Companies that did this would garner extraordinary amounts of goodwill from the gaming community.

Re:Being "Super"

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Neither of the two subsequent superhero MMOs, Champions Online and DC Universe Online, even came close in character creation.

I wonder why? That was what lead to alt-itis for me, filling at least 6 servers' worth of characters.

It's such a fun, seductive part of the game, why does no other game pick it up and go with it?

Re:Being "Super"

[Opportunist]

If you think this is bad, wait until the various games with heavy phone-home DRM lose their publishers and/or get their auth servers turned off.

We're living in what will be known as the dark ages of computer gaming.

Re:Being "Super"

[grumbel]

Tons and tons of games were released from 95-01 for that OS and sadly waaaay too many relied on "hacks" to boost the then weak performance of the systems.

That's easy to fix with emulation.

and of course the guts of Win9X were such a hodge podge and have so many copyrights and patents to deal with a DOSBox style solution for Win9X will most likely be impossible.

Wine already exist and if you don't like that, you can just use a real Windows95 and install it on a PC emulator.

As long as the CD don't corrupt before somebody makes a backup, Window95 games won't have an issue, as preserving them and playing them is not very difficult.

Re:Being "Super"

[zoward]

... My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.

There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?

Because of the number of IP's licensed for just about any large MMO - the graphics engine, physics, engine, maybe even the IP itself (eg, Star Wars Galaxies), there are usually legal reasons they couldn't open up the game like that. Also, at least for companies with more than one MMO, why would they want to? They'd just be creating a free competitor against any of their other games. Instead, they usually offer incentives to their departing players to transition them to another of their titles.

Re:Being "Super"

[Hatta]

I agree that no good virtualization solution exists for 9x games yet. I do keep a Pentium 1, 2, and 3 around for that reason, and they won't keep running forever. But once there's historical interest in these systems, it should be doable. The only reason there's not good 9x support in Virtualbox today is that there's not enough demand for it.

Re:Being "Super"

[Hatta]

Wine already exist and if you don't like that, you can just use a real Windows95 and install it on a PC emulator.

There's a lot of stuff that won't play on Wine. A lot will, but a lot won't. And 9x is officially unsupported on Virtualbox. It runs, but there are no guest additions. And who knows to what extent DirectX will work?

I've wasted a lot of time trying to get 9x era games to work reliably under Wine or Virtualbox. It came down to being easier to just get a KVM and some vintage boxes. I got a socket 7 box, put a P200MMX overclocked to 225, put a copper cooler with an undervolted fan on it, an old laptop hard drive, a soundblaster with midi daughterboard and a voodoo card. It's the sweetest 1997 rig I can imagine, and it's damn near silent. That was a lot more fun than dicking around with Wine.

Re:Being "Super"

[Teancum]

There is no "IP" or "intellectual property. There is only copyright, trademarks, and patents. Sell also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

BTW, on the issues of "intellectual property" I happen to completely agree with Richard Stallman on this issue. Don't get caught up in the kool-aide of the term "intellectual property" when it really can get more confusing than it really is.

Patents can't be helped, but they can be licensed for something like this. Any patent license can also be "sent through" to any non-profit "subsidiary" set up by any company who cares, if they want to set up a non-profit that is community operated. In other words there doesn't need to be any cost and it can easily be taken care of if the original company wants to be engaged and see that it happens.

Trademarks may have some value to the original company and can even be retained. There is no reason why trademarks necessarily are even needed by an open source project and it may even be useful to create new trademarks for the derivative game that is open sourced. This wouldn't even be a problem at all. Trademarked named within the game (kind of like how "Captain Kirk" is trademarked by Paramount Pictures) could even be changed if necessary. That is a trivial issue that wouldn't have any impact at all on the game itself.

As for copyrights, I would call that an incredibly stupid company who didn't secure commercial reproducibility rights for a game including for any successive company. Artwork can be redone (for textures, skins, and background music) if necessary but could still be reassigned if necessary. Just think of what would happen if the company was purchased in a merger situation.... the same situation would apply for turning a for-profit company into a non-profit. If some specific kinds of copyright license is needed for key parts of the game engine, licenses could be granted to a non-profit company as easily and that same non-profit company could be seen as the legal heir to those rights as well.

In short, I find all of the excuses that "IP rights" wouldn't apply in this situation... assuming that the original copyright holder of the game itself is willing to at least try to pass the game off as an open soruce game under control of a non-profit foundation. Perhaps not Richard Stallman style of open source, but pretty dang close and comparable to Netscape's transition to Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation (another example of a proprietary company who successfully switched to an open source foundation in spite of "intellectual property" concerns).

This has also been done by ID Software, where John Carmack has also turned his older games over to the community under open source licenses.

