One of my favorite “clever names” I came up with is Martial Artist, my Dark/Dark controller with wildly colored “Dark” powers. Her backstory is that she’s the latest in a long line of women in her family to inherit a magical paintbrush used for creating enchanted artwork, but isn’t nearly as artistically talented as her foremothers. She is however much more talented magically than her ancestresses, and can use the magical paint as a weapon; binding her enemies with magically summoned paint, or painting monsters to attack them.
Well, that’s a shame. I dropped out because I didn’t like the direction F2P went but I enjoyed the game itself very much. Sad to see it go.
I haven’t been playing City very often lately, despite having purchased a 14-month sub late last year…
…but dammit, City’s as close to home as an MMO can get for me. It’s the one game I never dropped my subscription on, even when I went months without playing. It’s always been there and I’ve always had fun on it. It’s comfortable and familiar and enjoyable.
The hell of it is, it’s not even City’s fault. NCSoft is taking some major hits this year due to Aion’s suckiness, and they’re cutting the low-performers, refocusing core competencies, tightening belts, and a bunch of other corporate bullshit.
There’s nothing quite like City in the MMOspace now. It sucks to lose something unique.
I am really disappointed…it must be sudden for everyone there because they were talking about future plans as recent as yesterday.
Well, that was totally out of the blue. I’m with the people on the forums talking about how they’ll never buy anything again from NCSoft after being blindsided like this.
Oh, I expected the game to die eventually; but not when they still had new content in Beta, and not before a long period when development had declined or ended and they just ran the servers to get money from the long time fans. I didn’t expect everything to be hunky-dory one day, and doom the next; even the Devs were blindsided apparently.
And now we’ll never know what the hell the Battalion was going to be like.
Yeah. For a while there NCSoft was the new, punky young kid of the MMO world, and they did stuff right. They looked like a fantastic company compared to SOE, which was the big dog at the time. More and more lately, though, NCSoft has proven to be as big a bunch of assholes as SOE. Dumping Paragon out of the blue like this is just the cherry on top.
Wow. I must admit that I am somewhat stunned. I’ve played COX off and on, mostly off lately, for over 7 years. It has the best player character rendering/animation that I’ve ever seen.
It’s really a shame to see it go.
This was posted on the Facebook comment thread:
If that’s true, it’s not NCsoft you should be boycotting. It’s Perfect World, Atari, and Cryptic Studios.
It seems unlikely, given that Paragon Studios was taken by surprise too. If there was a 5-year deadline coming up,at the very least they would have been prepared for the eventuality.
Gah.
Well frak. This game turned out to be the perfect game for me, style- and gameplay-wise, and I only found it less than a year ago. Now WoW’s the only decent Mac-compatible MMO out there.
And dammit, I just bought $50 worth of Paragon Points and haven’t even spent most of them yet.
Yeah, but the theory involves a buyout as a key component. That would be an unplanned for event.
As a non-player who knows of the game, I wonder what kind of grand mega crisis crossover will bring the franchise to a close? I think that would be kinda fun.
There’s no more development so I doubt anything will happen other than a shut down. I am kind of pissed as I bought $15 worth of points literally the day before the announcement. I already e-mailed looking for a refund.
I was so bummed (and, well, hungover too, but the two aren’t connected) yesterday that I couldn’t even play. I don’t even know if I can generate any kind of enthusiasm for playing it out until the end. With 89 characters — and that doesn’t count the ones I’ve deleted — I’ve seen most of the solo content. Blueside anyway, since my only level 50 is a hero. So it’s not like I feel a need to hurry and do all the stuff I haven’t gotten to yet.
On a certain level, most of my enjoyment of this game has been on a meta-game level. I fully embraced the idea of the journey being more important than the destination, and invented my own goals for what I wanted to “accomplish” in the game. Hence, my two themed supergroups, Solar Angels (my solar-system-based group) and The Extracurriculars (the schoolgirls whose school was destroyed in Galaxy City). I’d made my own little plan for advancing and developing the stories of these teams. Lately my efforts have been focused on getting the characters in The Extracurriculars as “even” as possible level-wise, just for the illusion that they developed together as a team as opposed to being individual characters solo-leveled separately. I even had a plan laid out for how their different costumes would work as they progressed: They started out in what was essentially their everyday school clothes, then at level 20 they would each create an actual costume that reflected their own individual style and image. At level 30 they would design, “together”, a team uniform, i.e. identical outfits but maintaining their individual color schemes. I’ve gotten five of them to 20, and a sixth almost there, with two more trailing behind. Their teacher-turned-nemesis is still stuck at level 8, and I’d just started trying again to get her leveled up. Now … what’s the point? The shutdown announcement came right as my job is getting ready to head into another busy season (Fall convention season, Sept-Oct-Nov), so there’s no way I’ll have the time to play enough to get them all as far as 30. I suppose I could at least create and screenshot the costumes/uniforms they would have eventually gotten to. It’s making me really wish I’d discovered this game years ago so that I could have had the time to develop my ideas.
The other big bummer is that, as a Macintosh user, CoH and WoW are really the only MMO options out there for me. After November it’ll just be WoW. I suppose I could get a gaming PC; I have a Windows laptop, but it’s really not powerful enough for serious gaming, and I can’t stand playing on that small screen. But even if I do get a gaming PC desktop, I can promise that NCSoft won’t be getting any more of my money (not a hard decision in any case - I’ve tried Aion and found it to be complete crap, and their other offerings don’t intrigue me).
For now. Elder Scrolls Online will be Mac-compatible when it ships.
I’m still rather in shock. Things were going well; the game has been undergoing a renaissance of sorts. New stuff was coming out faster than ever, and it was generally of better quality than what had come before, and grand plans for the future. Now it’s all going to wither on the vine for “realignment”? Realignment to what? Yet another grind-whoring WOW clone, now with prettier pictures, because that worked so well last time?
It’s the abruptness that gets to me. We all knew that it would end some day, and I would no doubt have been saddened when the end came, but I expected some warning signs before the announcement. Slowed development pace, no new storylines introduced for a while, and old ones wrapped up. I thought there would be a graceful decline, not a sudden shock.
I can’t play right now. Maybe after I have some time to think, to find some way to give my characters closure, so they can live on in my mind after the servers go dark. But not yet.
What. The. Fuck.
I’m just baffled. And sad.
FWIW, there’s going to be at least one concerted effort by the Titan Network to purchase the City of Heroes IP and database through crowdfunding. I doubt NCSoft will agree to sell, though; their recent behavior has been closed-off and uncooperative.
That’s a nice ray of hope, albeit a slim one.