City of Memories

By now, most of you have heard that the company that develops City of Heroes was dissolved en toto in a surprise mass layoff at the start of the month and that the game servers are shutting down at the end of November. I picked up the game mere months after it launched back in 2004 and stayed active for years after I’d run out of new things to do there. Over and over, whenever I decided to call it quits, I discovered that someone else I knew played it, so I stuck around a little longer. So I have a few memories.

I remember being asked multiple times whether I was French because I’d named my first character “Beaufort” after Sir Francis Beaufort. I also remember no one ever getting my battle cry of, “That’s a twelve on my scale!”

I remember saying “You’re welcome.” to the first pedestrian who thanked me for saving him because I thought he was another player.

I remember thinking that the hospital in the tutorial zone would be a great place for an Easter egg, given how rarely people end up there and how hard it is to go there on purpose.

I remember my first level 50 character. I’d played him to level 14, then Cryptic raised him to 50. See, the company I worked for had acquired the rights to make a City of Heroes CCG, and everyone on the creative staff who didn’t already have a level 50 character got one so we could experiment with the bonus character class that unlocked.

I remember my first legitimate level 50 character. He had a huge broadsword and a dark, muscular build, and I called him Nightstallion. I made him in response to the abundance of characters with names like “Nightmare Shadow” and “Xx-NiGhTmArE-xX”, with the intention of asking them, “You know a mare is a lady horse, right?” A good opportunity never arose.

I remember playing with a guild of coworkers one night and travelling in a group from mission to mission wearing guild colors, and how good that felt, and how annoyed I was that the game’s design made that extremely rare since individual travel powers varied so much and group-travel powers were cumbersome and weren’t even available until after everyone had personal ones anyway.

I remember Vahzilok zombies making typeless attacks that dealt typeless damage, thus bypassing most protective powers. They were so challenging to fight that many players deliberately avoided picking “Science” as their power origin so they wouldn’t be sent on the Vahzilok story arc.

I remember the Paragon Dance Party.

I remember vendors who wouldn’t talk to you for three more levels even though they sold stuff you could use right now, so you asked higher-level friends to make purchases for you in the meantime.

I remember when the developers found that one power that was supposed to give enemies a -10% To-Hit penalty actually gave them -100% due to a data entry typo. So they fixed it, and a different set of powers went from being most-popular to least-popular as a result.

I remember joining a roleplaying group and totally bailing on them when I found it wasn’t really my thing. I’m sorry. I should have handled that better.

I remember when enemy groups would sometimes spawn a level or two higher than they should have. And have more high-rank members. And be so close to the building’s entrance that they’d start attacking you the instant you entered the zone — which was several seconds before you could do anything, because the loading screen was still up.

I remember when the devs gave players a mission-crafting editor and somehow, in a mind-boggling lapse of reason, believed it would not be used almost exclusively to create powerleveling XP farms. (It was, of course.)

I remember how, when I quit the first time, I parked my richest character in a remote, rarely-visited store and gave two billion influence to the first player to eventually walk in.

I remember being amazed to hear that the development studio was reduced from about sixty to a mere fifteen people after City of Villains launched, yet still advanced the game at nearly previous rates for a year or two.

I remember how, the first time I quit, I picked out a docked sailboat in Independence Port to be Beaufort’s private fishing boat and logged out with him standing on deck. I’ll be doing that again soon.