SlickRiptide

Typically speaking, companies that shutter their games don't actively pursue emulators the way they did when the game was generating revenue for them. At least, I've never heard of it happening.

The outlines are instructive just for an illustration of the difficulty between imagining something and realizing your imaginings.

Thank you, Poison, Leandro, and Golden Girl for posting all of this information.

I could wish it had been available more widely, years ago, but I'm not going to rant about it at this point. I'm just grateful that there's no reason to hold this stuff back any more.

I see a few responses along the lines of "they wouldn't want to queer the deal by telling the truth" so I wanted to be clear. The reason I don't just paste the email verbatim is that I nrver received explicit permission.

However, the relevant quote would be "Never been discussed never going to be discussed."

That IS verbatim. There was no question of hedging. In fact, I exchanged a few emails wiyh Mister Smedley and he was surprisingly forthcoming about his own experiences having to shut down Matrix Online and EQOA. He also expressed his great respect for both City of Heroes and Paragon Studios.

Bottom line: SOE is not in the picture. At all.

Folks;

I received an email back from Mr. Smedley within a few minutes of the email that I sent him. Color me surprised and just a bit impressed that he's that on the ball personally on a holiday evening, no less.

I have requested his permission to post the contents here, but I can tell you that the SOE rumor is false. They have not made an offer and do not intend to.

I'm sorry. I was really hoping that bone would have some meat on it.

****REDACTED - See below***

Yep. No swan song for my heroes. The universe they live in is not dependent on a few bits streaming through a server someplace. They'll get up on December first and do the same things they do on any other day.

In the "the world keeps on turning" department:

Actor Michael Clarke Duncan died today of complications from heart problems (a "microcardial infarction") in July that he never fully recovered from.

In comic book terms he'd be best known for playing Kingpin in the 2003 Daredevil movie that starred Ben Affleck.



I can say that I enjoyed pretty much every movie I saw him in. It's a shame to lose a talented actor at a relatively young age. Maybe I should get in and have the physical that I've been putting off...

I would go so far as to say don't delete the game files from your hard disk unless you really need the space. If someone ever managed to get an emulator running you'd want to have those game files available.

Saving all of your costumes and power customizations is a pretty good idea, also.

The one feature I see that makes a possible sale favorable, IMO, is the one I complained about in another thread. Namely, the abrupt dissolution of the studio compared to Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa where they had a lengthy sunset and the studio ran the game until the final day. Tabula Rasa even had a special "back to Terra" event where the war against the Bane was fought until, in the game, the final recourse was the ultimate doomsday bomb in a hail-Mary, "If we're going down then we're taking them with us" climax. A great way to end the game.

Why are they divesting Paragon Studios so suddenly? It sucks for the studio employees, to completely understate the situation, but it means that any possible buyer would be buying only the IP, not the studio. If the purchaser chose to tender offers to previous studio employees after the purchase, well that would be their business.

There's no way to know, though. I've seen speculation about tax considerations in closing the studio and if something like that is the case, then a sale is less hopeful. NCSoft has a 100% track record of NOT selling their IP. Offers by other publishers don't indicate that NCSoft was inviting such offers. They only indicate that certain publishers saw a business opportunity and acted upon it.

For now, we have to proceed as if the game is going to be gone by December.

SOE is having a double-Station Cash sale this weekend.

I've been on the fence about buying some, since I'd just spend it on Free Realms TCG and I've got all of that I need at the moment. I might be tempted to buy a mount or a backpack in EQ2 but it's been awhile since I played EQ2 so it's not a good enough reason by itself.

Buying CoH goodies would do it for me, though. In case someone from SOE is listening in. ;-)

The flip side of that for CoH players is that SOE DOES periodically run "specials" on their virtual currency, as well as "events" where the entire stable of games has special sales on their merchandise.

I won't deny that the possibility of a CoH online TCG also piques my interest, and with a real-world TCG already designed, I can imagine that SOE finds that prospect somewhat interesting as well. They've got the infrastructure already in place.

As a long-time SOE customer, I feel like weighing in on this topic.

