When City of Heroes shut down in November 2012 imagining that it would ever be back felt like a major dose of hopium, but not even a decade later, the game returned with the launch of City of Heroes: Homecoming in May 2019.
Its return wasn’t in an official capacity, Homecoming was a private server being run by a team of volunteers as we’ve seen with many private MMO servers over the years.
One key difference, however, is that the team involved had been in active talks with NCsoft to officially take over the return of City of Heroes. The team wanted security for City of Heroes instead of living in constant fear of a potentially inevitable cease-and-desist order from NCsoft. An agreement seemed like a distant dream for much of that time, but earlier this year the Homecoming team announced that it had come to an agreement with NCsoft to acquire the license to operate CoH.
The story behind that rollercoaster ride in pursuit of legitimacy is detailed in a report over at PC Gamer, revealing that both NCsoft and the Homecoming team were skeptical of this agreement ever becoming a reality. Fortunately, years of discussions and negotiations later, City of Heroes is back for good.
