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| What the main site now shows. I'm quite fond of the evening sky/statesmen |
On the 30th of August, Paragon Studios announced the closure of the studio and City of Heroes. The decision apparently came from the parent company and publisher, NCSOFT. As this unfortunate event was already very well covered by gaming sites such as Massively. I will instead comment on what COH and its closure meant to me.
For those that were in the loop, COH was a MMO inspired from superhero comic books. Most notably MARVEL & DC comics. The character creation / customization is one of the best even by today's industry standard given that players can create almost any super-hero/villain that they can imagine. With exception to non-anthropomorphic characters.... such as my idea of parasitic intelligent life-form that is utterly incomprehensible to humans.
Its worth noting that COH was also first in its genre and still managed to held my interest as compared to the new kids on the block like CO or DCUO. Character creation / concept in DCUO was abysmal in comparison but that is another story. Can't speak for CO much since I haven't yet played it but the game didn't appeal to me due to the way the Archtypes (classes) are structured.
I was also fortunate enough to be introduced to the Virtue server which my friend played on. There, I was exposed to a vibrant role-playing community. While not all players role-play, most characters I came across have a back-story that explained how they came about. That gave people an idea of who they are dealing with which added more depth to the game. Not only that the community also had a website for the dossiers of the players' characters.
As an old-school pen/paper Dungeon & Dragons role-player, that got me really excited.. I literally went crazy with the character creator and made dozens of concepts for different heroes and villains. At the end of my 2 year run with COH, I had over 20 characters. Even though none were at max level, I was having the a great deal of fun.
COH was a game that let players to generate their own content. It allowed me to express my creativity in ways that I never could in all the previous games that I play.
I would spent hours thinking of how my character should look like, what motivated him/her to become a hero/villain and the character growth.
How they attain even more power and in what ways have their outlook changed in doing so.
It is without doubt that I am terribly sad to see COH go. I had originally expect this game to last much longer and so took my time with the game. One of my greatest regrets when it comes to COH was that I have yet seen 90% of the remaining content. There are tons of story-arcs, mission architects and power sets that I will now never get a chance to play.
Like an unfulfilled relationship, there was still so much left undone.
