Happy Halloween everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of the Wayback Wednesday recap. This past week has been a bit of a mixed bag, with ghosts, goblins, and Frankenstorms, oh my! Last week on Wayback we played City of Heroes. City of Heroes was developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCSoft. Since 2007 Paragon Studios has been the developer for CoH. Earlier this summer NCSoft announced that CoH would cease operations on November 30th, 2012 and they shut down Paragon Studios. It was with this information in hand that I decided to pay one last homage to CoH and take to the streets of Paragon City.
I'd be a phony if I told you that I played City of Heroes on a regular basis. The truth is I did not; however, it is a MMO that I very much respected and appreciated for what it was. Who hasn’t ever wanted to be a superhero as a kid? City of Heroes made that dream a virtual reality for many people over the past 8 years. Maybe you dreamed of being Magneto to someone else's Professor X instead? They had you covered there also. With City of Villains it was just as viable to be a bad guy as it was to be a good one.
Since release CoH has had twenty three content updates which they dubbed issues. Over the past year I was twice fortunate enough to sit down with the team at Paragon Studios and stream sneak peeks at issue 23 which contained the Magisterium Incarnate raid (Magisterium Incarnate Trial Playthrough) and the Summer Spectacular (Summer Spectacular). While the Magisterium could be called just another raid, the summer event was anything but just another seasonal event. This event was designed to place your character inside of the most daring scenes from summer blockbuster movies. It was a genius idea and executed very well. Also some of the player submitted movie posters were epic.
It is always a sad moment to see any game's sunset and I bid City of Heroes a fond farewell. If you have a CoH account you can continue to play the game for free until the end of November. There have been several in game celebrations for CoH since the announcement of its closure and if you are active on twitter you can follow the #SaveCoH to find additional details for further events over the next month. Normally at this point I would provide a link to last week's stream but it would appear the video is lost in the ether. I blame Sandy.
Tonight, since it is Halloween and I'll be taking my kids Trick or Treating, there will not be a Wayback Wednesday. Instead I will stream The Secret World sometime late at night. It just feels more appropriate. Tomorrow at 8pm eastern I will have a live stream interview and sneak peek at DDO's upcoming 16th content update, The Netherese Legacy. You can watch all the action live at http://www.mmorpg.com/streams.cfm; unless the host takes another vacation and then you can find us at the backup location of http://www.twitch.tv/mmorpgcom. If you have any stories about City of Heroes that you would like to share please leave them in the comments below. You can also friend me on Facebook or harass me on Twitter.
On a final note, congratulations to Kai Schober and his new wife Jennifer, those of you regulars to Wayback Wednesday or those of you that are just Dark Age of Camelot fans, probably know Kai as DAoC's resident Community Manager. Last Friday, on a spur of the moment, the two of them decided to get married. This wedding took place in the middle of Mythic's Fairfax Virginia office. It is also worth mention that the Kai and Jennifer met in game while playing DAoC. You can see more of the story at Dark Age of Camelot's Facebook.
Want to know more about City of Heroes' closure?
- Read Mike's reflections on the game.
- Read NCsoft's response to Save CoH Movement.
- Read Paragon Studios' Sunset FAQ.
