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Role Playing (Games) Businesses Games

NCSoft Closes "City of Heroes" Publisher Paragon Studios 109

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."
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NCSoft Closes "City of Heroes" Publisher Paragon Studios

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  • Being "Super" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31, 2012 @04:21PM (#41194735)

    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" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iamhassi ( 659463 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @05:13PM (#41195143) Journal
      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.
      • But but... wouldn't your karma persist long after the game was gone?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bhcompy ( 1877290 )
        EVE.
      • 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 t

    • 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.

      • 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?

        • 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 a

    • Re:Being "Super" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @06:12PM (#41195591) Journal

      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" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Teancum ( 67324 ) <robert_horning@n ... et minus painter> on Friday August 31, 2012 @07:54PM (#41196293) Homepage Journal

        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?

        • 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.
        • by zoward ( 188110 )

          ... 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.

          • by Teancum ( 67324 )

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

            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

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 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.

        • by grumbel ( 592662 )

          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.

          • by Hatta ( 162192 )

            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 soc

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Hatta ( 162192 )

          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.

    • 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.

  • So sad (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31, 2012 @04:22PM (#41194741)
    Rest in piece, Marvel DC wannabe expies. Long live..........um..........dark elves in thongs of shielding.
    • 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.

      • 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.

        • 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 actu

          • 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.
          • 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.

  • by 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Sir_Sri ( 199544 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @05:05PM (#41195059)

      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.

  • by samazon ( 2601193 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @04:24PM (#41194763)
    Only four months after Matt Miller promised [cityofheroes.com] "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. [cityofheroes.com] 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.
    • 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.

      • by Ken Hall ( 40554 )

        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.

      • 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.

        • 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.

        • by HappyEngineer ( 888000 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @08:03PM (#41196353) Homepage
          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.
          • by 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 boo

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Saturday September 01, 2012 @12:11AM (#41197691)

            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.

          • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

            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/ [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 co

    • 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
      • 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.

        • 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.

    • 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...

  • A bit sad to see (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Galaga88 ( 148206 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @04:25PM (#41194771)

    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.

    • 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.

      • "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

        • Exactly this.

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

          CoH was never grindy.

    • 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

      • 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.

  • would it last a lot longer if they open sourced the code?
    • 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 managem
    • Re:GPL it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @04:57PM (#41194999) Homepage Journal

      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.

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

      • 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.

        • by julesh ( 229690 )

          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?

  • 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.
  • 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

  • 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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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-do

  • 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 re

    • 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 releas
  • by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) on Friday August 31, 2012 @07:22PM (#41196095) Homepage Journal

    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 [cityofheroes.com] (and on the Titan Network forums here [cohtitan.com] 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.

    • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

      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

      • by Talcyon ( 150838 )

        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.

        • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

          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

  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.

  • 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 a

  • 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.

    • 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.
  • 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.

    • 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

  • 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.

Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!

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