*) The station pass doesn't apply any more. ALL of SOE's games have become freemium games. Even EQ2, where they originally went to the trouble of creating a freemium version (EQ2 Extended) while keeping the original subscription game as a separate service for the players that were certain that freemium would be the death knell of the game and its community. As it turned out, EQ2X tripled the number of people playing the game and most of the EQ2 players ended up with EQ2X accounts anyway just because that was where there were people to team up with.

*) As has been noted, SOE has no problem running three different high fantasy games as well as an arguably fantasy-themed game aimed at young people. Never mind games like Legends of Norrath, Pox Nora, and Magic The Gathering Tactics (or whatever their MtG "miniatures" game is called). Having two superhero games in the stable is no stretch for them at all. As long as it sells Station Cash, they're happy to run it.

*) SOE knows how to run a decent store. In the process of interfacing CoH to their Station Cash market system, they'd no doubt build a much better "Paragon Market".

*) For several years now, SOE has concentrated development in-house. That is, they don't really have individual "studios" for individual games. They have departments for programming, marketing, program management, etc... and people from those departments are assigned where they are needed. While they might feel the need to hire someone like Protean or Dink, for the most part they would be unlikely to make a goal out of reforming the original team. Rather, they would be looking at transitioning it to their own internal team. This would probably mean that people doing story work for DCUO would be likely to be put on CoH as well, just at a guess. (Pirates may be the one exception, in that I'm pretty sure that Flying Lab is still more or less in charge of it, though I think they sort of qualify as a "wholly-owned subsidiary" these days.)

*) SOE has a history of keeping games going as long as they are making even a small profit. The only game that ever really failed that test was The Matrix Online, and I suspect that Warner Brothers had something to do with that. Planetside and Everquest are still running. Planetside is getting a sequel, even. Pirates of the Burning Sea is still going. Free Realms is still going, even though they looked to almost be trying to kill it there for a while. In fact, Free Realms is going through something of a resurgence, not unlike what happened when CoH transitioned from Cryptic to NCSoft, which gives me some hope for other games from SOE.

*) Star Wars Galaxies was an aberration. It's time for everyone to let it go. LucasArts shares responsibility. The NGE was their baby. It was not SOE's decision to release an expansion themed around creature handlers (hunters, in WoW terms) and then one month later make a drastic change in the game that eliminated them from the game entirely. However, it WAS their work that eventually brought almost all of that functionality back into the game.

This is the thing that people tend to ignore about SWG. Despite what LucasArts forced them into with the NGE (and to everyone's credit, they WERE trying to address the complaints that the game was not "star warsy", in the sense that it was not enough action), over the next two years SOE brought the game mostly back to what it had been before and they made huge improvements in the non-combat games like the entertainer jobs.

In the end, it was not SOE that killed SWG. It was LucasArts that killed it because they didn't want competition to TOR. SOE just chose to close down when the renewal date came up instead of waiting to close when TOR launched.

SWG was still running, still being played, still getting content development and still making money. Pretty much the same as what happened to CoH, for what may turn out to be substantially similar reasons.

So, in the end, SOE may not be the company of anyone's dreams, but they would be a far cry from someone like EA. It might be that they would go the Matrix Online route and simply run the game and never make any more content for it other than simple things like costume bits. If they did take over the content development, we'd have to expect that with new people at the helm that Paragon City would take a new direction in its story.

All just speculation now, but I can think of worse endings for the game than ending up under the SOE umbrella.

So, here we are at last. It came a lot more suddenly than anyone could have expected.

I've been reading most of the threads the past few days and I've contributed to some of them. Rather than repeat myself or summarize what I've already said elsewhere, I stopped and thought about what statement I could make to the staff of Paragon Studios as a whole and to the community as well, that would express what the last eight years and more have meant.

In the end, what I want the entire staff of the studio to know is simply this:

Paragon City was not just a City of Heroes. It was a City of Dreams.

When you came to work each day and painted your art or rendered your textures or wrangled your bits you weren't just building a world. You were creating a place for dreams to come to life. Whatever color of the spectrum we preferred to live at, each of us players lived there because we could bring the stories and the dreams and adventures in our heads into existence in a way that could never happen in the mundane world. Paragon City and its neighbors were places where inspiration existed around every corner.

