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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."
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.
Rest in piece, Marvel DC wannabe expies. Long live..........um..........dark elves in thongs of shielding.
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.
I have the hiccups.
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.
Was it really that good?
No. But it was fun.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
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.
I have the hiccups.
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.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
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.