City of Heroes 2 Coming Soon

I think the point he was trying to make was that the game, although making great strides, is simple supported by loyal fans and poor competition. We don't generate much in the way of a steady stream of new players out side of the new issue seasons. While this game may be niche, the comic-theme currently is more and more mainstream and at some point this game should be more representative of that changing view.

A million times THIS!

Continue the stroking and twirling, Z.

(Did that sound bad or was that just me? Probably just me...)

No, that sounded pretty bad.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Coming Soon(tm): Planet of Heroes - "City of Heroes IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!"

Hey I can dream, right?

I'm saying that I hope that Paragon keeps CoH1 running forever, even after CoH2 comes out, but I don't feel like CoH by itself is positioned to sustain it's subscribers with all of the new next gen games coming down the road. CoH dodged 2 bullets with Champions and DCUO, and we are very, very lucky for that, but do I think CoH can maintain an acceptable market share after GQ2, Marvel Online, The Old Republic, DCUO and a free-to-play Champions? I certainly hope it can, but I would rather see CoH1's existence secured with a modern, next-gen big brother blocking the big stuff.

The free-to-play model would then allow the die-hard fans a chance to support their game where it really counts (at the cash shop), while gracefully acknowledging it's age and engine limitation in the marketplace, and introducing tons of new players to Paragon City.

Historically, yes, sequels fail, but I think that's more due to execution than anything else. In all truth, they could probably simply remake CoH1 on a new engine and have a success on their hands.

That's nice, but since you opened with: i still am asking:
Well?

I couldn't have said it better myself. We're dodging a lot of bullets here because of the superiority of CoH product and brand, and the poor performance of the competition... but that can't last forever.

I think Planet of Heroes is a great name! I started another thread about the possible name for a sequel if they decide against naming it CoH2, you should add that one!

That's no moon...it's a space station...

It's just a hunch, but I'm curious what you think the job postings mean. Care to speculate?

It means they're working on something and need more people. It *certainly* doesn't mean a new game next year (*WAY* too short a turn around time for a MMO...even Cryptic's post-CoH games took 2, and we all know how those launched), nor does it imply that this game is going F2P.

If you'd worded your OP more along the lines of "They posted this and I *think* it means (insert wild speculations here)" instead of stating it in absolutes, you would have had less people challenging your post. Barring that, it would probably have helped if you'd simply acknowledged your OP as speculation when challenged.

Except that, as far as I know, no one has ever done that.

It could be done but more questions:

1. How much Bandwidth usage? CoH is pretty light now. I use up 100MB per 4 hours of game play. A new version would probably use require more bandwidth...200MB?
2. How large are the Updates? I will not tolerate 9-15 GB every week. How will they deal with this? I stopped playing DCUO because of this reason.
3. What size Video Cards?
4. New zones or higher rez old ones? Personally, I'd like CoH2 to be an expansion of the game. Would the devs spend time moving content from 32bit to 64bit or creating both?
5. Finally, how much per month?

I disagree with this premise. I really do think that City of Heroes can compete with the new MMOs coming out, and there's a simple reason why: We have a seven-year head start on them. You have to consider that these games aren't competing with the City of Heroes of 2004; they're competing with the City of Heroes of 2011/-12/-?, which includes two massive upgrades (City of Villains and Going Rogue), plus 20 large patches that have, over the course of time, dramatically improved the game's quality of life and game mechanics.

We've also seen a significant improvement in the graphics engine to handle Ultra Mode. We've seen three zone "revamps," The Hollows, Faultline, an Rikti Crash Site/War Zone, which the devs point out are actually complete zone rebuilds, not mere tweaks here and there. We've seen too many bug fix cycles and game balancing tweaks to mention. We've seen incremental as well as massive addition of content. We've got an endgame system now that is transitioning from stable to mature. By the time any of these games launch, we'll have Issue 21, probably Issue 22, maybe even an Issue 23 and Issue 24 with god (aka "Positron and War Witch") only knows what new improvements and content.

You say that we are very, very lucky in that the competition hasn't been much, well, competition. I'm telling you, it's not luck. Creating a new 2004 version of City of Heroes is very time-consuming and expensive. It took the development team at the time several years to even get that far. Creating a new 2011 version of City of Heroes is prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, which is why the other games we have on the market so far kind of suck in comparison with what we have today. It's also why, while it's possible that Paragon Studios is working on a CoH2, I really kind of doubt it.

If there is a CoH2-ish project in the works, I suspect it's more along the lines of a massive update (note: not a total rewrite) in what the devs continually refer to as the "tech"--the graphics and mechanics engine that drives CoH--and I doubt it will be released as a new game. The simple fact of the matter is that it would kind of suck having the community split between two games, even if there were some cross-over zones and such. No, I think it would be more in line with introducing new features that we've been hounding them for but that they continually say it would take a lot of resources to provide; stuff like weather, animal models, dynamic water effects, and new stuff that we haven't asked for that will probably blow our minds.

