Apart from its brief announcement last week, City of Heroes’ Homecoming Team has been relatively quiet the past few months. Where once the rogue server group with over a hundred thousand players was patching almost too frequently to keep up with, forward movement abruptly stopped after the June patch even as the servers were upgraded and other private servers saw new content. In fact, at the beginning of July, we specifically asked the group where the patches had gone and what was next – and nobody would say anything on the record. (We asked this weekend too – they wouldn’t comment for this piece.)
Of course, last week we learned that the Homecoming servers had joined the NCsoft negotiations, and even the admins acknowledged their lapse. Either way, the drought appears to be over now, as yesterday the team patched up the beta server with both new content and critical upgrades for Mac players, who’d previously worried they’d be shut out of the game thanks to Apple’s OS updates.
“Mac OS X 10.15, codename Catalina, removes support for 32-bit applications. We have been hard at work for the last couple of months upgrading the client and all server components to 64-bit, while Manga has been working on a new version of Island Rum that uses the 64-bit version of Wine to run the game in Mac and Linux. This patch, fingers crossed, is the culmination of those efforts.”
For everyone else, there are multiple bug fixes, new costume patterns, buffs to snipes and stealth, and super buffs across the board for Dominators (fam, trust me when I confirm they needed it!). The patch does not include some of the new mission content you may have seen propagated elsewhere throughout the community, but we’re assuming that’s on deck too.
There’s a little bit of bad news if you’re a big fan of the NPCs contorting themselves upon death “arrest,” as we ourselves encountered during our last stream – recorded by MOP’s own Justin on his blog. The devs aim to “make it somewhat less likely for defeated enemies to be twisted into pretzels” by overhauling ragdoll parameters. Hopefully that means Mastermind pets too. RIP this dude.
Homecoming is seeking feedback for the update’s key points on the group’s forums before the patch hits the live servers, so head on over there to complain weigh in!