The argument about competition with future games is perhaps a bit more valid. The problem with that argument is that turning an old game that you want to shut down because it isn't profitable to run any more (the only rational reason to shut down the game in the first place) is that it also is using yesterday's technology and programming techniques. It really isn't progressing into the future and exploiting new technologies like new video rendering hardware or new kinds of user interfaces. While games like Doom have been ported to exploit some newer hardware (to give an example), it still has a dated feel and is more like walking through a museum rather than anything which realistically competes against games being developed by the current generation of programmers.

Perhaps a company like NCSoft is just a shell of a company with mainly lawyers and not many engineers. That can't be helped and if they can't improve over previous generations of software, they are a stagnant company ready to go bankrupt in the near future. I certainly don't expect to be seeing them in a decade if that is the case, so they will simply implode taking all of their games down with them into the corporate graveyard if they don't open up stuff like this. I

Re:Being "Super"

[Saxerman]

I do want to encourage the sentiment that people desire to be able to play games for as long as they desire, and not on some corporate or copyright schedule. But I keep hearing other MMO players express some kind of regret or fear that their character(s) only exist inside the digital prison of some corporate server. Those characters are you. Those achievements are yours. Those experience points weren't just points... they were experiences. And you get to keep them for as long as you care to remember.

I do think I sort of understand... I expect I feel a similar sort of regret whenever I finish reading an exceptional novel. But its not like I'm afraid to invest the time in reading books.

Re:Being "Super"

[hairyfeet]

Try ANY of the games I listed, they don't work in Wine and frankly never will. they used too many deep level system hacks, for example the in game events being timed in MW3 and i76 by the CPU clock which means even while throwing something like mo-slo on it'll just not work.

Wine is frankly ONLY good with a VERY small subset of Dx8 and Dx9 games, good luck getting Dx7, or any of the myriad of games that called low level stuff in Win9X or used the unique way that Win9X dealt with memory, it'll never work friend, not in a million years.

Re:Being "Super"

[hairyfeet]

The problem is the patents and copyrights make Win9X a minefield #1, and #2 to get actual support you are gonna end up needing at least some Win9X system files, again then you are back in the minefield.

But as far as demand you couldn't be more wrong. You don't think guys like GOG or Steam would love to have all the classic Win9X games? Don't you think the current owners of those games would like to be able to bundle and sell them? You are talking about a TON of big name games, Twisted Metal 1&2, Resident Evil 1&2, the first 3 Tomb Raiders, the complete Mechwarrior series, tons of killer flying sims, there were just tons of really great games that would be frankly butt simple to bundle and make money with even today.

But there is simply no damned way to make Win9X work on a modern OS with even basic hardware acceleration much less dealing with all the hacks that the devs used back then. Remember it was trivial to pretty much control the entire machine then thanks to it being a 16/32bit hybrid with DOS underneath. That led to a bunch of ugly hacks that simply won't work on a modern memory protected OS., at least not without some sort of VM.

Hell I keep a little 1.5GHz Win9X box on the KVM at the shop, its got a soundblaster and a Geforce MX in it, simply because its damned near impossible to get many of the classics to run on a modern OS or modern hardware anymore. I can run DOS games all day with DOSBox but win9X? Not a chance.

Re:Being "Super"

[srmalloy]

Neither of the two subsequent superhero MMOs, Champions Online and DC Universe Online, even came close in character creation.
I wonder why? That was what lead to alt-itis for me, filling at least 6 servers' worth of characters.
It's such a fun, seductive part of the game, why does no other game pick it up and go with it?

City of Heroes, and the other superhero MMOs, are probably unique among MMOs in that your character's abilities don't have to have any relationship to your character's appearance; this makes everything about the character's appearance open to customization, and you can retain that appearance all the way through the character's career, binding it up in what makes the character what they are. Fantasy MMOs, in contrast, are locked into what I call "you are what you wear" -- you may have all sorts of sliders and choices to customize the person of your character, but when that person is hidden by chest armor, gloves, helmet, leg armor, boots, capes, belts, amulets, et al., and carrying their weapon -- and each of these will change again and again over time as the character finds, makes, or buys better gear -- there is ultimately little you can do in character creation to make each character unique. Aion tried to give players some control over their characters' appearance by creating a mechanism where you could pay to have a piece of armor destroyed to give its appearance to another piece of armor, but that didn't change the fact that you can only choose to copy existing armor pieces, or that each visual 'design' is re-used over and over again for different levels of gear.

So sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Rest in piece, Marvel DC wannabe expies. Long live..........um..........dark elves in thongs of shielding.

awww damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly in the world of WoW there could not be a competitor. Just not enough revenue to meet costs, this game truely was unique and fun in it's own little way. A fresh taste to the regular. Good thing we still have Eve.

se-la-ve compadre

Re:awww damn

[Sir_Sri]

It hung around this long, that says a lot. 2004 -2012 is a very very successful game.

You can't expect a product to survive indefinitely if it can't attract enough customers to replace the ones who gradually attrition away. Even WoW is losing subscribers. The MMO landscape is changing a lot, the economy is bad, peoples tastes change, etc. It's possible the market has shifted and there won't even be another world of warcraft to follow, it will just be a series of smaller more casual niche games that are all free to play and only last a couple of years.

