City of Titans......FUNDED.

Congratulations, City of Titans!

Following the startling success of this Kickstarter had immeasurably brightened this last week for me, burning through the clouds with a beam of hope & igniting a flurry of activity in all my CoH Facebook groups.

I can only imagine how thrilling & disorienting it is for the Project Phoenix participants themselves.

And it all springs from what has become the theme of this blog, to the extent that it has one- the amazing, resourceful and resilient community that coalesced around CoH over the years.

A year after NCsoft faceplanted our game, the playerbase is still strong and united, with three developer groups out there combining inspirations to make a rez...and it looks like the Phoenix Project is gunning for an Immortal Recovery.

So now it's on to their stretch goals, all of which seem to be eminently within reach.
Congratulations on all your success thus far, Phoenix Project. I'm looking forward to some in-game teaming with your devs sooner rather than later.

To quote a Titan Network rallying cry,

We are heroes....this is what we do.

Kickstart My (blackened lump of a) Heart: City of Titans Jolts Kickstarter

As of this moment, the two day old Missing Worlds Media kickstarter for City of Titans has collected $260,268 toward their proposed $320,000 development budget.

While I'm hopeful for all three 'spiritual successor' games, City of Titans is the one exactly on my wavelength- instigated by forum regulars, staffed by veteran CoH volunteers, and devoted to as explicit a recreation of the CoH mise en place as copyright law allows.  Which is why I unlimbered my wallet & dug out a bit more than I can afford just now & pitched it into the crater of Mount Diable, a dark offering to Bat'Zul in pursuit of bringing CoH back in a new body.

Given my druthers, I'd like to simply turn CoH back on.  I'd log in the Goat, hit the Sharkhead Isle Black Market to check my traps, then pull up my global tabs to see who was doing what and where.

Since that can't happen, City of Titans strikes me as the successor team with a vision closest to my own.

It is heartening to see them pulling down these big numbers, digging a big, gloved thumb right in the eye of serial MMO killer NC Soft, who murdered the game and orphaned the community not because we weren't profitable, but because we weren't profitable enough.

Positron (aka Matt Miller) had some interesting things to say in this article.

Start small. You do NOT need to ship with every feature under the sun; that's setting yourself up for failure in the long run. If you can't support a feature for the long run, don't cram it in just to have a bullet point. Add it in when it makes sense to add it to the game. Concentrate on making the game FUN and ENGAGING first, then you'll be able to add the features you've always wanted when they are ready for primetime, not because you need to get them out the door.

Which got me thinking back to CoH's launch when there was basically nothing to do except make characters & wander around beating things up on the streets, in warehouses & office buildings.

Which I LOVED more than any game I'd ever played up to that point.
If they can nail the character creator, give combat that specific CoH feeling & provide a couple of zones to explore & baddies to thump at launch, I'll be ecstatically happy.

I've seen negativity regarding the spiritual successor groups generally and Missing Worlds in particular, having to do with the "impossibility" of what they're attempting, or how "crazy" it is.  It's the same sort of naysaying that went on after the shutdown announcement when TonyV and the Titan crew were agitating to keep the game going.

Why bother, it doesn't matter, nobody cares, there are lots of other games, blah blah blah blah.

While I've been aware of the Phoenix Project almost from the moments of its formation, reading their Kickstarter page really opened my eyes to what they're about.  It's basically an MMO co-op, staffed by volunteers.  The Kickstarter money is earmarked for licensing fees on the tools they need to build the game.  I remember thinking out loud on the forums about what kind of MMO I'd be comfortable playing in light of NC Soft committing MMO genocide on a profitable title, and that's where I ended up- a game beholden to no corporate paymaster, a superhero game infused with the spirit of CoH, a game by players, for players.

Why should the success of City of Titans be any less likely than City of Heroes existing in the first place?
I see some people complaining that they don't have professional game devs.
Well, they've got a lot of talented people from our community....and this goat remembers when Big Professional Game Developer Dr. Aeon was just a guy named Fearghas, paying his $14.99 a month to play superhero like the rest of us.

