I read the CoH boards a lot. My sense about GG was it was just people being clique-ish and nasty. The only concrete complaint about her I ever heard is she would sometimes post as if she had inside knowledge of the future of the game but I think that was just people who didn’t like her reading into things.
My experience with the CoH boards mirrored all MMO boards I have read: it was filled with ingrates who complained about everything, blind worshipers that defended everything and a handful of reasonable people in the middle.
None more so than those whose favorite power or power-up was nerfed, thereby ruining not only that power, archetype, play style or the entire game, but the entire notion of online gaming.
One of my genuine “laugh out loud” moments in the game was that radio mission that sent you to rescue a kidnapped game developer. He’d been kidnapped by the 5th Column (or maybe the Council), and the suspicion was that the organization was angry about they way they were portrayed in the game. When you got there and “heard” the NPC speech, it turned out these two kidnappers were simply pissed off because they were players of the game, and their classes had been nerfed
Okay, long time no bump. (Also not much news out of CoT these days… I suspect the money is running down and they’re just now really coming to terms with how massive the job is. You can build components and maps all day, but making it all work at the 2015 MMORG level is orders of magnitude more complicated… sigh.)
Anyway, I fired up Icon the other day and wandered, and damn if some things didn’t seem different. I was particularly interested in a walk through doubly-deserted Dark Astoria… whIch I remember being a gray fog zone. For whatever reason, it now renders as a dark but clear zone with a strong reddish haze, and there are very pronounced ambient audio sounds - moans, screams, etc. - that I simply don’t remember from the active era.
I doubt there has been any update and I know I am working from the same file set as the Last Day (not the beta release, the full release)… so is it driver changes that has made DA render differently? Was the rather noisy audio ambience there all along?
And I still miss this goddamn game.
ETA: If you haven’t ever enabled the dev mode (F4) in Icon, it’s worth a look. It shows you all the mob spawn zones and a zillion other ‘behind the curtain’ details. Cool.
If you’re a fan of pointless nostalgia, I learned a while back that much of the forums are accessible via the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.
Some stuff didn’t work such as some server forums but the main general forums did. My bookmark was on the artwork forum but you can navigate from there. I spent a couple evenings just reading old stuff and reminiscing.
Awesome! There was a really great, hilarious, but true post/essay somebody wrote, called, “How to Suck at CoH/CoV” (and no, it wasn’t aimed at bad players). I bookmarked it, but neglected to save a copy before the forums went down. Maybe I can still find it!
It boggles my mind there hasn’t been a new game like CoH. I get that a licensed game is the safer bet but there is definitely a Market for a game with a new IP that has free range to create what they want.
I fired up Titan Icon today to make some characters for a Champions game I’m running in February. It was kind of hard, actually. Being back in Paragon City is something I really want, and I can’t have it. Not really.
I hope that City of Titans comes out, and is good, and is successful. But it won’t be City of Heroes.
I have given up hope of seeing a rekindling of the spirit of CoH/CoV from any of the developers discussed in this thread. It is time to come to grips with this fact, as sad as it is, and move on.
Rest in peace Paragon City. I will never forget you.
In the event that CoT actually does see release, I hold no illusions that my current hardware could handle it. I’m already having enough trouble running the latest WoW expansion.
Apparently a City of Heroes private server has been running for years and some members of the community are rather upset to find out. They’ve been keeping the dream alive on Reddit, etc and shut out from knowing that there’s been an active server running all this time by other people in the same community.
Further drama about someone having possession of CoH player data from its live days and whether or not the source code will get released into the public so other people can run servers.
