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City of Heroes

City of Heroes (CoH) was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game which was developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCSOFT. The game was launched in North America on April 28, 2004, and in Europe by NCsoft Europe on February 4, 2005, with English, German and French servers. In the game, players created super-powered player characters that could team up with others to complete missions and fight criminals belonging to various gangs and organizations in the fictional Paragon City. Twenty-three free major updates for City of Heroes were released before its shutdown. The final live update, "Where Shadows Lie", was released on May 31, 2012. On August 31, 2012, NCsoft terminated its Paragon Studios development team, ending all production on City of Heroes with the last day of services on November 30, 2012. In April 2019, source code capable of running a City of Heroes server was distributed widely. This made it possible to create City of Heroes servers outside the direct purview of NCSoft and revived interest in the game, which by then had been out of development for more than six years. As of October 2022, NCSoft has not moved to have servers based on this source code shut down. In 2000, writer Rick Dakan and Michael Lewis created Cryptic Studios. The company's first project was City of Heroes, the idea for the game which Dakan claims to have come up with. Dakan was named Lead Design on the game, doing mostly writing for characters and story. Even after resigning from Cryptic, Dakan remained involved with the game through the publishing of the City of Heroes comic book. On October 31, 2005, the game's first sequel, City of Villains (CoV), was launched, allowing players to play as supervillains. The stand-alone expansion pack did not require City of Heroes to run, but if the user had both games, content was added to the City of Heroes side of game play. On July 16, 2008, NCsoft merged the two games' content together. Thus, a player who only owned City of Heroes could now play City of Villains, and vice versa.

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Related concepts (2)
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game
A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game. As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a character (often in a fantasy world or science-fiction world) and takes control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player online RPGs by the number of players able to interact together, and by the game's persistent world (usually hosted by the game's publisher), which continues to exist and evolve while the player is offline and away from the game.
Multiplayer video game
A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or via a wide area network, most commonly the Internet (e.g. World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, DayZ). Multiplayer games usually require players to share a single game system or use networking technology to play together over a greater distance; players may compete against one or more human contestants, work cooperatively with a human partner to achieve a common goal, or supervise other players' activity.

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