The game City of Steam is now in the Steam Greenlight queue,  which means it will be available through Steam if it gets the green light. Playing the game through Steam will provide provide some extra features, which is outline in a CoS forum post. Since the game is browser-based and with a free-to-play payment [...]

As of now, paying a subscription for The Secret World is no longer necessary. Everything currently in the game will be available once you purchased the game. There will be free updates, but also paid-for story oriented content, plus the regular stuff in the game store. They have also added some XP/AP boosts it seems. [...]

The last week, after the shutdown of City of Heroes, did not end up quite as I had planned originally. I did spend a bit of time with City of Steam closed beta, which was planned. But instead of playing the other games I had on my list ended up installing and playing a completely [...]

In a previous post I mentioned that would take a look at a steampunk-inpired MMO called City of Steam. The game is currently in closed beta and this very weekend is one of their closed beta weekends, the second of them – out of four weekends. I say steampunk-inspired; the game company Mechanist games says [...]

A few minutes after 9am CET, City of Heroes server Defiant shut down for the final time. I logged on about 2.5 hours before the end and these were some emotional hours for a lot of people, in particular the last hour. Despite the sad nature of the event people were very much focusing talking [...]

Would you play a game with permadeath? The folks at the site Iron Man Mode is doing just that, although with a self-imposed permadeath rule in various games, including a few MMOs. And they blog about their adventures until they die. They also have a charity fundraiser for Child’s Play, so there is a good [...]

In a couple of days City of Heroes will be end as a playable game and I will not longer have that game as a fallback when the MMO space looks a bit bleak at times. The last months now has perhaps more than before put the spotlight, for me, the importance of the MMO [...]

With only about one week left until City of Heroes gets killed by NCSoft, I reached my final goal that I set up for myself in the game. When I started to play the game for real about 6.5 years I created a number of characters, although most of these first did not stick with [...]

In general, not everyone “gets” MMO mechanics and gaming mechanics in general. But something you only really fully appreciate if you play lots of other MMOs is the fact that honestly, our devs had almost *no idea* how to keep control of the game they developed, certainly initially, and to a significant extent even past [...]

This week I reached the leveling goals I had set up when I learned about that NCSoft was shutting down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes – to get two of the controllers I were leveling at the time to max level 50 before the game shuts down. Thus these became the 20th and 21st [...]

If you look at any music videos on YouTube, then chances are that you have seen the widely popular Gangnam Style, by Korean rapper PSY - which has been viewd over 500 million times on YouTube.  Today on City of Heroes Tube I noticed a quite funny video by Angelus Animi. It is essentially a City [...]

When NCSoft announced that they were shutting down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes, one of my reactions then was that I must get into the game and use the time that was left to play the game. This is also essentially what I have been doing, to the point that all other MMOs that [...]

NCSoft has published an official response to the various forms people have used to say to NCSoft what they think about their decision to close down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes. As may have been expected, they have not changed their mind about their decision. I think the text is mainly a PR packaged [...]

Tonight there was a bit of a special event on Defiant – a league fight with multiple Kronos Titans.  Kronos class Titans are giant robots from the Malta group, which spawns when the mission leader enters a zone again after completing a certain mission. What had been done here was that multiple players has completed [...]

Although things look quite bleak, the work to try to save City of Heroes continues.  Unless you have not checked it out yet, look at the SaveCoH web site, which provides a a pretty good summary and view of different things going on in the efforts to save the game. In a recent State of [...]

About four weeks after NCSoft decided to pull the plug for City of Heroes development and cease all billing, they finally decide to tell this to the players. Of course, many players knew this already – either through gaming websites, through the City of Heroes website or though in-game friends. But this is the first [...]

The City of Heroes web site recently posted an update about the sunset of the game in the form of a short FAQ. It is a bit terse, giving a bare minimum of expected information and is focused on the financial matters. This FAQ combined with the really limited communication from NCSoft in the past [...]

When I heard about the announcement that Paragon Studios and City of Heroes were going to be shut down, my MMO game time schedule changed somewhat abruptly. During the summer I had essentially taken a break from City of Heroes to focus the little MMO time I had on The Secret World and a bit [...]

After almost three weeks without any communication at all from NCSoft there was finally some announcement about what will happen with the different player accounts and refunds of paid for subscriptions and Paragon Points bought. I cannot say that I like that they were silent for that long after the abrupt shut down announcement that [...]

Still a bit of time to the event on Virtue server and there are 31 instances of the Atlas Park zone currently. Update: Apparently Virtue is completely full, with 300+ people in queue – so people are starting to fill up Atlas Park in Freedom server. Update 2: Apparently Freedom is completely full, next stop [...]

Today I ran a 10km race here in the Stockholm area, Kistaloppet. This worked out quite well and I managed to beat my old personal record, running the 10km in 48:51. This means that after 26 years I fixed something that annoyed me back in my first 10km race, where I missed beating the 50 [...]

NCSoft has received a fair amount of heat from MMO fans lately, in particular from parts of the City of Heroes community. I consider myself part of that community and I am not happy about the way the shutdown of Paragon Studios and City of Heroes seems to have been communicated to the people involved. [...]

A recent post with an in-game quote from one of the Paragon Studios people have raised a glimpse of hope among City of Heroes players: [Admin] Alpha Wolf: Sorry guys but I don’t have any new update. I know Paragon management is having discussion with ncsoft and investors. Continue get people to sign online petitions, [...]

I have not been in the mood for much MMO gaming this weekend, which is mainly due to the announcement that NCSoft is closing down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes. I did jump into City of Heroes for a bit on Sunday though, chatting and and a bit of raiding (Rikti Mothership) and some [...]

It was quite a shock to come back home and read that City of Heroes and Paragon Studios are shutting down. Looking at the comments in the forums it seems people are quite surprised by this move. Shock, surprise, sadness, confusion, anger are probably words that sum up most of the feelings expressed in the [...]