Paragon Studios is working on a new MMO

I didn't mean to necessarily imply you were one of those people. I'm sorry if it sounded like that.

I was merely saying that every time a "CoH 2" comes up in discussion, there are always people who go "with all the content added, we're already playing CoH 2 (or 1.75 or whatever)!" or "CoH 2 will split the player base because it happened in [insert defunct fantasy MMO here]" or "I don't wanna give up everything I have now in CoH".

Those people don't seem to understand the vast majority of the public doesn't see the game as anything other than an eight year old title no matter what is added, a split playerbase is better than no playerbase and that when the game shuts down, which is an inevitability, they lose all their stuff anyways.


I honestly think 5-6 years down the line to start making a game that should come out 2-3 years after that is way past the point of no return. The writing is on the wall. They're shutting peripheral services down now. We know they're dividing focus internally on another IP and production. If a sequel doesn't happen soon I doubt it is ever going to happen, and that's the end of CoH.


It's all down to opinion, anyways. Nothing a few people on the forum say will influence them to do something they can't or don't want to do.


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Oh, come on. You cannot make that claim on that basis, unless you want to come out and say that you think Zwillinger's explanation for their reasoning was a flat-out lie. He gave perfectly clear explanations about how they don't have the in-house resources to maintain the regionalization of the game's text.

You're inferring that they therefore had to ditch them this because they're throwing ballast overboard to remain afloat. Sure, that's possible. Alternative explanations are that they couldn't justify the expense that it was incurring in time (or the cost of hiring someone to do it better) for the number of players those servers had. Zwil made it clear - those servers have never been big, and while PS was hoping F2P would make them bigger (thereby justifying the ongoing regionlization), that didn't happen. You can think something is a poor investment without needing the money you're spending on it to stay afloat.

I'll tell you what I see. I see my home server of Justice more populous in I22 than it's been in two issues. I saw so many multiple large-scale events going on this past Sunday evening that it was hard to form a TF at the same time, not because people weren't online, but because they were all busy taking part in pre-planned events. I see people who had left the game in I20 coming back to play on premium accounts and spending money, even if a small amount on micro-transactions.

Is any of this going to turn around the game's downward trending income? I don't know. We'll probably get our first clear indication of that (as clear as they ever are) in the next quarterly results report from NCSoft.

All things come to an end, and if CoH abruptly died tomorrow, it would have had an excellent run in my opinion. But I don't think the writing on the wall is as large or clear as you seem to think, and I certainly don't think we can assume that what's happening with the German and French clients is writ large there.

Not a concrete statement of fact.

You are right, they should get started soon if there is going to be a sequel.

Neg. That reference was up on his Linkedin page several months before the unfortunate event when he left Paragon. It was a Paragon studios project.

If I get curious enough I'll ask him about it then. I likely won't get curious enough as it isn't something I consider that important now.

I know Auto Assault (his previous game) was DX 9c so if it specifically said DX11 I'm unaware of what it was.

As for ClawsAndEffect confirming that he was working on Neverwinter, I knew the name of the game but didn't have it on the tip of my tongue to put it in my post.

Go tell that to Carbine Studios. They've been working on Wildstar since 2005.

I have NO IDEA what you're talking about@!

=P

Bad Assumption #1: they're working on another IP. They've publicly stated that they're working on a new project. They have also stated that when Paragon Studios launched, it would be dedicated to the City of Heroes franchise. These statements are not necessarily contradictory. There's nothing saying that the new project doesn't fall within the "City of..." franchise.

Bad Assumption #2: They haven't been working on something right now. As noted, the months preceding BaBs' linkedIn page his (and 1 or 2 other people released during that time) had noted that he was working on a DirectX11 next-gen MMO title. It could be that they had alpha teams testing concepts that never panned out or it could have been something in early production. It could be that the project was terminated and the team released, or it could still exist and change direction.

Bad Assumption #3: Making a new product follows the same production schedule and timetable as making a new IP. Don't get me wrong- it's going to be a long process, but much of the lore is established for the IP, many of the design goals have been hashed out through the "if we could do it over" after-action-reviews. They'll have thought and rethought many concepts during regular production that can be channeled over for 2.0 consideration. The design process will be much more streamlined in some places and much more problematic in others.

Heck, they might be looking at mitigating costs by utilizing code from their sister studios. Why develop an updated mapserv, chatserv, or authentication system if one made with modern coding standards was made for GW2 or Wildstar? In that case, maybe GW2's long-delayed development had delayed critical start points in CoH2's own planning...

All of these can accelerate development.

Bad Assumption #4: We do not have ANY understanding on what the timetable should be for an MMO sequel.
Really. How many have there been? Is there even enough to determine what a "best practice" is?

