Savior spelled = SOE?

To all the SOE naysayers, SOE has received far more hate over SWG than it deserves. Just as LucasArts was responsible for the final demise of the game, don't think they were any less involved in the NGE.

That said, the NGE WAS a disaster when it came out. The timing was bad, the lack of warning was bad, and the execution was bad. And yes, it slaughtered the old class system. But in the long run, the NGE turned out to be a pretty fun incarnation. But you'd never know it from version 1.0. A lot of it wasn't even working properly. And then slowly some pre-NGE features were brought back, and we got a pretty interesting hybrid of a game. And SWG's population was actually on the rise before the shutdown was announced. And the game was still being developed, even on its skeleton crew of a dev team, and new features were still being planned.

If SOE adopts CoX, don't sell them short. Most of the problems SWG had were not due to bad development. It was due to the fact that SOE didn't own the IP, which gave Lucas the freedom to play backseat driver. BOTH of the expansions that SWG got, were nothing more than promotions for Episode 2 & 3, which didn't even take place in the SWG era. Countless art and dev hours, to sell a franchise that the players were already invested in. How much of that time could've been put to fixing what was broken in the CU/pre-CU? Or doing an expansion that would've been best for the GAME, rather than promotions for something unrelated?

SWG launched just before Lucas decided that the Galactic Civil War was old-hat, and everything Star Wars now needs to be entirely about Jedi with DragonballZ powers in order to appease the target audience age for Star Wars, which has mysteriously changed from "everyone" to "K-16."

Things like this are why City of Heroes (or a sequel to it) is the only Superhero MMO I will ever play. Anything DC or Marvel ever licenses out to other companies is in danger of the same kind of garbage that SWG got dragged through. It also was nice in CoX that I didn't need to feel like I had to be a hardcore comic book reader for 30 years before I started playing in order to grasp the nature of the world I was in.

If the rumor is true, GO SOE.

Though even if what they're offering is GOOD, it doesn't mean NC will sell. Sometimes companies have a way of preferring to let IP's die rather than sell them, because years down the road, if the new company does an even better job with the IP, they don't want to have to deal with the ego-bruise.

Selling would be a wise choice for them, if they don't sell NCsoft is risking the very bad publicity they are generating in the US, Europe, Australia, etc from sticking instead of being a small bump in the road. If they sell we'll be (mostly) appeased and will stop making waves, if they don't they've alienated THOUSANDS of customers...its not the best business move to hold. Also, as for the programmers, I'd imagine at this point this project is like their child. Some will relocate, but others, given the chance, would run back to the project.

I don't get how they would benefit by sitting on it unless they were keeping the option for a CoH 2*. The property isn't worth much w/o a game - there is no merchandising, programming (CoH: The Movie!), etc. I don't think competition is a concern if they are indeed focusing on the Asian market rather than the NA one as it has already been demonstrated that CoH failed to catch on in the Asian market.


* The only thing I can't guess on is the ablility to write off the acquisition of CoH as a complete loss. I don't know the details of the sale (maybe someone here does?), and if the cost of the IP itself could be isolated. I would think though that the value of the IP and the loss from closing the studio would be distinct. But if someone is willing to make an offer on the IP, I don't know how they could they could write off the IP as a total loss.