I've seen this community work miracles before, and I'm confident we can do it again.
Viva City of Titans!

Community First....Literally

Just an observation today.

While I'm sure game designers have some idea of the types of player they'd like their game to appeal to, nobody really knows what they'll get.  As you've doubtless noticed, my musings on why CoH worked keep arriving at the same conclusion- the community, the one unknowable in the design of most games.

Well, unless you're one of the three dev teams vying to be the 'spiritual successor' to CoH, who are in an interesting spot.

They know *exactly* the type of community they'll be attracting....provided they can deliver a game world simulacrum of suitable fidelity.  It's game development in Bizarro World- instead of making their game and seeing what sort of players coalesce around it, the job is constructing a game to fit the expectations of an existing community...which, further complicating matters, is haunted by the ghost of their former love.

It's a scenario that could easily veer off into Vertigo territory- in the comic book sense or the cinematic one.

Which is why I'm managing my expectations and trying not to pick any favorites.
Although being human I'm inclined toward Missing Worlds Media, where the highest percentage of forum pals turned game dev reside.
That's the one team I absolutely know have their hearts in the right place, and consequently the one I'm rooting the hardest for.

What made CoH Special?

That's the question I've seen most often since the shutdown.

 From players, from successor teams looking for 'the secret', one I asked myself innumerable times as I struggled to reconfigure my reality around the empty space left by the shutdown, incessantly probing the wound like it was a pulled tooth.

 What did CoH have that other MMOs lacked?
 What exerted such a powerful attraction that the only thing able to distract me for more than a few days was an acute case of Adult Onset Parenting?

 The usual responses take the form of a list of small, appealing elements: easy teaming, simple mechanics, I CAN FLY!, etc. Occasionally someone will widen the focus & laud it's 'casual' or 'solo friendly' nature, generally supported by more mentions of how casual and solo friendly it was.

 All correct in their own ways, but even compiled into a single grand list (as was done by an enterprising soul in a forum thread I came across) they did not fully satisfy my own mournful curiosity about just what ineffable quality CoH had that no other MMO I've ever played managed to capture.

 I mean, yeah, it had to be relatively solo friendly to keep me around, because I mostly solo'ed. And I'm the very definition of 'casual' in my play- even at my most crazed & obsessive I never played more than five or six hours a week- I simply didn't have the time, even before my son was born.
 And obviously FLYING! was always completely amazing, even back in the old days (who else remembers the forum thread that proved sprint + hurdle was faster than base Flight speed? Hah!)

 But none of that entirely explained the quality of my persistent affection for game world, why the thought of logging in created the same enjoyable anticipation as sitting down with a really good book you were perpetually about halfway through, or easing into a hot bath after a long day.

 As I'm prone to do with such inconclusively resolved questions, I put it on a back burner and let it simmer, periodically checking in to stir the pot. And last night as I was slipping into Dreamland & drowsily considering the new post I'd been working on, it came to me.

 So simple, a variation on my Sam Tow Apology, and another situation where I'd let an obsession with mechanics obscure the truth.

 The people.
 The community.

 Duh, Goat!

 But wait, all successful games have people playing them, and where people gather community is the inevitable result, right?

 Yeah, but what made CoH special, or rather what *kept* it special was that the game was your ally, or to use a CoH centric metaphor, mentor. How many times have I found myself in another game having to navigate a ridiculously convoluted system just to reach out and speak to other players?  I've played more than a few games where the chat system felt like it was designed to prevent players from finding and speaking with one another.

 In CoH the basic local chat was handled by wonderfully engaging and thematic word bubbles, which always delighted me.  Later came the crown jewel, the one system which I've concluded "made CoH special"- global chat channels.

A mechanism which had the same galvanizing effect on in-game player connectivity as that radioactive spider bite did with Peter Parker.

 That's what made me feel like I was part of the CoH community even when I had almost no time to team or even play- I could still pop in and hang out in TheMarket channel or the Triumph global, or the Crazy 88's, or whatever. I'd see what people were doing, I could chime in advice or join in acclaim and laughter, it was an entree into everyone else's game. No need to be part of a guild, no need to mess around with external servers or systems, once you set things up it was just there, waiting for you.

