NCSOFT has granted the popular Homecoming fan server a license to host City of Heroes, finally bringing the game back in an official capacity.
Launched in 2004, the City of Heroes is a superhero MMO that allows players to don some brightly colored spandex and dive into the comic-book inspired Paragon City as the fully customizable hero of their dreams.
Centered around fighting supervillains and capturing criminals across the open-world, it had a fairly successful run with its fair share of major content updates before it was shut down by publisher NCSOFT on November 30, 2012.
Thanks to the tireless work of a sizable community of extremely dedicated fans, however, the game continued to live on with various underground fan projects attempting to keep things afloat despite the lack of official support.
One of the most significant of these was City of Heroes: Homecoming, which saw fans host the game as a free-to-play title and even continue development themselves by creating all-new content updates.
Although there had always been the looming threat of NCSOFT stepping in to shut these efforts down, it appears that Homecoming has been given the official seal of approval according to a recent post on the fan community’s forum.
The post states that “NCSOFT has officially granted Homecoming a license to host City of Heroes” and assures players that their “accounts and characters are safe.”
It also points towards a pretty bright future for the game, claiming that “development of new content will continue” which will be made available for free and “funded entirely through donations.”
There is a little more detail later in the thread, where the forum’s moderator explained that, while the license will allow Homecoming to “operate a City of Heroes server and further develop the game,” NCSOFT will retain ownership of the intellectual property.
This is incredible news for anyone who has been sticking with the game since support ended and it could even manage to attract some new players with the prospect of new content on the horizon.
For some top online games that you can play right now, see our guides to the best free games or the best co-op games.