How many games are there where a single addition to your tookit provides an inspiration for a new story? Do Azerothians see a new sword and create a new character with its own backstory, history and identity just for that sword? Do Star Warriors re-roll their characters because a new Force power is a closer match to their dream than the original version of that character? Do Norrathian magicians carry five different outfits with a story and a justification for each one? Only in Paragon City could a player receive a new pair of boots or a new variation on an old job and find a new story waiting to leap out of his or her imagination to take advantage of those elements and use them as the foundation of yet another new dream.

Paragon City gave us all a way to experience our dreams and share the experience with like-minded dreamers. What's more, it gave many, many of us a place where we could live out our ideals in ways that we just couldn't do in the mundane world. Whether those ideals were power at all cost or selfless service and defense of the defenseless, we each had a place where, for a little while, we could be the actor at the center of our dreams and have fun doing it without judgement about whether those ideals were good, bad, corny, trite or any number of other adjectives that they might have been subject to outside of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.

It's true that we were demanding guests in your world, even unruly ones at times. We argued. We critiqued. We analyzed. We criticized. We judged. We disagreed. It's important that you understand, in the end, that this is because you were doing a *GOOD* job at being stewards of our dreams. People don't complain about the things that they are indifferent to. If Paragon City had really never amounted to anything more than "punching things in the face and looking good doing it" then nobody would ever have had anything but positive things to say about it. After all, there was never any shortage of things to punch or of clothes to accesorize our activities.

Your world was much more than a place to punch things in the face. It was a place where we brought our stories to life. If we were demanding it was only because we had so many more stories waiting to be born, if only we had just that much more. You had the job of pleasing hundreds of thousands; an impossible task. Yet, you climbed on your horses, set your lances, and tilted at the windmills anyway and in the process you made a place where even the most demanding could still find a place to dream their dreams even if their couldn't have all of their demands met.

Here's the final thing to take with you as you move on to the next chapter of your lives and careers: dreams never really die. Soon we'll all awaken from this collective dream of a City of Heroes and Villains for the final time. The dreams will continue with us, though, in our memories of the times we shared with others, or just of the fun we had on our own. Our characters will be there in our imaginations, the embodiment of our ideals, hopes and fears and we'll take them with us as we move on to other dreams and other worlds.

That is your gift to us, and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart.

Don't stop dreaming.

Scott Schultz aka Slickriptide

Actually, the indications are that the studio was blindsided by NCSoft just like the players were.

Traditionally, the studio would have been at Pax and held a meet and greet. Between the booth and social gathering, they would ordinarily give away some hundreds/thousands of costume power codes and such. They started the code giveaway on Thursday night before anyone could have known what was coming down on Friday morning (presumably).

I'd guess that the code giveaway was a planned event meant to take the place of the normal Pax codes giveaway, as a similar goodwill gesture as the Pax and other trade show giveaways have been.

It was just awful timing that it was put into effect the night before the hammer fell.

I remember putting on Power Slide for the first time and thinking how much I rocked to be surfing through the streets of the city.

I remember how the flag atop City Hall was originally unlit and a forumite at the time called Stateswoman pointed out that "flag rules" require that a flag which flies at night should be lit up. That was the progenitor of the many, many debates over the years between people who cared about details in the presentation of the game and people who thought the devs ought to stick to important tasks, or that it was "just a game, LOL", and the nitpickers should just chill out and play, *laugh*.

I remember Paragon Studios (They were Cryptic Studios back then) watching the debate quietly as it went back and forth, and then when Issue 1 launched, the flag had lights. If the flag debate was the progenitor of many story vs expediency and real world vs pretend world debates to come, that response was the progenitor of a long history of the studio listening to the players and responding to the things they asked for, even if the players didn't always get just what they thought they wanted. What mattered most was that they wanted to be heard and the studio always made it a point to let the players know that they were being heard, even if the players couldn't actually have whatever it was they were asking for.

I remember when weapon customization came and axe tankers got a fireman's axe and one of the rednames (I've forgotten which) posted that "this ought to make that Fire Man guy happy!" The idea that they followed the forums enough to recognize particular people who had consistently lobbied for certain things was an amusing and reassuring idea.

