Tropical, high-tech, water, nice beachfront properties, the works.Īgain, we weren’t there for a huge tour or backstory, so I’m going to have to do some reading up on all of this later, but I know I’m missing out on a lot.
I guess I was making too many assumptions on the name alone, because the zone - a series of connected islands - is like a cleaned-up Miami. Since I had never been in Nova Praetoria and was only passingly familiar with it from press releases, in my head it was some sort of modern Roman Empire, complete with pillars and columns and coliseums. All I knew was that this wasn’t your mama’s Clockwork any longer. Along the way, I bumped into these grotesque cyborgs that raised all sorts of questions that I had no time to explore. Just getting to Nova Praetoria was a bizarre experience of going through The Underground - a network of sewers and subway tunnels that I had never seen before either. Giving players the ability to switch allegiances and explore the more murky grey areas of comic book superheroes provided a much-needed third angle to the title - and one that I don’t see any of the upcoming superhero MMORPGs addressing. Unlike the “blueside” content of the Heroes and the “redside” content of the Villains, “goldside” exists in an interesting state of limbo that was a fascinating direction for the game with Going Rogue came out in 2010. That’s actually an area/expansion that I hadn’t ever encountered in the MMO to date, as it came out when I was on a break from the game. Last week our City of Heroes group assembled once more, this time for adventures in Nova Praetoria. I’d still be worried about the state of such an emulator, but… yeah, I’d play in a heartbeat. I think I’d rather NCsoft sell the game to a company that’d be interested in running it as a legit thing, but I’d be happy if someone managed to jury-rig WildStar up on an Amazon server and let us return to Nexus. Of course, the project I really want to see happen is a WildStar emulator. If they did go through, I’ll tell you that it would work a lot in the game’s factor to attract me. We’ve been waiting over a year now for the City of Heroes Homecoming group to work out a deal with NCsoft for actual ownership or official permission to run these servers, but I’ve getting more doubtful the longer these “talks” continue that it’s actually going to happen. None of these are deal-breakers - I have played City of Heroes, Chronicles of Spellborn, and Star Wars Galaxies emulators - but they do a lot to make me hesitate getting that invested into MMOs that could end up folding overnight if the team doesn’t pay the server bill, dissolves in a fight, or gets slapped with a C&D from the IP owners.
I feel likewise with Return of Reckoning, the Warhammer Online server that I keep promising myself I’m going to check out. It wasn’t that I was uninterested (nor am now), but that there are some yellow flags that warn me away. Last year’s revival of City of Heroes, amazing as it was, wasn’t enough to keep me coming back for too long. That’s pretty amazing.Īll of this gets my approval - I have no ethical or moral qualms about preserving shuttered MMOs - but I’ve also noticed that I am emotionally wary about getting invested in such games.
And not only can you play them again, but you can play them with thriving communities of modern day players.
Today, you can step back into games like Star Wars Galaxies, The Sims Online, and Earth & Beyond, even though these MMOs have been shuttered for many years now. There are so, so many of these out there, and while there’s not one for every dead MMO that exists, plenty of these former projects are being preserved with love and care by diehard fans. Rogue servers, as we call them at Massively OP. In the year of our good Lord 2020 A.D., there is certainly something to celebrate in the MMO scene: the rise and acceptance of emulators.