 So, to all of the successor teams out there wondering how best to recreate the essence of CoH, once you've finsihed your deep, flexible costume creator and created a fun, interactive world for us to superhero around in....make sure you absolutely nail down a flexible, elegant universal chat system.

 We'll do the rest. =D



PS:
Carol 'Staci' McAllister noted in the Save City of Heroes Facebook group that the forums were also an integral part of the 'specialness' of the game, and I agree.   They were like the Internet Archive of the community, a tremendous resource for players new and old, while the globals were more Twitter, instant and ephemeral.
I wanted to mention that without having to re-write the whole thing....  =P

Eight Years On, One Year Off

So it's been a year since NCSoft dropped their Neutron bombs on Paragon City & the Rogue Isles and our diaspora began.

The aftermath has been enlightening.
They killed the game, but our community still thrives, on blogs, on Facebook & Twitter, in the churning belly of the Titan Network, in the hearts of the (at last count) three dev teams looking to mount 'spiritual successors' to our online home.

I've been gaming online since before there even was an online- what choo know 'bout Tradewars on local BBS's back when a 1200 baud modem would set you back a couple hundred bucks, or Doom II deathmatch modem-to-modem? Or MIDI Maze LAN parties with a room full of Atari ST's daisy-chained together?   Then, finally, there was an internet, and the WON network and hosting Half Life deathmatch & Counterstrike servers and communities  back when CS was a mod (shout out to the early beta M4A1, best FPS gun EVAR) & Steam was just a gleam in Gabe Newell's gimlet eye.

And in all that time I have never seen a community, large or small, respond to adversity like this one.

The death of my game had a similar effect on me that an actual death in my family would have.
I'm not one of those "whatever, dude, I hear Guild Wars 2 is awesome." folks.  Or even one of those "I love and miss CoH, but you know what, Champions Online is pretty good too!" folks.
I tried CO but for me it created a Monkey's Paw scenario- the similarities to my game made it seem like the corpse of a loved one made into an awful marionette, jerking and hopping in a horrid parody of life.

I eventually realized that I was not an MMO gamer, I was a City of Heroes gamer.
And, with no other game to distract me, I metaphorically sat down and did some deep thinking on the meaning of community, and what my role in said community had been and would be.

It isn't an understatement to say that the destruction of Paragon City made me a better person, and not just online.

I looked back and I asked myself, what did my various forum altercations benefit anyone?
What was accomplished by savagely attack Positron for not merging the markets quickly enough, or for overreacting to the abuse of MA?
How did it help anyone for me to go at Sam Tow hammer and tongs because his approach to the game was so different from mine as to be an artifact of an alien philosophy?
How do my various assaults on Tony V's intentions & perceived egotism reflect on me now, when he stood at tall as anyone against the true Coming Storm & did yeoman work giving the community a positive focus in the final days?

Even in market forums, the one arena where I could make a case for myself as benefit to the community, was I not reflexively combative, arbitrarily abusive of those I perceived as wrongheaded, did I not wallow in conflict like a berserker, gleefully ignorant of a world beyond the red mist of combat?

I took a long, hard look at myself in the shattered glass mirrors of our city, and it wasn't pleasant.
I found myself thinking of William Munny sitting by the campfire-


I resolved to make his refrain I ain't like that any more my own (aside from his backsliding in the third reel, which led to a saloon decorated with corpses).

I'm in a bunch of CoH related Facebook groups, and when people periodically say dumb things I either ignore it, or respond with a measured, reasonable post.  Instead of trolling with the trolls, I put them on /ignore.  Instead of snarling at the people who're trying to do something, I either give praise, constructive criticism, or keep my yap shut.  I 'like' almost everything I see.  I try not to judge any more- we all lived in the same town, we all lived through its destruction, and that makes us all part of the same tribe.

