It was announced today, out of the blue, that City of Heroes is now going to close its doors.
The news, to me, was heartbreaking. This is a small MMO, it is an older MMO, but it is my favorite MMO.
There are rumors that it might be saved, but so far these are just rumors. They’ve been spread, to me, mostly by the hopeful folk on “Looking for Group” chat on Virtue. I wish for the best, but, things aren’t looking good.
I hope to play the game again in the next few months, and get as much fun as I can squeeze out of what’s remaining. I have a VIP subscription, but I have no idea if VIP-only content will actually be accessible past the end of the month considering billing’s been cancelled. I fear I might not even be able to access the premium content or premium power characters very soon.
For now, I still have access to all my old alt slots tonight. I took a spin on a few of them, and a lot of screenshots. Those are below the jump. They are posted quite large, so keep that in mind before proceeding.
First, this is my newest, and possibly last, Level 50 hero. I’ve had this character for years, but just finally got her to 50 at the recent Double XP weekend. Some people ask, “is that a Debbie Gibson reference?” Well, obviously. (By the way, happy birthday, Debbie, though it’ll be a belated by the time I get this post up.)
While I was taking a walk with her, I ran in to Ascendant. He’s trying to advertise a petition, I suppose. Well, good luck with that, dude.
This is Jayde Chameleon, my primary alt. The idea behind this character is, well, the game has regeneration, so, why not a mutant lizard? That makes sense.
Lizard skins were actually added into the game long after I’d already rolled Jayde up. Here’s “Jayde Classic” with her original hacked-together lizard look.
Jayde has a pretty good amount of badges. Well, maybe not, but this used to be an impressive count, back in the day.
This is Lady A. She’s a Gamemaster. That’s right. She is also an excellent Radiation Defender.
I then logged into a somewhat more-neglected character just to play a bit. She’s Bamboo Knight, a mutant schoolgirl swordswoman panda. Because I can, that’s why. Take that, WoW. She was actually rolled up a long time ago, when Dual Blades was a new powerset. I alt hop a lot, if you can’t tell by my full server list (and it’s not my only server).
After moving around for a bit, I caught a conversation on the chat frequencies from a player who wanted to do a Synapse TF. She said she’d just started her subscription, and hadn’t even had a chance to do a Task Force yet. That, to me, was a shame, so, I figured, I had nothing to lose.
There’s lots of screens of the Synapse TF on the internet. It’s some of the oldest unadulterated content in CoH. From a design standpoint, it shows its age a bit, with lots of repetitive “kill all in this instance” type missions. But it doesn’t take long for an efficient team to chew through it anyway. And it’s still good nostalgic fun.
The highlight of the TF, other than facing down the Clockwork King, is fighting his giant monster robot minion, Babbage. We made pretty quick work of him!
And here we are having a dramatic battle with the Clockwork King himself!
He has a really cool, interesting looking lair, for as old a map as it is.
It’s my own fault: these screenshots aren’t as good as they could be. I apparently had the ‘show UI’ still set to ‘on’ from when I was capping badge windows earlier, and some good bits are cropped out. But you can see the names of the toons I played with, if that’s interesting to you. Sorry to Lia, who is covered up a bit by my chat window here. I hope you also took a shot of your own perhaps. Anyway, they were a great team. The community on City of Heroes has always been welcoming, friendly, and just plain excellent.
Here’s another shot of the team kicking ass.
After completing the TF, I had picked up a couple levels, so, it was time to visit the old costume creator and update my look.
I made her a panda samurai.
That costume creator alone is still worth the price of admission. There’s some interesting newer Chinese-themed outfits, but, I never bought them, and purchasing is locked out now.
And I had completely forgotten that actual animal fur had been added, so I can make my panda even more panda-like in future costumes. Look, you can even make tiger striped fur! I just got another alt I wanna make… Aw, shoot.
Unless some kind of Hail Mary happens, sundown for City of Heroes is November 30.
You’ll be missed.
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