CoH was a great game for all sorts of reasons. I played it fairly regularly for 8.5 years and I was sad to see it shut down the way it was. Like many of you I still miss it and I don't think any game since has captured the overall magic of what CoH provided to its fans. I was lucky enough to be there for the game's first day and the game's last day... Good times.

Having said all that I'm now going to say what many of you still don't want to believe but here it is anyway: CoH's time has come and gone. It's been shutdown for over two years now and to be perfectly blunt it probably would have been ready to be gracefully retired by now regardless. The game, as great as it was, was based on aging software technology that's now over a decade old. It was starting to look dated a few years ago and no amount of tinkering and/or duct tape was going to keep the increasingly unmaintainable baseline together forever.

Yes I'm sad to see CoH gone, but we have to collectively accept/agree that it's better off resting in peace than lingering on in some kind of weird pseudo-zombie un-updateable limbo. I hate to say it but the only thing NCsoft did wrong in shutting CoH down was doing it a bit too early - I figure it had another good year or two left to it before it REALLY needed to be shut down.

So is Nate Downes a Hero or a Villain? I call him a Hero because at least he's leading an effort to produce a new game that'll have the potential to be viable for the next 10+ years instead of wasting any more time keeping something alive that was only worthwhile during the last 10+ years.

First, I agree with the others that CoH would have been fading by now, though I'd rather have seen it go on a bit longer (as Lothic said), be retired gracefully and respectfully with The Coming Storm/Battalion, and followed by a well supported and well developed CoH 2 with the story of rising from the ashes of the Battalion attack the way CoH 1 was post Rikti.

But that's all fantasy and water under the bridge.

Second, what was the point of your OP, Atlantic? There is no useful information or potentially helpful opinion anywhere in it.

It really comes off like a disingenuous, pseud-supportive frustration troll.

My opinion is that Nate Downes and everyone at MWM are doing the right thing. Reasons include everything that Lothic stated, and because it makes a lot of sense to start fresh when A) NCSoft still holds the rights to CoH, its assets, and its intellectual property; B) the best we can hope for is a disk image of the game with no player data or source code; and C) it would still take a lot of time and resources to make the game functional let alone give it any hope for continued development.

It's not necessarily true that Nate chose not to revive CoH because of the investment in City of Titans. If his plan was to revive CoH, then the Kickstarter goal would have been to buy CoH. Instead, the goal was to build a new game. This seems to be what most of the community has decided to do with a number of successor projects currently in the works. In fact, I've seen it stated by a couple of the other projects that they have no interest in borrowing from CoH.

I also don't think that Nate and MWM have taken a selfish approach in their efforts. It's true that they're a business and they will make money from the game, but they want a game to carry the spirit of CoH as much as the rest of us. Raising $678k for this project instead of CoH isn't evil or selfish. The investment will give us a better game in the near future.

I'm personally looking forward to this "lame game," and calling it such showed some obvious preconceived bias against City of Titans. I'd be curious to hear your opinions of the other spiritual successor projects. Are all of the other project managers and developers guilty of making a new game instead of trying to buy CoH?

All of that said, if your heart is set on City of Heroes, take a look at [url=http://apr.pc-logix.com]the Atlas Park Revival project[/url].

I've never read the credits to any game I've ever played.
No regrets about it either
But for that reason, I suppose
I have no Idea who Nate Downs is
Sorry

Nate "Dr. Tyche" Downes is MWM's current president. MWM is a strange beast that actually elects the president and board yearly so that the entire company and community is represented as fairly as possible.

Yeah, sorry I busted out the "t" word. It's just that's what it looked like.

There's a lot of understandable frustration and impatience, but sometimes it leads to unreasonable and unfair criticism of MWM and CoT.

Not that they're perfect or beyond fair and resonable criticism, but they are going way out on a limb to do us all a great service.

There is a lot of confusion and mixed signals that result when people try to "serve two masters" ; no matter how up people may be with what is going on both here and in the other forum. It's my view that regardless of how you try to rationalize it, the effort to resurrect CoH is often diametrically opposed to (in competition with for both player and administrative resources) with the effort to develop CoT. When a person goes on record implying they are "fine" without something then you should not expect them to be heading up the effort to revive it. I also happen to completely agree with Lothic on CoH which begs the question of how long and how far should the president of MWM stick with negotiating with NCSoft? What little criticism I've heard about CoT (and let me repeat that most of the plans I'm hearing about are absolutely fantastic) it's been about the schedule and demonstrated results... which makes me wonder "well if the president/ technical director and others were not off doing something else..."

To the question of is Mr Downs hero or villain I'd respond he is trying to be everybodys hero... but sometimes in the real world you need to make choices on what is more important.

Izzy wrote:

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