Morning Folks! I am technically in holiday mode this morning and as a result, getting up and around far later than normal. However, I decided to go ahead and make a post given that I had something I wanted to talk about. Over the weekend we recorded our podcast as normal, and one of the subjects we discussed was the recent news about the City of Heroes Homecoming server officially getting a license from NC Soft… and thereby gaining the legitimacy that no emulator server project has gained to date. This made me and several other members of the podcast nostalgic about this game, and as a result Sunday morning I got everything up and running and took my first steps into Paragon City since 2020. We are rolling on the Everlasting server and I believe my handle is @Belghast so if you find your way over there say hello.
One of the most interesting things about being back in City of Heroes, is this game is a snapshot of what the evolution of an MMORPG looked like before the world changed. This was the game that me and my circle of friends were playing when we all started getting into the World of Warcraft beta process. This was the last game we played before that title stole our attention for the next several years. After the launch of World of Warcraft, the formula for what an MMORPG was changed forever to shift to adapt to what that game was doing. However, in City of Heroes you can see the slow steady progress of what came before culminating in this exceptionally polished product. This was the best the genre had to offer and had so many ideas that were well ahead of their time like Mentoring and Bolstering to raise or lower the character level to make sure that you could always group with your friends. It also had these amazing open area “raid” zones that were way too tough to tackle alone, but if you gathered up a group of friends you could run around and fight baddies for hours.
The mission structure was also revolutionary for the time. Instead of a single quest… you had chains of quests that were related and felt like you were investigating a case. You might start with tracking down clues by killing baddies in the open world, which would then lead you to a hideout… and eventually maybe even to take you to the lair of a boss for that faction before eventually wrapping up that chain and leading you to a new contact. It isn’t that quests did not exist before, or even quest chains… but the entire experience had more narrative cohesion. You were a hero and you were fighting back against the evils that sought to decimate this fair city. On top of that these instanced areas required strategy to get through them… you might have to learn how to work your way through a “pulling puzzle” and figure out which enemies you could single pull to ultimately lower the amount of damage you were going to take when you eventually had to charge forth out of the shadows.
Another aspect of the game that was somewhat revolutionary is that it had some proper build craft. Every level you either got to choose a new ability or add sockets to your existing abilities… this allowed the player to pick and choose how to evolve their character over time. For example I am playing a version of what I played at launch… the Katana/Regeneration Scrapper each of those aspects dictating what type of build I can craft with it. You chose a primary power pool, a secondary power pool, and a base class that dictated what your ultimate role in combat would be. I remember this being an extremely solo-friendly character back in the day, and I managed to dig up a build that I am loosely following from the now long-defunct official forums.
I am not sure if I am just drifting by on a wave of nostalgia, or if this game is far better than I remember it being. So many aspects of combat from the superb sound design to the gravity of your attacks… make combat feel more “meaty” for lack of a better term as opposed to a lot of other hotbar combat games. World of Warcraft really gets a lot of credit for making combat feel immediate and visceral… but City of Heroes was doing this as well. The class design also stems from an era before the holy trinity of DPS, Healer, and Tank… and includes a lot of crowd control and pulling mechanics to add more strategy to approaching every combat puzzle. I remember I used to have an ability called “Teleport Other” I believe, that would allow me to yoink a single mob out of a pack and silently pull them over to me. That way I could whittle down the strongest member of a pack making it a bit easier for when I pulled everything else.
I only made it to level eleven yesterday, but I had way more fun than I was expecting to. Legitimately City of Heroes is a better game than even my rose colored vision seemed to remember. There have been a number of times on the podcast where we have wondered what MMORPGs would look like if World of Warcraft had not been the runaway generational success that it was. I think playing City of Heroes gives you a pretty decent idea of what a best-in-breed game looked like from that time. I remember at the time it legitimately was one of the best-selling games and was breaking records… that only got eclipsed in scale by the launch of World of Warcraft. Somewhere around here I still have the comic books that we used to get in the mail from our paid subscription.
If this post made the nostalgia well up inside of you like the podcast did for me this weekend, I am thankful to say that the process of getting everything up and running is straightforward. As someone who has jumped through some nonsense hoops before to play on emulated servers… this is as simple as setting up an account on the Homecoming forums, setting an in-game password, and then downloading the installer. Because this is an older game, the total footprint is about 5 gb which should not be an awful download from a modern internet connection. That is smaller that a lot of mobile games these days, to be honest. There are even folks who have been successfully playing it on the Steam Deck which is pretty sweet.
If you make your way over to the Everlasting server feel free to say hello. I’ve set up a private area on the Super Dungeon Friends discord for City of Heroes. At some point, I need to rework the auto-role menu, but for the short term ping me if you want access to it.