Comes as a BIG surprise.

[samazon]

Only four months after Matt Miller promised "a ton of plans for content beyond Issue 24 and 25. We have a pencil sketch of the stories, arcs, zones, and trials for the next few years (I say pencil, because we still want to be agile and work to bring you things you actively ask for, things even you don't know you want yet!)" and less than two weeks after the release of a new power set. As much as I enjoy GW2, I am FURIOUS with NCSoft for pulling the plug on an eight year old game. The LEAST they could do is keep the servers up, or sell it to someone who will do so.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[fustakrakich]

When someone abandons a property they should forfeit all claimed rights to it. Like they do in the city, have it condemned and put up for auction.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Leafheart]

From the tone on the announcement by Zwilliger, it came as a big surprise for them also. This looks like a decision taken out of the blue by the guys in the NCSoft HQ

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Ken Hall]

NCSoft doesn't care, it's all numbers to them. I played Tabula Rasa right up till it shut down. It had a very loyal following, but not enough for NCSoft to keep the servers running. CoH tried hard, but I guess they couldn't come up with anything new, I quit that some time ago.

Unfortunately, all of their games use the same or similar "engine" on the back end, so if they give away one, they're basically giving away the keys to all of them.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[SydShamino]

The same way a book should enter public domain the second it goes out of print? Sorry, I support drastic copyright reform but that's still a bit too harsh for me.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Scarletdown]

I'm currently logged in on one of my characters on Virtue, and trying to keep up with the chatter about this in the global channels.

One thing that has stood out there is a rumor is about the game engine that NC licensed from Cryptic when the 2 split. The rumor is that the license was for 5 years, and it is about to expire. Will need to wait and see if anyone who really knows can confirm or deny this rumor.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[fustakrakich]

Yes, if nobody offers it up. Squatter's rights. Copyright is a government granted privilege supposedly for the benefit of society, as its supporters insist on telling me. It should come with some conditions and a price.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[HappyEngineer]

Why did anyone mod you up? When someone abandons a copyrighted property of any sort then it should enter the public domain. If the book, dvd, or whatever goes out of print then you should lose the copyright. If a game is no longer available for purchase or play then you should lose the copyright.

Who gains when the government protects a monopoly on content that you refuse to provide to anyone? How is that promoting the arts in any way?

If you want to keep the copyright then just make it available for purchase. If you care so little about the product then you lose rights to the product. I can't imagine any reasonable argument against this.

People in favor of copyright are always saying that the creators should get paid for their creations. How are they being paid if they stop making it available for sale? The only possible response is that they want to restrict access to the content so that new content has less competition. That's a pretty poor argument for continuing a government enforced monopoly.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

So your saying...

A company should be legally bound to provide the servers, support and all other required infrastructure even if only one user wanted it, otherwise they loose the copyrights on their game?
What if there are not enough players to support the costs of this infrastructure? They should be forced to take a loss?

What if a publisher sold out of a book, and 5 people would like to purchase it. Should they be forced to create 5 copies and sell them far below cost or do an ENTIRE printing run of the book to satisfy the 5 people?

Should an artist be forced to provide prints of his painting forever or he looses the copyright?

If you created an original piece of art (game, book, music, art) you absolutely have the right to not make it available for purchase.

Owning the rights to a single game and not selling it is NOT a monopoly
Owning the rights to EVERY single game IS a monopoly
copyrights do not create monopolies (but patents could/can)

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[tlhIngan]

Why did anyone mod you up? When someone abandons a copyrighted property of any sort then it should enter the public domain. If the book, dvd, or whatever goes out of print then you should lose the copyright. If a game is no longer available for purchase or play then you should lose the copyright.

Who gains when the government protects a monopoly on content that you refuse to provide to anyone? How is that promoting the arts in any way?

If you want to keep the copyright then just make it available for purchase. If you care so little about the product then you lose rights to the product. I can't imagine any reasonable argument against this.

People in favor of copyright are always saying that the creators should get paid for their creations. How are they being paid if they stop making it available for sale? The only possible response is that they want to restrict access to the content so that new content has less competition. That's a pretty poor argument for continuing a government enforced monopoly.

Given the practicality of duplicating copyrighted materials these days, I say we don't lose copyright protection.

Instead, the instant something is no longer for sale by the creator, it becomes mandatory licensed, as in, a government-set fee schedule kicks in to compensate the creator, but anyone can then sell the good, as long as they had an original. And yes, any and all DRM can be broken in order to sell it.

So the moment a book goes out of print, anyone who has it can freely scan it and sell it for whatever they want, paying the original creator the fixed per-copy fee. Ditto music, movies, etc.

Creators still get their fees, public still has the goods, and libraries and other resources can make use of their immense collections to sell copies and make some money to support themselves. Google Books can continue to sell access or copies, etc.