I remember writing a PM to BaBs (whose secret identity was Tik Tok, who knew?) about power customization. I am a software fellow by profession and I labored under the conceit that this gave me insights. He responded to my "couldn't you do this or that?" message with several paragraphs outlining details about the inner workings of game engine and showing that "no, we have this limitation and that limitation and we would have to di that other besides" and I read it and thought, "Wow, that makes perfect sense." That was when I realized that no matter how clever I thought I was, that sitting in my armchair I really just didn't have the first clue about what was actually clever or "easy to do" when it came to programming the game. He and other devs treated everyone's questions like that; with respect and candor, even when they sometimes didn't deserve it.

I remember writing my first AE arc and making it a convoluted time travel story and thinking that I was really pushing this story telling thing to its max. I signed up for Venture's critique thread and he played it and said "I didn't have the first clue what was going on." I asked him, "Really?" He said, "Really." I took a few figurative steps back and looked at it again and realized that he was correct. My clever little time travel story was all in my head. The bits out in the game engine didn't really accomplish what I had intended them to accomplish unless the player happened to be me. I learned then that writing missions is not nearly as easy we players imagine that job to be.

I remember taking my daughter to the Pax 2008 meet and greet, and putting faces to some familiar names and meeting a lot of great people. I remember how cool it was to be able to talk to Hero One and Positron in person and listen to their enthusiasm about the new-fangled mission architect that was coming out soon. I remember my daughter meeting Avatea and saying "THE Avatea?" and Avatea laughing at being treated like a celebrity.

I remember my teen (at the time) daughter having great times making silly themed characters and wandering around doing everything but leveling up. Chip off the old block in some ways, I suppose, heh.

I remember wandering invisibly around Croatoa and stopping on Tuatha island and just watching the NPC's. The Tuatha in that place were not monsters; they were a people with a culture celebrating life and their version of honor. That was literally breathtaking for me; the idea that these beast men were more than the beasts they appeared to be and that the game could depict that in a moving fashion. Later, touring through the far reaches of the zone and seeing the relationships between the Tuatha and the Red Caps just cemented for me the fact that this was something special. There was a whole story being told by the zone itself, independent of any particular mission. Even today, I still hold Croatoa up as an example of some of the game's finest work because of the way it employed what I'd call "environmental storytelling" in a way that I've not seen done in any other game.

I remember being part of a community that had it's ups, downs, friendships and conflicts. It has been one of the best experiences of my life to be a part of that community. I earned the respect of a few. I earned the ire of a few others. I laughed, argued, debated, and shared with many. There were times when I seldom logged into the game and my subscription fee was primarily to "play the forum game", as I put it. The community of this game is and has been the best of any other MMO I've ever played, and I have played many of them over the course of many years.

I made a few friends here who became real life friends. I made some connections that I hope will carry on elsewhere. There will be many that I was not "friends" with but who were old-timers like myself, who I will also miss just because I enjoyed seeing what they had to say and why.

It's been a long, strange trip, and we'll all move on to other things when it ends, but I will take some part of each of you all with me when I go. I thank you all for that, and I thank the folks at Paragon Studios who, for the last eight-plus years, gave us all a place for that to happen.

/em thumbsup; /em akimbo; /em salute;

Priceless!

What I find puzzling is the way that they are kicking everyone out the door.

When Auto Assault shut down, they kept the studio in charge until the last day.

When Tabula Rasa shut down, they didn't just keep the devs running it, they had a big end of the world event that fit the theme of the game perfectly and made for a truly legendary ending.

With City of Heroes, they shuttered the studio and are, apparently, putting the game on bare maintenance until a pre-ordained shutoff date. At this moment, at least, it looks like we won't even get Issue 24, let alone any kind of an end of the world final battle.

It feels like someone deliberately went out of their way to kill the game, not just shut it down for performance reasons.

If they were letting them go out the way that Tabula Rasa went out then I would almost certainly be here until lights out.

Judging by today's events, that's not going to be the case. I'll probably withhold judgement until I see how the next week plays out, though.

If it's just "play the game until they flip the power switch" then I'll probably move on sooner rather than later.

Hi, Everybody! <<Hi, Slick!>>

My name is Scott Schultz and when I'm not busy nitpicking this or that about the game, I'm a one-man IT shop for a small publishing company in the employment field.



And yeah, that Ultimus is a tough act to follow. Whodathunkit???

I guess I'll be heading to The Secret World. Guild Wars 2 seemed like a no-brainer before this, but now... I don't know.