(Bad Assumption #5: Not made by Johnny_Butane, but by others in this thread: There's also nothing stating that said project was necessarily an MMO or a PC game for that matter. While I posted my iPad comment in jest, this IS a scary time for any studio to try a multimillion-dollar PC title. PC sales are flat and PCs that would handle a high-end DirectX11 title well are not entering the market fast enough to match the growing costs of developing these high-end titles. You may want to mitigate costs by developing cross-platform, lowering system requirements so it works across a wider array of PCs, or keep your IP alive by developing products with your IP in alternate markets until things seem less stormy.)

CoH is tailor made for one of those Facebook/App type 'farmville/mafia wars' sort of games.

And I read somewhere recently that smartphone sales eclipsed computer sales for the first time this year....a savvy developer would seem to be well served by diversifying into a large market segment with a tremendous potential for growth.

In other words, by George, I think Chase is onto something here!

Yeah, I was rather surprised to see it listed that way, personally, as alpha teams like that are usually tightly NDA-driven, ( I'm told: my closest eqivalent project was also DoD related so the NDA I was under included prison time... so I might just be overly-sensitive to such things). I consider it just a scrap of evidence for us conspiracy-theorists to salivate over and sometimes suspect that some people intentionally put out red herrings to see how much of a frenzy they can put us in.

If you do ask, say "Hi" for me

In the interest of full-disclosure on the accuracy of my prophecies, so many years ago, I was caught saying something like this at a local gaming shop:

"The lore is razor thin and poorly contrived to cater to the original game's RTS mechanics. Sure, that game was well-done, and what WAS there was cleverly-presented, but the world itself is a third-rate D&D clone, so who'd really want to play in a World of "Warcraft"?

That IP is already in development by the same folks that did the BSG MMO.

reminds me of the comic store guy years ago who gave me an impassioned soliloquy on how the DVD was doomed and would NEVER replace the Laserdisc..... =P

Well if its not CoH2, then I doubt I'll be interested. I've tried enough MMOs and seen them all come and go to know the only one that has any real staying power for me is this one. And I say that openly acknowledging that I tried and dropped WoW after a month of gameplay (when Lich King was all the rage). To date, CoH is the only MMO game out of 8 I've tried that i'm still playing and I'm now going on my eighth year here.

MMOs are becoming stale because they focus too much on the IP and not the player or their personal influence on the game. CoH is still the only one that gets it right. So if they're not working on CoH2, i'm going to be highly prejudiced against trying something new.

This.

I gots the agreeance. I've tried them all, too, and I keep coming back here. Even the things I dislike about this game aren't enough to keep me away.

I don't know about "highly prejudiced" but a game that is set in either a faux medieval realm or a post-apocalyptic wasteland is going to receive an instant "REJECTED" stamp from me, no matter its pedigree.

Facebook mostly. At least for me.

I don't recall seeing an announcement, but I could be wrong.

I think where I saw it was in one of Arcanaville's posts, but again, I could be wrong.

Hopefully someone will correct me if my memory is failing me. Today hasn't been a good day and it isn't getting much better.

A sequel is not going to happen. One: they've looked at doing a sequel before, in fact at least twice before, and decided it wasn't in the cards. Two: Paragon Studios isn't going to work on three games at once, and the "other" game is unlikely to be complete vapor with both Second Measure and Television going to work on it. In fact, I would imagine that neither of them would take the job if it wasn't a definite thing. Nothing in life is certain, least of all game development projects, but I believe those two signing on means the project crossed the credibility threshold.


Now, as to people saying the game is nearing its end, its been nearing its end from the moment it launched. What no one knows, and so far everyone has gotten wrong, is at what point "closer" becomes "close." We're three years past the point when people thought we only had a year or two left, and five years past the point when people thought we would only be in maintenance mode in just a couple years.

Anything is possible, but if NCSoft was stupid enough to sell lifetime subscriptions tomorrow, I would be the first one in line to buy one. I pay $143.40 for a year's subscription. If the lifetime sub cost $400 I would consider it a bulk savings and buy one for each VIP accounts I have. I would bet double that much with anyone who wanted to bet I wouldn't make my money back.

One day I'll probably be wrong. But if everyone who pretended to know what the future of this game was, was willing to bet real money on their failure mode predictions I would already have won enough to retire, and I'd be making this bet with the house's money.

Also, no one's shutting down anything until I get the last of the Master badges.

I've been jousting with people yelling THE END IS NEAR! in my face since shortly after I registered on these forums.

Sniffing around on-line I found one of those expatriate forums & was greatly amused by a thread circa BaB's exit from the game where a gaggle of former local luminaries were GUARANTEEING that this was THE END of blah blah blah.

Particularly, it has survived wave after wave of games that were DEFINITELY going to kill it off.

I dunno, the place still seems pretty lively to me. =P