City of Heroes’ Homecoming team, having been under official license by NCsoft for the last two weeks, issued an address to players on its forums this afternoon, diving into its philosophy and teasing its next content update, the latter of which has been an absurdly long time coming.
“[A]fter the events of 2019, City of Heroes can never truly go away again,” the team writes. “But the game simply existing wasn’t good enough, in our books; it was already sunset once, and we didn’t want to risk that happening again – potentially over and over. The community deserves a safe and stable long-term home – not uncertainty, division, and a lack of continuity.”
“That’s why we began our talks to acquire a license in 2019 – to secure that future for everyone. It’s been a long road, and we know some of our decisions have seemed questionable or frustrating at times. We know we’ve made some mistakes and missteps along the way, but our motive has never changed. Everything we’ve done has been in service of that original goal. And it worked. Nearly five years later, the talks succeeded and Homecoming is now officially licensed to host City of Heroes. We’re back for real now – and it’s still a bit surreal!”
As noted during the initial announcement, Homecoming is working with some of the remaining rogue servers behind the scenes within the confines of its City Council program to make those servers, well, less rogue, bringing them under the Homecoming umbrella. The first to join the existing five live HC servers will be Victory, though it won’t be “for at least a couple of months.”
In the meantime, the next update, which the team has been teasing for a while now, is Issue 27 Page 7, and it’s finally on the verge of moving to the open beta test server. Does this mean the patch notes are finally live? No it does not, but there are five screenshots to tide you over, as well as a promise that the notes are 70 pages long. “This update is huge – new power sets, new story arcs (including the finale of Piecemeal’s story), zone updates, new customization options, enemy group updates, and our next Advanced Difficulty Task Force: Lady Grey.”
“[T]here’s so much more to come in Issue 28 and beyond, including 🌊 & 🐮,” the group concludes – that’s a water and cow emoji, if you’re wondering. No, I don’t know what it means, but my new headcanon is water armor and barnyard animals Mastermind, and you can’t tell me otherwise.
