I'M NO HERO | DEEP HELL'S HOW TO
What can you expect now that the dust has settled? Oh, sorry, there’s ringing in our ears: NCSoft, makers and cash-iners of various MMOs for the last almost twenty years broke a precedent.
It’s been no secret to cape-fans everywhere that City of Heroes was done dirty, and almost signaled the end of a certain generation of video game. Shut down in 2012(?) City of Heroes’ demise came like a shock, following a trend where the publisher moved the staff responsible for the game to their own studio. Like the death of all digital worlds, there was a eulogy not just for the memories and spaces that could never be revisited, but for the players who might log back on looking for a friend only to find a black hole where the game had once been.
The Digital is fixed in place, a surreal diorama of still-furries and the remains of goth roleplayers long dead in player sessions echoing final character moments in a nightclub turned into a partial cathedral. Something shedding the careless descriptors of Liminal and embracing a Man Altered Landscape. Visual approximation of reference photos and memories of clubs the original developers must have experienced years earlier during a different twilight of the superheroes, a sloughing off of the club-rave to be slowly replaced with some kind of EDM-themed carnival for child-adults with mortgages and vacation time.
Over a lifetime of bad decisions, I’ve approximately gathered roughly eight-thousand or more hours of online roleplaying. This has come from avenues like City of Heroes or Champions Online, World of Warcraft or Achaea. A brief stint in a minotaur-and-tavern-themed roleplay on Furcadia. It follows me, it haunts me, through crop tops gone unworn aside from digital mausoleums growing cobwebs in my memory. Real thoughts about fake places about real memories: Charlie Brooker is crying somewhere.
And two weeks and some time ago NCSoft made a kind of unprecedented (not looking this up tbh) move of offering one of word of mouth-spread City of Heroes private servers a full license to run the game legally and do what they will yet. In an unsurprising move, It’s unlikely this was an attempt to sabotage the game by massively flooding it with players. There are enough to find strange server population numbers in the hours of dawn or dusk. Hyper-Sapient Vampire men from other planets, Irish Faeries cosplaying as Twitch.TV Humans. You can find this: and more, and I’m addicted.
I’ll drool for just about any reason, and putting an unlimited supply of bad comic book tropes blended together with terminal online-roleplaying-brain. The disease is taking me swiftly, coiled around some part of my decision-making apparatus like a crook worming its way up into the small parts of my brain, and just moving things around. I’m still alive, but I’ve been changed somehow.
Welcome to the startmenu.co.uk guide to GETTING STARTED in THE ONLINE WORLD.
In a basic way, launching CITY OF HEROES is not unlike the same way addictions to Final Fantasy XIV or The Elder Scrolls Online: not much has changed in the startmenu technology of MMO launchers since the PlayOnline days, the last true innovation in Massively Multiplayer Online Game Launchers. you’ll follow the two steps here that’ll take you to signing up for, and downloading City of Heroes: Homecoming.
Homecoming, has recently chosen to partner with another free server that did not, officially, get the same license to merge their server bases together. Even more adventures in the world of half-remembered comic books are waiting for you, and next week you can come back and check in with us for creating your first character*. See you then!
(*on top of all of the screwing around with the character creator you’ll do - skeleton)
