Not just a City of Heroes...
By
Megajoule,
Posted on: 2012-09-02 15:36 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Well said!
Thelonious Monk
Very, very well-said.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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