It also keeps copyright intact so open-source doesn't go public-domain accidentally - it's still copyrighted and users can pay the per-copy fee to use it under standard copyright laws, or obey the open-source license.

Abandoned works can have standardized collection agencies (e.g., libraries) who can hold the fees in trust and use the profits and investments of it to help fund operations

Once a work enters mandatory licensing, it cannot leave it, so if the original creator wishes to re-release it, he can compete with everyone else. The government set fee will be less than the average per-copy royalty (say, 70%) for that type of work (this is to encourage authors who wish not to participate to simply keep said book available for sale). So if all book authors earned on average (including first time authors through to bestselling authors) of $5 per copy of the book (probably a bit on the high side but it's just a number I picked out of thin air), the per-copy fee for any book will be $3.50. Ebook websites can compete against each other - I suspect after costs the price will be $3.75 or so for out of print, but not out of copyright books.

Same goes for other works.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[_Shad0w_]

No-one would buy anything when it came out. They'd just wait for the producer to abandon it so it became free. Copyright law arguably needs reforming, but reforming it in such a way that no-one ever wants to produce something is not how to do it.

Plus expiring the copyright on something like an MMO doesn't really do anything useful. The copyright might expire, but that doesn't force them to hand out copies of the source code to anyone who asks, which is what you probably want to achieve. You can reverse engineer the server from the extant copies of the client, but it's a pain in the arse.

It also gets a lot more complicated when you start introducing third party IP in to the mix. Sony shut down SWG, but they didn't own any of the Star Wars property, they only had a limited licence to produce an MMO using it. Whilst they could have given out the source code to the server and client, they almost certainly wouldn't have been able to release any of the assets that went with it, because they're tied to the Star Wars IP that Lucas* owns. You couldn't just take the game engine produce your own Star Wars assets, because you don't have a licence from Lucas* to do so. You could have taken the engine and made your own non-Star Wars assets, but then you just have a generic SciFi MMO; which you could have simply achieved by using one of the open source MMO game engines that are available.

If you actually want old games that are no-longer commercially viable to be released in to the public domain by the producers, you're going to have to figure out a way of encouraging a cultural and/or philosophical change within the industry itself. A lot of them seem to be waking up to the fact that they can still get a small revenue stream from their old IP for very little effort by releasing it on Steam or GOG.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Opportunist]

It's not like NC did it the first time. Hence my reluctance to ever touch an NC title again. They already pulled exactly the same stunt with Tabula Rasa when Aion was released. But at least we TR enthusiasts who enjoyed an MMO that's at least a bit different than the various WoW clones got a few months of game time in their WoW clone...

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Opportunist]

I dare to disagree. TR was at least something new. It was one of the few games where you could actually see people cooperate "by chance" rather than after hours of group assembly. You'd just go down to one of the contested outposts and sure enough you'd eventually notice how people came by and joined the fight until you had the numbers to overcome the opposition. If anyone knows of a game that has a similar approach to gameplay, I'd love to hear it.

The story was pretty good, and the quests where finally something fresh after games that came up with little more than making you the FedEx delivery boy (which made absolutely no sense considering the omnipresent mailing system...) or wanting you to farm a million mobs so they finally drop a dozen or so ears. Hell, even grinding mobs was fun since it felt like it actually served a purpose.

I don't see a big problem with a game that focuses on PvE, honestly, considering how the PvP community in most MMOs that are not explicitly geared towards PvP is rather small. It was never sold as a PvP game and it certainly had no focus on it, so why would having one faction be a problem? If anything, it served as a great vehicle for the "us vs. them" theme of the game, since the aliens remained alien for the player, It remained a mystery why they attacked, who sent them, what's going on, why the war in the first place... I'm pretty sure there was some background to it, sadly we never found out. It had a hint of a Babylon 5 air to it, with what seemed to be two powerful alien races fighting a proxy war by using "lower" lifeforms to do their battles.

Sadly it was simply released before it was done. When class defining skills get completely redone after a game going live, you know something is not running the way it should. Balance was completely shot at release, and some other problems made the game simply unplayable for many. Still, I liked it while it lasted.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Opportunist]

Yeah, I can see that. After all, nobody buys a game when it comes out, everyone's just waiting for it to get to the bargain bin...

And currently the creators of games can even keep you from reverse engineering and providing servers for games they "abandoned" and don't plan to offer anymore. Tabula Rasa actually provides a good example of that. A few people sat down and reversed the server code, they actually got pretty far and had a pretty nice looking alpha ready when NC sent a C&D letter.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[DRJlaw]

Why did anyone mod you up? When someone abandons a copyrighted property of any sort then it should enter the public domain. If the book, dvd, or whatever goes out of print then you should lose the copyright. If a game is no longer available for purchase or play then you should lose the copyright.