Sitting there on the cracked steps of City Hall overlooking the fallen statue of Atlas I finally understood that in the virtual world everything is reversed.  Your actions and accomplishments in the place that seems so real and important, the game world, are ephemeral.  What lasts, and what matters, is your place in the community, that agglomeration of wikis, memes, gifs, forums, blogs, youtube channels and tumblrs which collect around the game world like fish around a reef.   This realization is an extension of my apologia to Sam Tow, where I figured out that mechanics are mortal but lore is eternal, after years of proclaiming the opposite to one and all at top voice.

As we've seen, a game world can be shut down.
But the community which accumulates around one is a much more resilient structure.
It doesn't matter how many expees or billions you accumulate, or how l337 your gear is, or how efficiently your team conquered this or that obstacle, because all of that can be erased by the flick of a switch, reduced to Youtube ghosts forever acting out the same scenarios.

The true meaning of any game is providing the foundation for a community to grow on.

So I'm watching the progress of the 'successors' closely.
Whichever one most closely matches that ineffable quality CoH exuded will earn, in addition to my financial support, the presence of an older, wiser Nethergoat in their community, one who has renounced the gun and mended his ways.

One who ain't like that anymore.

Happy Should Have Been Ninth Anniversary, City of Heroes

Image via Doc Leo on  Twitter-  @leandrotlz

I've been AFK from gaming for a while now.
I meant to commemorate all my CoH characters with screenshots and elaborate 'closing ceremonies' for each over the last few months the doors were open, but couldn't bring myself to log in.  It was like someone had condemned my home, I had nowhere to move and no way to transport my belongings anyway.  I took a few screens, but that's about it.  The whole scene was too disheartening to contemplate.

I made a legitimate effort to like CO. It was far superior to DCUO, which is a compliment in the same way Cheez Whiz is a food.  To extend the food metaphor, if CoH was filet mignon then CO was a cello wrapped microwave hamburger from a truck stop snack bar.  They had some good ideas and some fun implementations, but the foundation of the game was built from flawed materials.

Old time vets all say it with me- "Jack's idea of fun."
Even though he'd skipped off to the next project, as ever one step ahead of the consequences of his mistakes, the game was shaped by his 'vision'.  With CO that vision was a hybrid console/PC MMO, save they never managed to iron out the 'console' part.  The result was a PC game that felt & played like a console port...call it 'the worst of both worlds'.
They'd made some strides at repairing those flaws by the time I came back (I played it a bit near launch and found it entirely repellent), but there's only so much you can do when the very structure of the game is working against you.

Aside from that abortive foray and playing a bit of the original Torchlight (which was quite fun, but never became an obsession) I've been out of gaming since the shutdown.  Some of it is practical (I have a family, I run my own business, either of which can take up all your time unless you take steps), some of it is that nothing is even vaguely like CoH, but most of it, I think, is the result of an existential crisis.  Bigtime MMO gaming is a corporate endeavor and the callous, eminently preventable way CoH was destroyed instantly clarified the value said companies place on the playerbase-  zero.  

I can't play an MMO I don't have an emotional attachment to, and I'm not going to let myself become emotionally attached to a game world that can be turned off as casually as I power down my computer every night.   It's been years since single player games held any interest for me, and I haven't got the time (or, tbh, the reflexes) to get back into the FPS pool.  CoH over the years became more than just a game to play, it was a place to go, a virtual home where I was assured of finding like-minded souls to spend some time with.  Yes, there was fun stuff to do, but the real attraction for me was hanging out in global channels chatting with my pals, cruising around seeing everyone's cool characters, running a few missions with some folks, tending my marketeering schemes.

Anyway.
Seeing all the Ninth Anniversary stuff on twitter got me back to thinking about CoH.  It's been long enough now that I can look at screenshots without getting depressed.  I'm keeping track of both the Plan Z dev teams because it's become clear to me the only way I'm going to get attached to another game is if it's a player-driven situation unbeholden to corporate whims & corporate control.  And I'm hanging out on a couple of CoH expatriate Facebook pages commiserating with my fellow exiles.

And, I'm going to be updating this blog again, telling the stories of my favorite characters and reiminscing about things that made CoH such a standout experience.

/em salute