City of Heroes on Steam with Achievements & Purchasable Starter/Vanity Item Packs

That would be pretty cool, huh?

Don't forget the cross promotional with Team Fortress 2!

-Soldier gets Recluse's Helmet and the Dominion of Arachnos backpack secondary. It would jut be a reskin of the buff banner that's made to look like Recluse's back legs all folded up, they all flip out while the mini-crit buff is active.

-Heavy Weapons Guy gets Statesman's masks and "The Hammers of Justice" which would be KGB reskins as just Statesman's red gloves.

-Pyro gets Preat Penelope Yin's Backpack and face details, wearing them activates Pyro Vision mode.

-Scout gets Neuron's Backpack and 'goggles', also a special reskin of BONK that looks like the Elude Icon and the use animation has Scout do the "fist to the sky/Call to justice" animation.

-Spy gains Mako's Claws (Knife reskin)

-Demoman gets Scirocco's Sword. (eyelander Reskin)

-Medic gains "Dark Watcher" coat.

-Engineer gets Anti-Matter (BLU)/Positron (RED) helmet. Gains special taunt kill "Anti-Matter Pulse" that overrides any of his weapon taunts.

-Sniper gets Manticore's bow (Huntsman reskin) and Chimera (BLU)/Manticore (RED) hat.

-All classes get a cape misc detail.

What does city of get in return?

Well, Beam rifle, assault rifle, mercs, robotics, dual pistols, and Arachnos soldiers will be getting a lot of new customizations. Oh, and hats, we'll get a lot of new hats.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Personally, I dislike Steam. But wasn't CoH available through the service back before it had to be run from the NCSoft Launcher?

Personally, I dislike Steam. But wasn't CoH available through the service back before it had to be run from the NCSoft Launcher?

CoX players hate Steam, got it.

Well, not all CoX players--I have plenty of fellow CoX players on my Steam friends list. I have been using Steam for a couple of years now. It has made it so easy to keep track of my games and updates (and saved games across computers, go cloud!), and team up with friends, and yeah, I look forward to earning achievements. But it's possible for Steam to simply sync up with an MMO's already-extant achievements/badges (as other games have shown), but I don't expect that minor detail to change anyone's mind here.

A couple of friends have claimed that Steam wreaked various forms of havoc on their PCs, but I've used it across three systems now with no such problems, along with many other people I know (and both of those friends were in the habit of pirating games instead of paying for them when they complained the loudest about Steam--wonder if that had anything to do with it? )

I disliked the system for a myriad of reasons, though I did use it briefly awhile back (as I recall, it was the only avenue to play a certain game I was interested in at the time). But putting aside false positives and resolving program conflicts and the impracticality of having to be online to play some offline games, I believe the main reason I started boycotting it was due to it not playing nice with my programmable gamepad.

Yeah, Steam achievements are pretty pointless other than self ego-stroking. Steam exclusive vanity items? Heck no!

I had quit CoH to save money to buy a house, but Steam lured me back when they had Going Rogue on sale for $5. Later on the NCSoft Launcher came along and the Steam engine seemed to have been removed from the loop, though my screenshots still go to a Steam directory....
Anyway, I do like Steam.

I have no problem with Steam being used to help spread CoH.

Steam is garbage, please no. Enough great games are already locked behind Valve's hat-ridden RTM nightmare. Don't add another.

Honest question: what would Steam bring to a MMO?

There's no savegame files. All character data is stored serverside. The friends list is in game. The client is free to download and at least for mac side you can just drag and drop the package to move it to another computer. (Now if I could just figure what's causing the fans to fire up when D3 and WoW don't trigger them at all...)

Bindfiles and costumes are about the only thing I can see a synching service being useful for.

It would bring access to what is rapidly approaching five million concurrent users a day. In addition to an initial jolt of interest from offering some "discounted" ~$10 starter bundle thing, they'd then have access to future exposure upon the release of content packs or through steam's extremely frequent sales. The most obvious issue is that CoH doesn't really do "expansions" anymore and they went pretty far out of their way to ensure the only thing you could really sell externally to the in-game store would be bundles of points. That's the main reason why I would be surprised to see CoH reappear on steam. Stranger things have happened, though, and steam's free to play selection seems to be burgeoning (though mainly with truly awful looking purpose-built cash grabs).

I don't see how using other openings to get the game to new players would be bad?

Nal, that is entirely, 100% false. Valve has absolutely no control over the content of anything carried on steam apart from their right to remove a product entirely at their discretion. Neither do they "siphon off in-game purchases." They would get a ~30% cut from the sales of the City of Heroes Starter Pack. They would get nothing from in-game sales. I suspect you believe that due to EA's bizarre press release flailings when they were being asked why they removed most of their games from steam to coincide with the EA store's rebranding; you might want to read a bit more on that because, shockingly, it turned out EA were full of it.

The only real way they'd make money in the absence of Going Rogue-style expansions would be from users purchasing a new-accounts-only bundle or from DLC packs along the lines of the old Super Boosters. That's why I think it'd be unlikely that either NCSoft or Valve would be terribly interested in such a partnership: the game has moved away from that DLC model. Without either a trickle of small releases like that to periodically generate interest or a "full version" to tantalizingly discount there just isn't a lot in it for anyone.