Well then, fair is fair. http://mymindblewup.com/ is down, and looks to have been down since March 2009. Fortunately, the internet archive has copies from January 2009 and earlier. Thank you for surrending the copyright to everything that you placed on it, and for permitting me to use this material in any way that I please... such as content for an ad-link farm.

If you care so little about the product then you lose rights to the product. I can't imagine any reasonable argument against this.

Q.E.D.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[Brannoncyll]

I dare to disagree. TR was at least something new. It was one of the few games where you could actually see people cooperate "by chance" rather than after hours of group assembly. You'd just go down to one of the contested outposts and sure enough you'd eventually notice how people came by and joined the fight until you had the numbers to overcome the opposition. If anyone knows of a game that has a similar approach to gameplay, I'd love to hear it.

The Guild Wars 2 dynamic event system is very similar. Just wandering around you often come across one of these events, and you can just hop right in and join - no need to party up. The last stages of the event typically feature a mini-boss, and often have 20 or 30 people joining the fight who came together by just happening to be in the area and getting the notice that a nearby event is in progress.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[xhrit]

Phantasy Star Online 2 is a really good co-op PvE sci-fi shooter MMORPG. Everything about it is designed for people to work together. It has a lot of really cool features that I have never seen before as well, like the ability to use your friends and alts as NPCs. It also has dynamically generated maps, and an ad-hoc multiparty system. The game is currently released now in Japan, you can play it with an unofficial english patch; the US version should be out early next year.

Re:Comes as a BIG surprise.

[srmalloy]

Zwillinger denied the rumor, and Back Alley Brawler, who left Paragon Studios to return to work at Cryptic, posted that he'd asked Jack Emmert about it, and Jack was surprised that this would come up. NCSoft received a license in perpetuity to use the game engine behind City of Heroes for CoH and any derivative products when they bought the game from Cryptic back in 2007.

A bit sad to see

[Galaga88]

I haven't played the game in years, but it was the only MMORPG I ever played in which I actually made it to the endgame.

The combat seemed faster paced and generally less grindy than other MMORPGs at the time.

It helped that I played a Tanker, which was a horribly unbalanced class at the time. I remember forming a team, and single-handedly holding aggro on an entire instance worth of mobs, herding them into a corner, and letting the blasters let loose all at once. Good times.

Re:A bit sad to see

[Tyler Eaves]

I found the opposite.

CoH was the most grindy game ever - that's all there was to do - just run the same "random" missions over and over again. It didn't even have loot progression.

Re:A bit sad to see

[sheetsda]

less grindy than other MMORPGs at the time.
Missions that consist entirely of [Go here|Kill some things|Click on something]{pick 1-3} were painfully boring so grinding was the way forward for a lot of us.

It helped that I played a Tanker, which was a horribly unbalanced class at the time. I remember forming a team, and single-handedly holding aggro on an entire instance worth of mobs, herding them into a corner, and letting the blasters let loose all at once. Good times.

I remember that too, it lasted a month then got nerfed, but it was CoH at its best - pulling and killing (no exaggeration) 200 monsters at a time is an epic and awe inspiring experience I have yet to see replicated in any other MMO.
Speaking of nerfing...
The method I used to grind my scrapper to 40 (Underlings or some class of tiny monster) got nerfed.
My Fire/Radiation Controller got nerfed.
Power leveling by forcing the average party to a middle player and using a high level player to kill high level monsters got nerfed.

If there ever was a game that was "You will play our way or not at all" it was CoH. NCSoft did a good job of making my heroes feel less powerful with each successive patch and for me that made the game forgettable. And I only played from [release] to [release + 3 months].

Re:A bit sad to see

[Osgeld]

horizions by atari, the grind on that make AO look like an action platformer ... the only game where I watched a bunch of people spend a month putting rocks INTO a cave, to mine it out (logic!), just so the first boss creature would appear in world. you couldnt take piss in that game without mining 100 tons of ore and harvesting 100 tons of food and a million units of lumber to end up with 10 arrows that sucked ass

Re:A bit sad to see

[Carnildo]

If there ever was a game that was "You will play our way or not at all" it was CoH. NCSoft did a good job of making my heroes feel less powerful with each successive patch and for me that made the game forgettable. And I only played from [release] to [release + 3 months].

That was Jack Emmert's legacy. Things changed dramatically when he left.

Re:A bit sad to see

[nitehawk214]

It helped that I played a Tanker,

Well that's a new role: dps, heal, tank and tanker. How does ship-based tanker combat mesh with the other three roles?

It's a support role... until you spring a leak.

Re:A bit sad to see

[Darinbob]

"Grind" has many definitions depending on who is using the term. To me a grind is if you do something mindless over and over in order to get a benefit in another area of a game. Ie, you kill 1,000 boars until your eyes water just so that you get +3 on your Shoulders of Spikiness, that's grinding to me. But if you run the Instance of Awesome 1,000 times because you think it's fun then that's not grinding. Doing the same instance 1,000 times only because there's a remote chance that they drop Shoulders of Even More Spikiness then that's grindy.

