City of Heroes: It's Kind of Back!
Apr. 22nd, 2019 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlI just logged out of City of Heroes for the evening. Made a couple of characters -- with some twiddling, you can put together a decent furry, although it's still awkward if you want them dressed up decently BUT want to emphasize the fur. I ran a handful of missions, hunted Hellions, remembered where some of the Badges are in Atlas Park. I tried out the experimental cel-shading option, which looks really nice indoors and a little strange outdoors.
Mostly I sat there in disbelief and wonder, because I was playing City of Heroes again. I cried, even.
Back in 2012 when the CoH servers were announced to be closing down for good, it really hit me emotionally hard. Since then, I've been wavering up and down on the subject.
I had started to let myself get convinced, you know? I was almost convinced that maybe the game hadn't been as fun as I remembered it. Maybe it had been taken down for good reason. It was an old game, it couldn't be that great. I just didn't know better at the time.
Friends and Russian spambots, I was wrong as hell. City of Heroes in our blighted year 2019 is still a great game. It's still fun, and NCSoft are still rat-bastard cartoon clowns for closing down a game like this. At the worst, the UI and fonts need serious scaling adjustments, but that's pretty much it.
They're wiping this beta server in a week, but if you want to get in before then:
Here is a topic that tells you how to download and install the game. Using the magnet link to a bittorrent file is a much faster way to get the game downloaded than via the launcher, but either way, it should work.
It's still City of Heroes. It's still kind of janky, the physics are weird, and everyone on the internet who has ever had nostalgia for that character creator is downloading and making characters because we don't know what's going to happen, maybe NCSoft will step forward and nuke this again, WE DON'T KNOW but for one shining beautiful stupid moment Paragon City needs heroes one more time and it's RIGHT THERE. All of it, all the way up to the Going Rogue expansion and even some stuff that they only showed off on livestreams because the game shut down around their ears while they were making more content.
For years I told myself, y'know... "Even IF City of Heroes were still up, I wouldn't be playing it. It's too old and outdated to be more than a curiosity."
I was wrong. I was wrong and dumb and I'm so glad to have been wrong and dumb.
I hope this lasts.
Mostly I sat there in disbelief and wonder, because I was playing City of Heroes again. I cried, even.
Back in 2012 when the CoH servers were announced to be closing down for good, it really hit me emotionally hard. Since then, I've been wavering up and down on the subject.
I had started to let myself get convinced, you know? I was almost convinced that maybe the game hadn't been as fun as I remembered it. Maybe it had been taken down for good reason. It was an old game, it couldn't be that great. I just didn't know better at the time.
Friends and Russian spambots, I was wrong as hell. City of Heroes in our blighted year 2019 is still a great game. It's still fun, and NCSoft are still rat-bastard cartoon clowns for closing down a game like this. At the worst, the UI and fonts need serious scaling adjustments, but that's pretty much it.
They're wiping this beta server in a week, but if you want to get in before then:
Here is a topic that tells you how to download and install the game. Using the magnet link to a bittorrent file is a much faster way to get the game downloaded than via the launcher, but either way, it should work.
It's still City of Heroes. It's still kind of janky, the physics are weird, and everyone on the internet who has ever had nostalgia for that character creator is downloading and making characters because we don't know what's going to happen, maybe NCSoft will step forward and nuke this again, WE DON'T KNOW but for one shining beautiful stupid moment Paragon City needs heroes one more time and it's RIGHT THERE. All of it, all the way up to the Going Rogue expansion and even some stuff that they only showed off on livestreams because the game shut down around their ears while they were making more content.
For years I told myself, y'know... "Even IF City of Heroes were still up, I wouldn't be playing it. It's too old and outdated to be more than a curiosity."
I was wrong. I was wrong and dumb and I'm so glad to have been wrong and dumb.
I hope this lasts.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-22 02:20 pm (UTC)City of Heroes was... not my first MMO, but it at the time it felt like my first real MMO? My first non-shitty MMO? The first to know what actual production values and such are? Horizons was my first (unless you count KoL,) and I jumped ship from there directly CoH because Horizons was Horizons. From there, I took a Katana/Regen Scrapper from 0 to... early-mid 30s or so? twice, both times finding the early-midgame a blast, getting worn down by the plateau in the middle, and not making it to the end. I was already long gone anyway by the time the game shut down.
However, you've seen the overwhelmingly moving flood of feelings and nostalgia and more feelings I'm getting from revisiting Istaria now, and that's the game I ditched even at the time because CoH was better, and the game that's actually been here and alive and supported and everything this whole time but I just didn't care (until recently.) If I'd gone more all in on CoH, or if I'd still been into it when NCSoft killed it, I would be exactly where you are now. This was your MMO, as Horizons was mine (after they fixed half of the FFXIV 1.0-tier launch bullshit and I got older and more nostalgic for the other half.) It feels good to be home.
I'm still committed to Istaria at thsi pont, and I don't think I have it in me to be playing two early 2000s MMOs. However, I may just snag this while it's available because God yeah you are directly calling me out with the whole "everyone who's ever been nostalgic for the character creator" line, aren't you. I hope NCSoft keeps their dicks out of this and lets people have their fun but, unfortunately, as you probably already know, NCSoft. So, you never know, so I may as well get it while the chance is there.
Thank you for alerting us to this, and I very anxiously and eagerly look forward to reexperiencing some of Paragon City vicariously through your screenshots and such. This is good. <3
(Also, based on this experience plus my current Istaria revisiting, "needs more/better middle-game content" is apparently a thing for MMOs from that era, huh.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 10:40 pm (UTC)I think the only MMO with a halfway competent midgame is FF14, and that's because they don't really, you know. Stop the plot from happening as you go up in levels. They just add more plot on top, is all. It's a lot more serialized like a gacha game that way.