But I thought heroes never really died!
Spending the last week hearing how great Warlords of Draenor is has put me in a funk. I fondly remember my MMO days, but I’ve never been able to love another one since City of Heroes was shut down. It left a death-ray-shaped hole in my heart that Orcs, wizards, and dragons just can’t fill. Hearing about people exploring new content, experimenting with balance changes, and re-energizing their old guild networks just rubs it in that my rooftop-jumping, spandex-wearing days are over.
Already feeling glum and jealous, I came to a dark realization. If Overwatch was made with re-used assets from Blizzard’s scrapped Titan project, and it’s all about cartoony-looking superheroes mixing it up in a Pixar-esque world, does that mean Blizzard was working on its own superhero MMO? And they killed it?
My funk just nosedived into full-blown depression.
If you never played CoH, it might be difficult to understand what all the fuss is about. It was a superhero MMO that came out juuuust before WoW stormed into the market and salted the land for every other MMO looking to grab a slice, which is probably why it was able to survive as long as it did. I’ve been a comic book nerd since childhood, and the idea of flying around a persistent city busting criminals and fighting arch-villains alongside hundreds of other superheroes sounded like just the ticket.
CoH took a kitchen-sink approach to the genre. Drawing inspiration from everything from the goofy trappings of the ’70s Silver Age, to the embarrassing grimdark of the mid-’90s Dork Age (pouches and bandoliers as far as the eye could see).
There was something for every kind of player, and the level of customization and creativity available was staggering. You could make a four-foot-tall weather-controlling fairy princess as easily as you could a machine gun-slinging Punisher knock-off. I just don’t get the same joy from putting on a slightly different leather tunic and choosing between pre-determined ability trees.
CoH put a huge emphasis on player identity. An incredible number of costume parts was a given, but there were also a ton of little touches. Titles and honorifics could be unlocked, so you could be “The Incredible xXWolverineFanXx” if that was your bag. Badges could be set under you character name if you wanted to show off a particular accomplishment or just add a little flavor to your hero.
If you were so inclined, you could even write a small biography or backstory for your character that would be viewable to anyone with a simple right-click. The “quality” of these bios drastically varied, and it was as much fun to sit around a busy area and throw shade on crappy bios as it was to actually get out there and fight evil.
And the game just kept getting better and better. Great quality-of-life tools like the sidekick system and super groups made it easy to play with friends, even if you were at different experience levels, so you could always convince a buddy to join. More content was being added on a fairly regular basis, both tiny little quest lines and huge releases like the amazing City of Villains expansion. Old areas and quest lines were revamped and given a facelift as the dev team learned from past mistakes. Even the oft-requested feature of player-created quest lines was eventually released.
And then it suddenly died. In September of 2012, players were notified that NCSoft was sun-setting the game. They would have a little less than a scant three months to get in their last heroic hurrah’s before the servers shut down.
I haven’t seriously played an MMO since. CoH was perfect for what I look for in that kind of game mechanically and aesthetically. I have Skyrim and Dark Souls if I want to run around in a suit of armor and mess up goblins; doing that with a bunch of other people doesn’t appeal. But there was something special about linking up in a super team to take down a Godzilla-sized robot or invade a knock-off Dr. Doom’s island laboratory.
Sure, there have been other attempts at the superhero MMO, but like failed clones none of them have lived up to the original. Champions Online is still around under the F2P model, but I never liked it. Jack Emmert, the original lead designer of CoH who “left” the company early on (it’s speculated that he was encouraged to leave) was the brains behind Champions and it showed. Jack was always accused by the CoH fanbase of standing in the way of obvious improvements and being unresponsive to feedback, and in this rare instance, the mob might have been right. Champions seemed to embrace all of CoH‘s flaws and few of its virtues.
Big DC itself got into the action with DC: Universe Online, which I played for about a week before banishing to the phantom zone. After all the freedom CoH provided and its emphasis on the player’s identity, it was bizarre to play DC: UO with its heavily constricted power-sets and being constantly up-staged by the DC cast (although maybe that was to be expected). It’s still around, also on the F2P scheme, and I hear they’ve made improvements since release but I just can’t be assed to give it another go.