So if you run random City of Heros missions all the time and have fun doing that, then that's not grindy. Not having loot progression actually makes it _less_ grindy because you're only running the missions because you like to run the missions and not because you need DKP or gear.

Re:A bit sad to see

[SilverJets]

Exactly this.

WoW is grindy. Keep running those instances to get that one specific drop.

CoH was never grindy.

GPL it?

[pouar]

would it last a lot longer if they open sourced the code?

Re:GPL it?

[samazon]

Someone suggested that in the giant forum thread. The thing is, the people who still play CoH are SUPER dedicated. I know people who spend hours a day doing world-related stuff, who run radio stations themed around and listened to in-game, people who RP... If they open-sourced it, the current player base would probably only need, say, three servers - two American, one European - and a few people dedicated to making sure that if something bugged, it got fixed. I don't know anything about video game management or development though, so that's just my assumption. It could be that it's an unmanageable task by anyone but industry professionals. But IMHO, it's been running this long (albeit, I hear, with duct tape and bubblegum) - it couldn't take too much effort to keep the servers lit up.

Re:GPL it?

[Carnildo]

They can't. The engine is owned by Cryptic, not by Paragon, and parts of it (such as the physics engine) are licensed from yet other parties.

Re:GPL it?

[ducomputergeek]

And Cryptic is now owned by Perfect World....

Re:GPL it?

[X0563511]

Perfect Fail.

Re:GPL it?

[VortexCortex]

They can't. The engine is owned by Cryptic, not by Paragon, and parts of it (such as the physics engine) are licensed from yet other parties.

Exactly. I get strange looks (even called disparaging names) when folks find out I'm writing everything myself from scratch... That's unheard of these days, but it's not that hard and at least I'll never have to worry about licensing issues when it's time to open the source the Engine & CC the content -- If the game doesn't have the chance to live forever it might be worth playing, but it's not worth making.

Re:GPL it?

[julesh]

Yep. That, or use a commodity engine that you could realistically define as part of the basic platform the game runs on and which isn't so ruinously expensive end users couldn't afford to acquire it (I'm thinking Unity here, but I'm sure there are others -- isn't there a free-as-in-beer version of the Unreal engine these days?

Re:Quality?

[Local ID10T]

Was it really that good?

No. But it was fun.

Not suprised

[Anomalyst]

I kinda enjoyed playing and was even willing to pay for the privilege.
I'd buy 60 day cards online at a discount and it brought the price down to under $13/month. Suddenly you couldn't get 60 day cards, only 30 day. So in addition to the higher price/day you had the additional PITA of manually updating your subscription every month. I stopped playing.

Re:Not suprised

[Anomalyst]

Not the same cost. CC billing is full retail.

Re:Not suprised

[X0563511]

+1

Sounds like the same kind of person who wastes half a gallon of fuel to save a few pennies per gallon...

Re:Quality?

[Snaller]

No, that is the problem - it was a boring grind which never got any new material.

Really bummed at the moment.

[Chas]

I've been playing for just over 4 years now.

I'm just shocked that they decided to sunset this game in such an abrupt manner.

Yeah, it wasn't a megajillions earner like Aion or their other Triple A games. But it was a steady earner all along. The game's essentially been paid for for years. And, especially in the last year, it's been doing gangbuster business after the change to the hybrid model.

But, apparently that wasn't enough to save it. Especially after the drubbing Aion and GW2 have taken.

Paragon and its employees have nothing but my respect.

NCSoft won't see another dime from me though.

Sad to see it go

[Denogh]

I played CoH off and on since late 2004. It (along with EverQuest) is one of the games I go back to for a month or two each year. I'm not looking forward to the next time I feel the urge to play my scrapper and then remember he's gone forever.

Wouldn't be so bad if only Champions Online wasn't such a steaming pile of donkey shit. No more hero fixes for me.

Re:Sad to see it go

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 3 max level characters and 30+ alts in CoH, and consider it to be one of the best games ever. I played from 2004-2009.

All the game zones are incredible, there is a massive amount of excellent PvE content. Most of the classes were unbalanced at launch, which made them incredibly fun. However, the lack of integrated PvP and crafting at launch held it back in my opinion, stemming from it's origins as a garage project before being picked up by NC. That said, the resulting hero/villain combat was hands-down the best PvP experience I've ever had online. I only left the game when the PvP action dwindled.

When CoV was announced they began balancing hero classes and developing the PvP system, which was an awkward move, since people were used to tanking and DPS'ing 50 mobs at once. If CoH had launched as a dual faction, open-world PvPvE with crafting and economic structures, Blizzard would have had a serious challenger for MMO subscriptions.

My all-time favorite MMO moment was the second CoV PvP beta, where everyone was allowed to make fully slotted lv25 characters of either faction and stress test the new zone. It was all out WAR. At one point one side (I forget which now) had the bulk of the other faction holed up in their hospital, with assassins teleporting around the laser defenses and killing players directly in the respawn tubes. Reclaiming those corridors was the most intense group PvP action I'd seen until contested Abyss fort raids in Aion.

