City of Heroes: Missing Worlds and NCsoft negotiating resurrection of IP

While it may not be a done deal at the moment, there may be hope for fans of City of Heroes yet.

According to Missing Worlds president Nate Downes, he and others had been in contact with NCsoft to discuss the possibility of acquiring City of Heroes.

Downes said a proposal is in place, and while not in its "final form", it would allow the CoH IP to be "spun into its own company."

I'll just let his words tell the negotiation process, verbatim, below:

"The CoH IP would be spun to its own company, to handle licensing. This company would itself license the existing engine from NCSoft for the creation of a maintenance mode, using a binary copy of the i23 server. The existing user database and characters are not part of this arrangement at this time, nor is the source code.

"An arrangement is to be made to license the trademarks to the various Plan Z projects, CoT, Valiance and H&V, to create a family connection, and to allow each to drop the “Spiritual” portion of successor. This means they can make references to the original game if desired, and to enable the expansion of partnerships. This could be expanded for any of them, should the desire be there.

"An arrangement is also to be made for the Atlas Park Revival project. As part of the informal agreement we have with them, they would be given an official stamp of approval, and the CoT game build would be licensed to them, to create a kind of “CoH 1.5” and migrate people off of the classic game engine before it finally becomes unsuitable (we expect this to happen around when Windows 9 is released, due to binary compatibility). This can be done because both APR and CoT run on Unreal Engine 4.

"By being its own firm, the licensing company can also pursue other avenues which were unavailable before."

Downes said terms, adjustments, ideas, and limits are still being discussed, and will probably continue until a deal is signed.

"The whole thing may fall apart," he said. "For all we know, everything done so far has been nothing but a delaying tactic so they can say once again that they tried to work with the community to no avail. But until such time that becomes clear, we will continue forward in good faith.

"They could have ignored us from day 1, but they did not. They may not operate at the pace we would like, but they are at the pace they are comfortable with. At this point, the ball is in their court."

So there you have it, City of Heroes fans. Hopefully, the deal goes through to every side's advantage.

The City of Heroes spiritual successor City of Titans was a successfully crowdfunded MMO put together by fans at Missing Worlds media, but this here is completely unrelated to City of Titans.

City of Heroes, was the first superhero MMO to land om the scene back in 2004. NCsoft shut the game servers down on December 1, 2012 . The firm had  announced in August 2012 the MMO would be shuttered along with Paragon Studios due to a “realignment of company focus and publishing support.”

Thanks, Massively.