City of Heroes to Close November 30

According to GameSpot UK, the closing date of the game is to be November 30, and apparently the staff have all been laid off already.

More to come.

City of Heroes Freedom to Close in 2012

City of Heroes Freedom will be closing by the end of the year according to Andy Belford, Community Manager of Paragon Studios.

Disappointing, but not unexpected news. The Freedom business model failed to gain any traction, and the financial situation of the game became unsustainable.

In my opinion, the Freedom model's continued emphasis on selling subscriptions, and failing to grandfather in returning subscribers, were the major factors in the model's failure. Subscriptions had by that time already proven to be unsustainable (thus the switch to f2p), and the former subscribers who were willing to return and give the game another try were welcomed with locked characters and grayed-out enhancements, thereby losing them as customers.

There were other minor factors as well in my opinion, including an uncompelling, exclusive endgame in the Incarnate system, the erosion of the good-will of the community caused by Architect Entertainment, and the fact that the game is quite old and suffering from natural attrition, and though I would disagree, many have said the game hasn't aged very well (IMHO, the game looks and plays exceptionally well for a game of any age, let alone one designed 10 years ago!) The game's feeling of extreme repetition, even by MMO standards, was the game's number-one, perennial Achilles' Heel.

None of this changes the fact that City of Heroes, a game that ran for eight years, can only be called a great success. It's influence will live on in the features it gave to games like Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and so many others. Never doubt that City of Heroes has been highly influential in this industry, and years after its closing, it will still be felt in the design of brand new games. We'll be able to say, "City of Heroes did it first!"

More to come.

Installing City of Heroes Freedom on Ubuntu 12.04 is Easy!

City of Heroes for human beings.

1. Download Wine & Winetricks from the Software Center.

2. Download Xdelta from the Software Center.

3. Download Unrar from the Software Center (it might already be installed).

4. In the terminal, run the following to get XML::Simple: sudo apt-get install libxml-simple-perl

5. Run Wine Configuration (winecfg) and it will create your Wine directory automatically.

6. Go to /home/YourUserName/.Wine/drive_c/Program Files and create a new folder called City of Heroes (replacing YourUserName with your user name). If you're running 64 bit Ubuntu do this in */Program Files (x86) instead. If you don't see the .Wine directory, make sure the "show hidden files" option is on (ctrl+h).

7. Download cohlaunch.pl from http://www.carnildo.com/cohlaunch/index.html uncompress it and move it into the City of Heroes directory you just created.

8. In the terminal run: 

cd "/home/YourUserName/.Wine/drive_c/Program Files/City of Heroes"

The quotation marks are necessary. On 64 bit replace Program Files with Program Files (x86). Replace YourUserName with your user name.

9. Now in the terminal run: perl cohlaunch.pl -renderthread 0 and let it do its thing. The whole game will be downloaded and patched up, so this may take several hours depending on your network connection speed.

10. Once complete, to run the program repeat the two terminal commands above to call the directory and run the script with perl in that directory. If no patch is needed the game will just run, otherwise it will patch itself up and then run. If you hear choppy sound or no sound, quit the game, log out of Ubuntu, log back in and relaunch the game.

11. Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls!

Tested on Ubuntu 12.04, Xubuntu 12.04 and Lubuntu 12.04.

City of Heroes Freeom's NPC Design Is Tops

Arachnos Arbiter shows off CoHF's fantastic NPC design.

While playing the other day, I was reminded of what I've thought for a long time about City of Heroes Freedom: the NPC design is some of the very best in the industry. Compare it to any MMO of any vintage you choose, this little game from 2004 not only competes with them all, but often (such as in the case of the Arachnos Arbiter above) exceeds them all.

Q2 2012

Sales are down 1% from last quarter. The new revenue streams the game is trying may be stemming losses, but revenues are still on a general downward trend as I predicted in my previous post. This comes during a quarter when NCsoft's revenues overall are up 4%.

Why NCsoft, notorious for an itchy trigger finger, hasn't shelved the game yet is an open question. Maybe the game is so inexpensive to run, they're still well into profitability? Perhaps NCsoft is so enthusiastic about Paragon Studios' upcoming title they're keeping City around as a sort of loss-leader? It's hard to tell, but I'm glad the game hasn't met the ax.

The great white hope is Issue 24, which is looking like a very strong Issue. Will it be enough to turn the game's fortunes around?

Missing SBOs; New Charater; Issue 24; Financials Due Soon

Comet Master, Grav/NRG Dominator Villain

So if you store your Store Bought Origin (SBO) Enhancements in emails, and forget about them for 60 days, those emails and enhancements will get deleted. I found out the hard way. I didn't think they'd delete pay Enhancements like that. Considering petitioning to get them back, but I don't know, I kind of just shoulder-shrug about it.

I rolled up a new character, a Grav/NRG Dom. Energy Assault is amazing these days, but what people don't realize is that Gravity, once it gets its pet Singularity (Singy) is one of the best control sets around. A good half of the set's control potential is in that pet. Oftentimes, Singy allows you to just blast and not worry too much about even controlling anything. That's the beauty of Gravity Control, and nobody sees that. And yes, I haven't written a bio as you can see. Sometimes I have to experience a character in-game for a good while before I know who they are.

Issue 24 has some stuff. Leveling content! Sweet, sweet, much needed leveling content! But tier-9 VIP exclusive costume set. Boo. And Blasters getting another buff, this time quick snipes (Doms benefit, yay!) but also getting regeneration in some of their secondary powers. Regeneration is not going to save a Blaster. A Blaster's still gonna die. I don't see the point. But okay, I guess. Oh, and power pools just got awesome. Customization, and a new pool power that turns your character into an "unrelenting berserker".

The latest financials for NCsoft are due out this week. Following hot on the heels of a very weak Issue 23 numbers will probably be down again (I'd love to be wrong about that). The good news is NCsoft either has forgotten the game is still running, or they like it, they really, really like it. What could possibly go wrong?

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