CoH/V players are indeed SUPER loyal, it has always had one of the best game communities around. I will be sad losing all my characters, whenever I upgrade my PC I like to reinstall and tour Paragon and the Rogues Isles again, touch up my custom story arc.

Oh yeah, you can make your own mobs and levels, how cool is that?

Annoying Free to Play

[cirby]

I played it for a while last year, then gave up on it.

I went in again this week to see how the game worked under the Free to Play model. It really didn't. The worst thing was finding out that you needed to buy an auction house license to use the AH in game.

That's the thing about "free to play." It's not free. It's just a lot of tiny little cheap things that add up to about the same amount as a "pay to play" game, except you have to spend a lot more time fiddling with the mechanics before you can even really play the game.

Re:Annoying Free to Play

[fredgiblet]

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to the Free-to-play future we have looming. On the one hand it will make games cheaper for me since I'm not a sucker who'll pay $2 to bump myself up a level or get a shiny weapon that'll last me for 2-3 hours of play time. On the other hand games that are deliberately crippled to make them free-to-play are going to suck.

Thankfully there's plenty of games that I haven't even played yet that I'll be able to get many hours out of if complete games ever totally stop being released.

Re:Quality?

[Ken Hall]

It was the first game I ever level-maxed in. But the only reward was a new character type that you got to start all over with.

Still, some of the scenery was incredible for it's day.

American Thongs or British Thongs?

[thegarbz]

What kind of thongs we talking here? American thongs don't sound like they would shield much at all. Thought I guess the British equivalent thongs of fast running also wouldn't quite be as useful as they sound.

Re:American Thongs or British Thongs?

[geminidomino]

The "of Shielding" suffix implies that they're magic thongs, which is why going from full-plate armor to the cover of the Victoria Secret Summer Catalog is an armor upgrade.

Re:American Thongs or British Thongs?

[_Shad0w_]

My memories of Guild Wars are basically that, for female armour at least, the level of protection afforded by armour was inversely proportional to the amount of protection it afforded.

Even when you get female armour that's moderately sensible - in that it actually covers everything the male armour would - they usually fall in to the trap of giving it boob contours. The thing about female armour is it looks exactly like male armour: by the time you have all the padding or harnessing you wear under your actual armour, there's no figure worth speaking about left, unless you have really pronounced curves.

Re:American Thongs or British Thongs?

[Chelloveck]

And when was the last time you saw a woman in a video game who *didn't* have really pronounced curves? So yeah, the boob contours are *totally* there for practical reasons, not just because video game artists don't get out enough.

Re:American Thongs or British Thongs?

[geminidomino]

You don't remember correctly. Other than the "elite" armor varieties, every style of armor was the same all the way up the tiers, from newbie armor to max (the elite skins were max armor level only). It was entirely an aesthetic decision, and every class had at least 1 "sensible" armor option.

From the Titan Network

[KingSkippus]

If you're a player of the game, you might have run across me at some point. I'm TonyV, the creator of the Paragon Wiki web site and current owner and administrator of the Titan Network sites.

I'm really hoping that this won't be the end of the game. I've posted a message on the official forums here (and on the Titan Network forums here discussing what I'm intending to do. It might not work out, in which case four months down the line, we're not going to be any worse off than we are today. But if you're reading this here and don't browse the official forums very often, please drop by. As the game's continued existence will depend on a crowd funding effort, we really need you to stay plugged in over the next few months. I'll post regular updates on our Titan Network forums to let you know how it's going.

Re:From the Titan Network

[mvdwege]

Hi Tony,

Can I ask one thing? I understand Paragon owns the rights to the Hero System Role-playing Game. What is the upshot of the NCSoft decision for the pen-and-paper RPG?

Mart

Re:From the Titan Network

[Talcyon]

Hi Tony,

Can I ask one thing? I understand Paragon owns the rights to the Hero System Role-playing Game. What is the upshot of the NCSoft decision for the pen-and-paper RPG?

Mart

Paragon don't own "Hero system" you're thinking of Champions Online where Mr Emmert jumped ship from NCSoft bought the rights to "Hero System" and used it to make Champions.

Re:From the Titan Network

[mvdwege]

Ah cool, thanks. I've just added a few Hero System games to my collection, and I didn't particularly relish the thought of another system dying off due to publisher issues.

Mart

City of Heroes will be missed.

[phreakincool]

6+ year CoX player.
Played almost exclusively in Ubuntu Linux/wine
Numerous level 50+ toons.
Thousands of badges.
Humongous Hero bases w/ teleports to most zones, storage, etc.
Almost orphaned 3 teen kids, widowed 1 wife. :-)
Good times.
Guess I'll log for a few last times before the end.
...Sigh.

