BlueBattler

Originally Posted by Aggelakis

So you don't believe the comments from two different rednames that things were happening? Nice going there.

Originally Posted by Positivity

Calm down.

Many of us believe that there is an actual reason for NCsoft's continued silence. They might not be able to give any specifics because they are currently in ongoing negotiations with a third party regarding the ultimate fate of CoX.

Originally Posted by IronLung1169

I just recently read an article were Vivendi, who owns a big chuck of Blizzard, wants to sell it off due to a slump in the stock.
In my opinion, NCSOFT either does not have faith that the CoH franchise has a marketable sales appeal to other companies, or they are going to shelf it. A move should have already been made if they had intentions to sell it.
Why shelf it? So they can have the rights to make CoH2 or sell of the franchise when they can make more money for it.
Next month, X Com is coming out. I remember buying that game nearly 20 years ago. Now they are bringing it back with high hopes. Sometimes, separation makes the heart grow founder. In my opinion, this is what NCsoft is betting on. Let's hope it doesn't take 20 years.

Originally Posted by Nericus

This news is.....encouraging. Here's hoping.

Also on a slightly "devil's advocate" note: let's say the game is saved somehow (Im hoping that is saved, don't get me wrong), but would that mean the return of all the Paragon Studio staff? Some may not want to return for assorted reasons.

Originally Posted by Starsman

The market does not have to be rebuilt, just detached from their current backend, attached to the new one and adjust prices to reflect the new business model, it's harder than I oversimplify here but does not have to be a full rebuilding of the store system.

Other than that, most things are true but don't have to happen overnight. The monthly billing has to change hands quickly but after that point, the game can be transitioned slowly into the new servers and login system.

In addition SOE has a cross-game chat system that will likely be required in the game at some point.

Originally Posted by Brillig

It seems unlikely that anyone would buy the property unless it contained everything. In spite of opinions to the contrary, the value of the franchise is in the ability to run the game and generate operating revenues from it. The IP is pretty much worthless in the grand scheme of things.

Originally Posted by TimTheEnchanter

To all the SOE naysayers, SOE has received far more hate over SWG than it deserves. Just as LucasArts was responsible for the final demise of the game, don't think they were any less involved in the NGE.

That said, the NGE WAS a disaster when it came out. The timing was bad, the lack of warning was bad, and the execution was bad. And yes, it slaughtered the old class system. But in the long run, the NGE turned out to be a pretty fun incarnation. But you'd never know it from version 1.0. A lot of it wasn't even working properly. And then slowly some pre-NGE features were brought back, and we got a pretty interesting hybrid of a game. And SWG's population was actually on the rise before the shutdown was announced. And the game was still being developed, even on its skeleton crew of a dev team, and new features were still being planned.

If SOE adopts CoX, don't sell them short. Most of the problems SWG had were not due to bad development. It was due to the fact that SOE didn't own the IP, which gave Lucas the freedom to play backseat driver. BOTH of the expansions that SWG got, were promotions for Episode 2 & 3, which didn't even take place in the SWG era. And SWG launched just before Lucas decided that the Galactic Civil War was old-hat, and everything Star Wars now needs to be entirely about Jedi with DragonballZ powers in order to appease the target audience age for Star Wars, which has mysteriously changed from "everyone" to "K-16."

Things like this are why City of Heroes (or a sequel to it) is the only Superhero MMO I will ever play. Anything DC or Marvel ever licenses out to other companies is in danger of the same kind of garbage that SWG got dragged through. It also was nice in CoX that I didn't need to feel like I had to be a hardcore comic book reader for 30 years before I started playing in order to grasp the nature of the world I was in.

If the rumor is true, GO SOE.

Though even if what they're offering is GOOD, it doesn't mean NC will sell. Sometimes companies have a way of preferring to let IP's die rather than sell them, because years down the road, if the new company does an even better job with the IP, they don't want to have to deal with the ego-bruise.

Originally Posted by Bloodspeaker

You forgot "refuse to sell the game, because it's existence is a viable threat to their other sources of income".

Originally Posted by Combat

From what I understand, CoH's powers would actually be relatively easy to export to a different engine. They are explicitly defined in spreadsheets, whereas some games have to create a program for every spell.

Some of the features would probably need to be re-written, especially things like bases. Unfortunately, it may be impossible to restore the bases lost through such a transition. I believe most other features would be possible to recreate on a different engine.

Graphics? Your guess is as good as mine. I 'believe' that the way the textures work, it would be possible to recreate most of the graphics, and FX stuff probably works independently.