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Despite the shutdown of the beloved superhero MMO City of Heroes over a decade ago, fans have been keeping it alive for years with a variety of custom server efforts. Now, one of those projects has just gotten the blessing of the game's original publisher and license holder, NCSoft.
City of Heroes: Homecoming made the surprising announcement earlier today that "Homecoming has been granted a license to operate a City of Heroes server and further develop the game - subject to conditions and limitations under the contract." The Homecoming project will remain free and donation-funded, and while there are a few changes to how the project is being managed, it doesn't look like players will see any meaningful differences in the game itself.
"NCSoft has always had (and will continue to have) the right to demand that Homecoming shuts down," as the announcement notes. "This agreement provides a framework under which Homecoming can operate the game in a way that complies with NCSoft’s wishes in hopes of minimizing the chances of that happening. We’ve had a really positive and productive relationship with NCSoft for over four years now, so we do not anticipate there being any issues."
That'll certainly offer a bit more of a feeling of security to Homecoming players, since most custom MMO servers tend to seem like they're living on borrowed time, waiting for the day some lawyer or another takes notice and moves to shut them down.
The question mark that currently weighs over the license for Homecoming is what this means for other custom server projects, like City of Heroes Rebirth. Today's announcement notes that "other servers are out of scope" for this license, and the devs say that "our hope is that our license will help us consolidate our userbase with City of Heroes fans from other servers." There's already a bit of fear in the community that other private servers might start to disappear following this news, but only time will tell what will happen on that front.
For the most part, however, this news is being met with an unequivocally positive response from much of the City of Heroes fandom. Here's hoping we see similarly happy endings for other online games in the futures.
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