Whenever we write about the current crop of City of Heroes-inspired indie superhero MMORPGs, some of our commenters nearly always ponder whether it would be better for everyone if the three bigger studios pooled their resources, talent, and playerbases into one big game. Surely it would be better if they weren’t all competing with each other – or so the thought goes.
But following a pair of our articles earlier this week – one an exclusive from Ship of Heroes, the other a preview of Valiance Online’s map – key developers from those two games as well as City of Titans chimed in on Twitter to attempt to dispel the idea that they’re in any sort of competition to begin with.
“I wouldn’t call what we’re doing a race or battle personally,” Valiance Online tweeted out.
“We’re against the whole race/there can only be one mentality as well,” the City of Titans account agreed. “We really wish news sites would stop fueling that fire.” (That part appears to have been directed partly to the twitter account of the fledgling Marvel MMO, which we also covered last week.)
City of Titans Project Lead @warcabbit expanded the discussion to a straight up monologue (his word!) that’s worth a read for his perspective on NCsoft, City of Heroes, and the other superhero titles:
We got one opponent. It’s not NCSoft, it’s apathy. We believe, here. We’re making something the world needs, we’re looking at inspiring people to be the best they can be. We are willing to go hard, and fail, and get back up, and keep fighting.
As long as one of us is here? It’s not over.
It’s not about CoH. It’s about the spirit of CoH. About a positive community in a MMO. About the first MMO to encourage LGBT players, not ban them. About the first MMO to let you look how you wanted, play how you wanted, and with who you wanted.
I see people talking about how Storm or Wonder Woman or Spidey inspired them because they could see themselves in them, because there wasn’t someone out there besides that hero. How finding that hero was lighting for them. How it gave them hope, how it made them believe that they could be more than the obvious. Doctors. Teachers. Scientists. Businessmen. Anything. We want people to keep being inspired. And we want to fight for it.
We’re not gonna do that by tearing each other down.
All of you reading this, remember when you found comics, or video games. Remember how those pages felt the first time you opened them. Remember when you believed a person could be a hero, and you could do it too. It’s just paper. It’s just ink and art and staples. But it’s not. It’s a dream, of truth, and justice, and doing the right thing – and being more than yourself, more than what others see when they look at you. Hold that flame in your heart. Pass it on. That’s who we are.
So it may not be a race, but I doubt I’m alone in wishing they could move faster all the same!