One thing that I've noticed is that sometimes people get in this mode of thinking that the game must be dying because there aren't any boxes on store shelves. Personally, I think shelf space is a very poor indicator of a game's status, as more and more people aren't buying games off of store shelves any more. I know I don't; I only buy stuff off of online stores like Amazon.com (mostly for console games) and off of game services such as Steam (mostly for PC games). Today, marketing isn't so much about getting your game in Wal-Mart as it is about getting ads in front of users on the Internet, news and reviews hitting Slashdot, people posting links and "likes" and videos on sites like Facebook, placed in other media, and into alternative channels such as merchandise, mobile apps, etc. (the latter of which I'll admit Paragon Studios is remarkably poor at, but hopefully with plans to improve).

Anyway, that's my CoH 2¢'s worth. For those that keep jumping on Robot's case, please stop. Speculation is fun and it will always go on, and I'm pretty sure everyone is aware that that is all these posts are--speculation. Believe it or not, it's also useful in that the devs do read these threads. I'm pretty sure that some of them have seen posts and said, "You know, that would be pretty cool and it wouldn't be that hard to implement, I think I'll bring it up at the next meeting." By the same token, I'm also pretty sure they've seen some and said, "Man, they are SO off, that's funny."

Pretty much this. A posting for jobs working on a new MMO generally means it's at a minimum two years from release. Yes, Cryptic has done approximately two year turnarounds, but that was by modifying a game engine they already had, and so far the results of that approach haven't been pretty.

A City of Heroes 2 sequel would require using a new game engine. Even if most of it was done by licensing another company's engine it would still require extensive work and the creation of all new art assets, all new storyline and mission writing, and a whole lot of other work. While i don't think it's impossible that CoH2 or CoH2.0 might be in the works i do think it would be at least two years before it was released. If it does happen sooner (or even at all) i would be ecstatic, but i'm not going to claim it's a sure thing until i see something more than what we've seen so far.

Short version: In my opinion, you have a mistaken vision of both City of Heroe's position in the gaming world and a mistaken idea of what keeps gamers playing any particular game.

Long version:

My first real introduction to Penny Arcade happened because I was into my third year of Everquest and happened to be reading the EQ forum. Some random person had started up a thread about Dark Age of Camelot and how EQ was doomed. Note that this fellow and some of his supporters weren't just saying that EQ might lose some subscribers. They were saying "LOL, put a fork in it, it's done. It'll be shut down with a few months."

The reason wasn't even that Dark Age of Camelot was a better game that had just launched. It was that Penny Arcade had run a comic/blog saying that DAoC was a better game. The obvious conclusion these PA fanboys drew was that EQ was doomed and everyone ought to just acknowledge it and quit now.

I remember asking myself "Who the smeg is this Penny Arcade guy and what makes him so powerful that people just take his word for something as ludicrous as this claim that DAoC has already killed EQ before it's really even gotten started?"

Needless to say, when I finally found the comic and the website, I was more puzzled than enlightened. I'm a fan of PA nowadays, of course, but at the time it was merely bizarre.

As I mentioned above, I played EQ actively for three years and inactively for some time after that. I saw all of the doom and gloom. Every new game that was launched was going to destroy EQ and wipe it off the gaming map. DAoC. Anarchy Online. Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2. Anarchy Online 2. Mythica. Horizons. Earth & Beyond (EA, I still hate you over canceling E&B).

Vanguard was the truly amusing one. It was founded by Brad Templeton. It was going to be a return to the roots of what "originally made EQ great." It was going to be hard core. It was going to be fabulous. It was going to redefine what a MMO should be and set the world back on the path of righteousness.

When it launched it was already obsolete and irrelevant.

The plain truth of the matter was that every new game expanded the market a certain amount and Everquest's subscription numbers went UP every time one of them launched, instead of down.

EQ may not be the biggest gorilla in the zoo any more, but after more than a decade, it is still around and still profitable and still supplying just as much entertainment to its core subscriber base as it always has done. It does it with a graphics engine that would be considered deplorable by today's standards and with gameplay mechanics that fly directly in the face of what passes for generally accepted mechanics today. Hell, it's still nearly the only game at all where you actually SPEAK to a NPC in order to interact with it, instead of using pre-generated dialog trees.

I point out all of this archaic goodness inherent in Everquest in order to illustrate the fact that when a MMO has matured to the point that it is in a steady state subscription-wise, that it has reached the plateau where all of the subs are the people who are self-selected as being people who are happy with what the game offers.

Once you reach that plateau, you can maintain it pretty much forever, barring some kind of drastic change in the gaming scene. In EQ's case, it was World of Warcraft. However, even despite WoW, EQ is still alive, kicking, and profitable. Hell, even Anarchy Online is still alive and kicking after all of these years, for the same reasons.

