"A few years later, after random passer-byers in the tram started chanting into their cellphones 'Ascendant who? I'm sorry, you have the wrong number,' I was contacted by a Paragon employee to meet them in-game. Unlike most jokes though, this one caught on and became an official part of City of Heroes lore. Tell me the idea of Batman waiting in line at the DMV doesn't make you smile." "What would a superhero say on a payphone? It was my first introduction to the idea that mundane hassles + superheroes = hilarity. "I was bored, waiting on my SG to assemble, and on a whim started playing a Bob Newhart-like skit at the phone booth," remembers Ascendant, via secret identity Tre Chipman. Still, it's the creative side that I remember most fondly - from peoples' costumes, and regular costume contests in Atlas Park, to the fine puns on display, the amusement of wandering into a new area and seeing Catapilla the Hun run past with a gag of insane mutants in hot pursuit, or Ascendant's infamous phone calls. I've never played one with more grouping requests though, or had such cheery killing sprees with strangers - teams of mismatched heroes coming together to fight crime simply seeming more thematically appropriate than worrying about things like the 'holy trinity' or 'combat efficiency' or 'basic common sense'. Like any MMORPG, it had its share of jerks and silent psychopaths grinding through content. This freedom led to arguably City of Heroes' greatest asset - its community. 2011's DC Universe Online is much more restricted by lore.Ĭity of Heroes bet on creativity, right down to becoming one of the only MMORPGs to integrate support for player created stories and missions, and offering few limitations on what kind of hero you could be from the start When everyone's special, nobody is. Champions Online (made by the same developers) would later take this to even more freeform levels. Pyromaniac plant girl Burnthyme could opt to back up her fireballs with a few devices, like caltrops, or for the heck of it, ice. Most importantly though, it bet on creativity, right down to becoming one of the only MMORPGs to integrate support for player created stories and missions, and offering few limitations on what kind of hero you could be from the start - at least unless you wanted to be a copyrighted one, or a female character capable of seeing her feet without a mirror.ĭashing Welsh swordsman Dai Katana for instance wouldn't have to spend 30 hours poking people with daggers to acquire a proper warrior's blade. While it didn't invent the idea of free-to-play, it was also one of the games that first set the standard of what to expect from once-subscription MMORPGs that made the leap. Its Sidekick and Exemplar systems knocked down many barriers between high and low level players. City of Heroes' 24 issues (big patches) weren't without their faults, but they still brought a steady stream of new ideas - time travel, alien invasions, jobs for characters to do while you were off living a less heroic life, an expansion devoted to villainy - albeit not one that made it feel good to be bad, especially when Westin Phipps showed up - and new ways to tell stories. NCSoft looked down and whispered 'No'.Įven if you agree that City of Heroes has had its day though, it's still a loss - not least because it's rare to see a MMORPG so willing to take such risks, and to keep reinventing itself. Publisher NCSoft has never been shy about pulling the switch on games it didn't see a future in though, most notably Ultima creator Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, and has shown no interest in the petitions and campaigns set up to keep the game alive. City of Heroes' free-to-play switch seemed to go reasonably well, and by all accounts it was still making money. No more will Perez Park confuse the hell out of newcomers, or anything secretly turn out to be a Nemesis plot.Īt least from the outside, it seems like odd timing. Never again will Frostfire glance out of his base and shake his head at the sight of heroes skiing around on his ice-ramps instead of coming to fight him. This Friday, night falls on the City of Heroes for the last time. Unless you'd just copied Batman, obviously. Best of all, with a character creation system no MMORPG has ever beaten, it was your superhero. It let you feel like a superhero, hurling fire, swinging swords, controlling the minds of lesser men and more. It didn't simply let you play as a superhero. City of Heroes wasn't even close to the first MMORPG I ever played, but it was the first that understood that even Level 1 can feel awesome.