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Earlier tonight I found out that the City of Heroes/Villains MMORPG, that I spent a good while playing back in the 2000s, was released as open-source code and that there are current active servers for it. Basically, you can now play it for entirely free.
I've been wondering what game I might be able to pull GWF members into playing together, and a fun MMORPG that's basically guaranteed to run on any current PC for free seems like a great candidate.
Elevator pitch; City of Heroes is a superhero-themed MMORPG where you create and customize your own hero—or villain—with unique powers, costumes, and backstory. Set in the sprawling, comic book-inspired Paragon City, you team up with others to battle evil, complete story-driven missions, and level up by fighting gangs, monsters, and sinister masterminds. The game focuses heavily on character customization, fast-paced combat, and cooperative gameplay, letting you live out your own superhero saga in an ever-evolving online world.
I spent a little while rolling through the tutorial and testing things out, and it seems pretty easy get things set up and playing.
Basically you just need to register at the server-host forums below;
Here is the getting started guide;
Basically once you have a forum account, it should prompt you to create a game account which is just agreeing to their TOS and so on. Then you can download the launcher and get playing.
I picked server Victory since the load was light, so I'd recommend anyone wanting to try pick that too. That way we can get a GWF league of superheroes going.
I thought about going through all the character creation options and explaining those, but there are literally so many different types of heroes you can build, so many different looks, etc. that it's more fun to just play around and see what you end up creating.
My first character was a super-reflexes Tanker with claws that I made look like a dinosaur. Of course.

(Graphics are of course super dated since it was released in 2004, but you can at least probably run them all on ultra at this point.)
So come play superheroes with me. And feel free to post your character creations, etc. in this thread.
I've been wondering what game I might be able to pull GWF members into playing together, and a fun MMORPG that's basically guaranteed to run on any current PC for free seems like a great candidate.
Elevator pitch; City of Heroes is a superhero-themed MMORPG where you create and customize your own hero—or villain—with unique powers, costumes, and backstory. Set in the sprawling, comic book-inspired Paragon City, you team up with others to battle evil, complete story-driven missions, and level up by fighting gangs, monsters, and sinister masterminds. The game focuses heavily on character customization, fast-paced combat, and cooperative gameplay, letting you live out your own superhero saga in an ever-evolving online world.
I spent a little while rolling through the tutorial and testing things out, and it seems pretty easy get things set up and playing.
Basically you just need to register at the server-host forums below;
Homecoming
Homecoming is a free-to-play, officially-licensed private server for City of Heroes
forums.homecomingservers.com
Here is the getting started guide;
Basically once you have a forum account, it should prompt you to create a game account which is just agreeing to their TOS and so on. Then you can download the launcher and get playing.
I picked server Victory since the load was light, so I'd recommend anyone wanting to try pick that too. That way we can get a GWF league of superheroes going.
I thought about going through all the character creation options and explaining those, but there are literally so many different types of heroes you can build, so many different looks, etc. that it's more fun to just play around and see what you end up creating.
My first character was a super-reflexes Tanker with claws that I made look like a dinosaur. Of course.

(Graphics are of course super dated since it was released in 2004, but you can at least probably run them all on ultra at this point.)
So come play superheroes with me. And feel free to post your character creations, etc. in this thread.