So, here's a thing. It's one of three (four?) projects currently going on to create a superhero/villain/vigilante MMO in the spirit of City of Heroes. CoH players, and fans of the supers, in general, might consider giving these folks a look.

City of Titans Kickstarter

Boosting the signal,
-paws

Just a quick note: This Kickstarter is funded and has already surpassed its first stretch goal.

Man, I played the hell out of CoH, from the CoV release until shutdown. I'd love to see it back, but at the same time I have serious doubts about this project.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong. That'd be nice. But they're going to be very lucky if they don't get legal trouble from NCSoft, and from what the kickstarter mentions they haven't budgeted for it, just for a retainer.

Even NCSoft had to fight and win against Marvel over the original CoH.

Well, I do know that the project specifically is NOT using any assets, code, or other properties belonging to NCSoft. Just the basic idea - a massively multiplayer supers online RPG with deep character customization. Imitating the 'feel' but not the details. You can't copyright a basic idea.

Whether or not it will suceed is a whole 'nother question. It could fall by the wayside easily like so many other indie games.

And also... I had thought I had gotten over the gut-punch of the cancellation by now. But the subject coming up just brought so many memories of stuff I probably never see again. And now I haz a sads all over again.



-k

Yup.


I'm only worried about it because, for example, Marvel went after NCSoft over powersets and costumes that -could be made- to look like their properties. That and CoT is explicitly trying to get the old CoH playerbase, which is going to mean they'll need to make the game in some ways similar.

If just 'superheroes, the MMO' was enough, Champions Online would have picked up the playerbase.

Well, to be fair, many of CoH's early costume elements were based on (read: blatant rip-offs of) well known marvel characters. Wolverine's claws, for instance. The original hero claws were almost an exact copy. Put all those pieces together and you could easily copy a Marvel look-alike character. It was sloppy fan service on coh's part and it came back to bite them since Marvel was obligated to challenge them or risk (blah blah IP & copyright stuff).

I'm sure (as sure as I can be, based on the concept images we've seen) that MWM is going to try and steer clear of visual elements. I'm more concerned with some of the naming, but even then, they seem to be divorcing CoH names from what they originally meant. That's probably one of the reasons they want a lawyer on retainer.

You know, I'm optimistic about this project. That's why I shared this originally. I can understand people not wanting to get their hopes up. No one wants to go through that mess again. Still, I feel that a cautious wait and see approach is better than thee mindset of it won't happen, because.

-paws

PS sorry for opening old wounds.


Edit for "Damn you autocorrect!"

I thought Champions Online was a much better game than City of Heroes, TBH.

I agree. Between the freedom of power choices and the more in-depth combat system.

The same developer that created City of Heroes also created Champions Online. Five years of refinement of game systems helps, huh?

I do know that at the time City of Heroes was being developed, it was supposed to be a free-form system same as Champions is now, but back then they kept running into balance problems. Instead of a wide array of power combinations, players kept picking the same few powers over and over, whatever was the favored power combo flavor of the month. So they scrapped everything and went to a more traditional class based system instead.

Oddly, a huge amount of the CoH playerbase expressed a distinct dislike of CO when that came out. I guess people get used to things being a certain way.


-k

Which is amusing because I could always find at least 5 or 6 different "powerful" builds for a character design in CO. More than anything about CoH that drove me crazy were the bland power sets and cookie cutter builds.

Agreed. All my characters were completely different from each other, but they all felt powerful.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. One of the Kickstarter images was a damn near perfect shot-for-shot recreation of Atlas Park's plaza, for example. We'll see, though. I wish them well, but I don't think I could put the kind of time into another MMO that I did for City.