City of Heroes is Back. (Maybe.)

A confession: I used to play MMORPGs back in the day. (If you don't know what that is, it stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. If you've heard of World of Warcraft-- still probably the best-known game of that genre-- then games that are like that.)

I played a pretty decent number of MMOs with varying degrees of dedication. The original EverQuest was my first and probably the one I put the most hours into, but I also played Dark Age of Camelot, EQ2, WoW, Wildstar, Horizons, The Secret World, Champions Online, and probably a couple of others I'm forgetting in my old age.

But one MMORPG stands above all the others in my memory, and that is a superhero-themed MMO named City of Heroes, which I played off-and-on from its beta in 2004 until it was announced that it was being shut down due to nonsensical corporate politics in late 2012. It was not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it was by far the most fun MMORPG I ever played. Perhaps even the most fun video game of any kind I ever played. CoH also had a great community, which made playing it that much more enjoyable, something that was-- and is-- very unusual for an MMO (and which has made getting into other MMOs harder, when I inevitably discover they have unbearably toxic communities *cough*WoW*cough*Wildstar*cough*). 

(To be fair, some other MMORPGs did have good communities also. The Secret World had a good community. But that may be partly because TSW went free-to-play the same month CoH shut down, and a huge chunk of Secret World players were CoH refugees for that reason.)

Anyway, at this point, City of Heroes has been shut down for longer than it was live, but it still has a large, nostalgic fan-base holding out hope for bringing it back nonetheless.

And that brings me to my reason for posting about all this today. It's back. The dream is alive! Yes, I am serious.

But how? Well, from what I understand, shortly after the shutdown in 2012, an unknown CoH dev secretly (and very illegally) turned over the game's server-side binaries to some guy who then secretly worked on reverse engineering them these past seven years. And now the cat's out of the bag-- the stolen and reverse-engineered server-side code has been leaked, "out there" in the wild. All this time, it was said that without the server-side code there would never be any way to reverse engineer CoH since so much of that game was handled server-side (at least, compared to MMOs of the same era, e.g. WoW, which tended to rely more than CoH did on client-side code, making reverse engineering it easier.) That is the reason people stated for why it was possible to have rogue "community servers" of games like WoW and EQ1, but that such would never be the case for CoH. With the leak of CoH's server-side code though, everything has changed.

And indeed, now there is a playable CoH community server up. Its legal status, etc, is still up in the air (as one might expect), but who cares? Additionally, there's been an embarrassing amount of publicly aired personal drama surrounding the people involved the effort, but again: what difference does that make to me? City of Heroes was my favorite video game, and I truly thought I'd never get to play it again. But now I can. I'm not going to sweat the legal niceties, nor the petty drama. I'm going to log into City of Heroes and "arrest" bad guys by blasting them with my super-powers, and I ain't even sorry.

Note: I do realize that very likely no one among this blog's usual visitors cares anything whatsoever about City of Heroes. It is definitely dated-- it did not boast top-of-the-line graphics even by the standards of 2004, let alone 2019. But it was-- and still is-- a lot of fun to play. It is hard to point to any one thing that makes it so, but in general, you just feel really powerful in CoH even from the beginning, compared to other MMOs, where you typically feel very weak and afraid haha. Despite that, I just can't remain silent about the return of CoH-- to me, this is huge. And needless to say, anyone reading this is, of course, welcome to check it out, even if they never played it back in the day. *Insert caveat here that doing so may or may not be entirely legal, so do so at your own risk, etc*