City of Heroes

City of Heroes (CoH) was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game which was developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCSOFT. The game was launched in North America on April 28, 2004, and in Europe by NCsoft Europe on February 4, 2005, with English, German and French servers. In the game, players created super-powered player characters that could team up with others to complete missions and fight criminals belonging to various gangs and organizations in the fictional Paragon City. Twenty-three free major updates for City of Heroes were released before its shutdown. The final live update, "Where Shadows Lie", was released on May 31, 2012. On August 31, 2012, NCsoft terminated its Paragon Studios development team, ending all production on City of Heroes with the last day of services on November 30, 2012. In April 2019, source code capable of running a City of Heroes server was distributed widely. This made it possible to create City of Heroes servers outside the direct purview of NCSoft and revived interest in the game, which by then had been out of development for more than six years. As of October 2022, NCSoft has not moved to have servers based on this source code shut down. Production history