Been there since Beta

[matthelm007]

I've been playing since late Beta. I'm going to miss this game. Wish I could find a game 1/4th as good. I haven't seen one yet.

Re:Been there since Beta

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This irritates me. Champions Online just never felt right -- Got a maxxed char there, too, but...

And DC Universe Online, this was just a console-oriented POS that deliberately made fighting clumsy and hard to do. Some "fun" that was.

All I know is MMO games with high-speed, 3D travel better not disappear from the surface of the Earth. I am sooooooo sick of canyon crawls and eight billion dollar horses at level 40 that let you move at 1.9x normal speed.

Oh well...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This totally sucks. I've been playing MMOs since Ultima Online, and this is the only game where I've truly buffed up a high level character.

So long, true high speed travel. Now we're stuck with asinine horses in other games (or "speeders", you know who you are) that don't even move at 2x run speed.

So long, true 3D travel. Now we're stuck with asinine games where "level design" includes all kinds of mountain passes and corridors.

So long, ragdoll physics. Now it's back to pre-generated animations tossed around the scene looking goofy.

So long, superbases, where you could spend weeks stacking and overlapping things to make magnificent structures that didn't exist in stock lists of things you could place.

Given the ragdoll physics and true 3D nature of travel, they must have had one hell of a good programmer compared to shit like World of Warcraft or a million others that can't seem to get beyond the idea of game engines as playback mechanisms for 3D animation modeling programs.

Still have two active, P2P accounts.

High-speed travel

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I will miss games with high-speed travel, which starts at 14, and is free.

I run at just under 40 mph. I am not a speedster.

My vertical leap is 14 feet. I am not a super-jumpster.

My flying speed is 60 mph.

Ya, can't wait to get back to a horse somewhere, or pre-engineered flight paths.

Re:High-speed travel

[danbuter]

Guess you'll have to play DCUO or Champions Online. I know I have been playing Star Wars lately, and travel is torture compared to any supers game.

Is that NC soft policy?

[Opportunist]

I mean, I tend to notice a trend here, every time NC publishes a new game, another old one gets the axe. Tabula Rasa came out, Auto Assault was shut down (and players of AA got a few months of TR). Aion gets released, TR gets kicked out. Now GW2 comes out and COH gets booted.

Wonder if Aion's next when NC gets to release something new.

Re:Is that NC soft policy?

[srmalloy]

Auto Assault, Exteel, Dungeon Runner -- NCSoft has had a poor track record in the 'casual games' market, which led them to buy the casual-gaming company Ntreev for a reported $97.5 million. As a result of this purchase, the marketing costs associated with the rollout of the MMORPG Blade and Soul in Korea, "increased labor costs", and "disappointing performance" by Aion (a lower-than-expected number of microtransactions), NCSoft posted a $6 million loss for the second quarter of 2012, with a 12% decrease in revenue. City of Heroes, at the time of the announcement of its shutdown, was still running in the black, making a profit for NCSoft.

City of Heroes has been an outlier in the games NCSoft ran; it didn't push you out into the game world to grind materials to grind skills to keep your gear from falling behind the power curve, it didn't keep you coming back to the in-game store again and again to buy stuff to help keep you from falling behind the power curve, and it was perfectly possible to go from start to level cap without ever having to team up. As such, it is the antithesis of the type of game that is NCSoft's bread and butter -- and while those games do well in the Asian market, where NCSoft makes more than 99% of its money, bringing that type of game to Western markets has been much less successful, as the failure of the above three games, and the 'disappointing performance' of Aion has shown -- while, City of Heroes flopped in the Korean market because its play style was so foreign to the Korean gaming culture. City of Heroes' admittedly moderate success in the Western market, while NCSoft's 'traditional' MMOs fail there, creates a conflict of image for the company, and eliminating City of Heroes returns NCSoft to being a provider of one style of MMO wrapped in different cosmetic shells, so the company can convince itself that it's the shell, and not the play style, that is making its games fail.

MMO's are rentals

[danbuter]

I like MMOs, but I'm well aware that I'm just renting a game. I also played CoH, and it was fun for a couple years. I think it just got too old compared to newer games. In any case, I'm glad I played it. I kinda feel bad for those who have been playing the full 8 years and are heavily invested in their characters. Then again, this is a bit of a reality check.

Re:Quality?

[Phrogman]

It was very repetitive I will admit. A lot of the missions were identical to ones you did previously, although they did a lot with what they had.
It did have the best group combat dynamic of any MMO I have ever played. Each class had an interesting mix of abilities and a clear function in a group. Solo it was rather dull, but grouped up with the difficulty ramped up and a good group of players who knew what they were doing, it was unequaled in my opinion.
Played COH/COV from beta for 5 years or more. Created probably almost a hundred alts and played them to various levels. It was very creative with character costuming and had an interesting dynamic in the way they worked.
It will be sadly missed by me at least. It baffles me how a great game like this can disappear and something like WOW - which I heartily detest - can continue to have millions of players :(