City of Heroes has been at that plateau for a few years now. The game hovers right around 125k - 160k subscribers, depending on how recently a new issue or new expansion has been offered. That is plenty to support the game and to fund development of new features for it. It keeps that number up in the face of all competition, not because of good fortune that the competition is lackluster or incompetent, but because the people who play CoH enjoy playing CoH.

There's no need to create "CoH2" in that scenario. It won't "fix" anything unless, as Chase_Arcanum suggested, it replaces it entirely. All it will do is split the playerbase. While there are some players who have the inclination and the disposable income to subscribe to multiple MMO's, most players feel that they are fully committed at one subscription. They aren't going to subscribe to both, as was more than adequately demonstrated when City of Villains was launched as a "stand-alone" game with its own subscription fee.

All other considerations aside - The silliest notion in this whole line of speculation is that Paragon Studios has no ambitions to expand their offerings beyond the single niche that they now operate in and which is pretty thoroughly played out now. If Marvel ever successfully launches a MMO (and it sort of sounds like it will just be an adult version of Super Hero Squad Online) then the niche will be pretty well filled. All of those other games that were mentioned like The Old Republic and what-not are NOT a threat to City of Heroes. Not directly. They are in a different niche that is NOT well-filled. The people who make up the core audience here are not the core audience for those games, despite some overlap.

Looking at those job listings, I drew the same conclusions that someone upstream of here drew - These are all senior personnel, who are the top level of a new project that is in the very first stages of production. That means that you're looking at something that is a good four years away, at the earliest. That's not a CoH2. Especially if you believe for some weird reason that CoH is going to be six feet under at this time next year.

Whatever the game is, it will draw upon the lessons learned from CoH, but it will be unrelated to it. It certainly won't be a "next generation" CoH. It will be something that leads the development team in new directions and offers new challenges for them to overcome and define what a "next-gen" MMO actually means. Assuming, of course, that the project is even a MMO in the first place.

Basically, friend Robot, I feel that you are making a lot of speculation and a lot of baseless statements, which I really don't mind except for the vehemence with which you defend them, again completely with emotion and hyperbole and nothing at all in the way of evidence to support your opinions.

You mileage may vary, of course.

The future is not absolute but this is true. Things happen that you don't expect. DCUO for example, who would have imagined Sony would have a security breach? This will kill DCUO.

Adding praise to CoH, this game could still exist after a coh2. How? there will always be people who won't have advanced video cards...mobile phones, netbooks, tablets. Even more than that and I said this before...if they make a link to Portal Corp they can tie CoH 2 to Coh1 forever.

At the risk of being modded for off-topic conversation, this is the company that deliberately distributed malware on music CDs several years ago. Yes, I know, different arm of the company, but still the same company. I've had several very unpleasant experiences with Sony, and as a result, I haven't purchased any of their products in years and I've encouraged all of my friends and family to do the same. As a direct result, I do not have any account information on PSN or SoE and was not one of the millions of people affected.

In short, while I certainly don't wish what happened to Sony on anyone--a lot of innocent people have been hurt by this--it was something I felt was foreseeable given what I knew about the company.

I'm not saying all of this just to twist the knife in Sony's back, there's a relevant point to be made here. While I would never be so arrogant as to say that something similar could never happen to Paragon Studios or NCsoft, if anything, it seems to me that they sometimes go too far in being paranoid about security. Sometimes it has been frustrating, especially once when my roommate was locked out of her account for several days, but I have to grudgingly admit that I'd rather that they err in that direction than the other. I've never felt uncomfortable with them having my billing information or snippets of my personal data.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while some people would chalk up the likelihood that DCUO will fizzle out miserably compared to City of Heroes as an unfortunate consequence of some external factors beyond the game's control, I don't view this series of events as being determined by random chance. Even though it's not the ideal way to beat your competition with the side effect of a lot of people's personal information being lost, it is a legitimate way in which City of Heroes is run more competently than its competitors and I see it as a legitimate reason for why it is doing better in the marketplace.

I'll just add this comment. DCUO never had a chance. How do you play ball with a game that is 7 years old? Even if they never slept they'll never have enough content. When the game came, I asked my friend to timecard with me because I felt the game was going to be a console type not a serious PC game. This was the smartest decision I have made in my gaming life. None of my personal information was ever exposed and the game had such huge downloads, I could never play it on my time. CoH has figured some things out....lots still don't have broadband.

Mostly cuz a good chunk of the playerbase has already done a lot of that backlog of content

Good analogy, actually.
I have an old pair of jeans that I wear a lot. Sure, they're old and worn, and it bugs me that the pockets are too small to do anything useful, even to fit my hands into.
But they're comfy as hell. So I keep wearing them. I like 'em

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.