How City of Heroes was almost saved

On November 30th 2012, NCsoft shut down City of Heroes and ended the spandex adventures of thousands of players. Gamasutra has the exclusive story on how the popular superhero MMO and developer Paragon was almost saved, but was instead scuttled by last minute publisher decisions.

On the night before we all got the notice of the studio shutting down, Brian, Ross, and Destin were in there still trying to work out that deal. We were a signature away from things going through or not – and we unfortunately fell on the not side.

Lead Designer Matt Miller spoke about some of the plans Paragon had for the MMO if they had been allowed to continue.

So we had an alien invasion race called The Battalion that was going to be arriving in the very next issue. That would play out over several issues culminating with the moon base, where you would use the resources of the moon base to actually fight back and basically kick Battalion out of our solar system.

A final fan effort to purchase the rights to City of Heroes also failed.