Maybe I’m just a picky jerk who’s overly nostalgic for his pet game. Or maybe it’s impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice. But man, if there was anyone I’d trust to be able to pull it off, it would be Blizzard.
Blizzard has the experience, the budget, and the brains to make a fantastic MMO. Say what you want about WoW, it knows what players are looking for and what kind of content works. If you had told me Titan was a superhero MMO, I would have been over the moon because I’d have known I was going to get a shot at reliving my CoH glory days.
But Blizzard killed it in its cradle. After working on it for seven years, the company said it “didn’t find the fun” and pulled the plug, stitching together Overwatch as some kind of Frankenstein consolation prize.
There is no way of knowing for certain that Titan was going to be a superhero MMO or how much Overwatch reflects whatever state of development that game was in. We’ll probably never know — I can’t see Blizzard going around talking about its seven-year money pit any time soon. This is all conjecture and speculation, but I think it fits, and it bums me the hell out.
If you watch Overwatch‘s cinematic trailer while thinking about it in terms of an MMO it makes a lot of sense. It sets up a broad conflict and a super group that’s seen better days, shows off a few mascot characters, and makes a literal call to arms that “the world needs more heroes!” at the end. It looks like it should just drop you into a character creation screen!
Speaking of characters, look at them! So many sizes and shapes and interesting doo-dads, very cool. I can see them as a colorful cast for a shooter, sure. But I can see them even more as the colorful mascots of an MMO showing off what the character creator can do. They all look so crazy and anachronistic, from robots and cyber-knights to dwarfs and samurai, like the kind of crap you’d see in an MMO trying to be all things to all people.
Then we have the various powers and abilities the characters demonstrate in the gameplay trailer. Lots of them seem right at home in an FPS, are genre standards, or were lifted straight out of TF2, but there are some oddballs here and there that make me think. Look at Reaper’s (ugh, what a name) “death blossom” move and tell me that isn’t just an AoE attack straight out of CoH or WoW. Whipping out into third-person and spinning around guns blazing looks silly in an FPS context, but it’s run of the mill for an MMO attack.
Hanzo’s giant-twin-dragon shot straddles the line between looking cool and chintzy. On one hand, giant-twin-dragons are badical. On the other hand, look at it clip right through walls and stuff, ugh. They seem to justify it by showing that its meant to work with his sonar powers to get enemies hiding behind cover, but doesn’t it look more like a top-tier power in an MMO? That “cool but kinda broken” look of the end-game stuff in CoH?
The list goes on. Pharah’s chest missiles look like they’d be more at home in an action-MMO than a twitch based FPS, Zenyatta is laying down party buffs, and Reinhart looks like a cyber-orc from WoW: 2099. Maybe (probably) I’m reading too much into this stuff, but to me at least it seems like Blizzard had these characters and powers in mind for an MMO and found a way to work them into a team-based FPS.
What has me bummed out about Blizzard shutting the door on Titan isn’t just what we might have missed out on from that project, but what it says about the industry and genre in a broader sense. If Blizzard with all its money and experience can’t think of a way to make a superhero MMO fun and (presumably) profitable after seven years of effort, that might be the final nail in the coffin for the sub-genre.
It’s infuriating because there has never been a better time to get out there with a superhero MMO! With Disney/Marvel scheduling superhero movies out to 2030 and my own great-aunt wearing a Rocket Raccoon t-shirt, it seems like NOW is when you’d want to rush your mutants and cape-wearing aliens to the shelves. If Blizzard ran the numbers and figured it couldn’t make it work, I can’t imagine it will be a better climate for a superhero MMO five or ten years down the road when we’re all jaded and burned out on truth, justice, and the American way.
And who else is left to make one? The MMO bubble burst a long time ago; all the studios who got burned by it have learned their lessons (or are off throwing more money into the furnace trying to make the next big MOBA). DC already took its kick at the can; it won’t try again. Disney/Marvel could make their own, but they’ve already got Infinity milking kids out of lunch money so why bother? Blizzard is probably the last big name left that could have done it right, and the company decided to pick up its kryptonite and go home.
So pour one out for all us CoH fans. Pour one out for what we lost, for what might have been, and what we’ll never see again. The closest thing we’re ever going to get to another superhero MMO is making whooshing thruster noises with our mouths while trying on ski-boots.
Or maybe that’s just me again.
