That's expensive - it's not like they could just upload the whole thing to Github, no review, nothing.īesides, the people who don't want to pay for a new game are people who you should spend zero time pleasing - they're not willing to support whatever endeavour you're embarking upon, so why spend all this time and effort putting something out there for them to enjoy? Sit on it: cost zero. Instead you'd have to pay a lot of money for lawyers and engineers to review the code, etc. I think their business rationale is totally sound: why not just sit on it, and people who want that same experience come to you for their new work? If you could somehow relive your favorite concert forever, rather than buy more tickets, artists would be devastated. Most people don't even realize it exists because it comes around at a very high level and is basically optional at that point.īecause people who might otherwise buy a new game, by the same people, would instead play the old one. That should have been something more of the game was built around. It's a shame that the Nemesis system still takes far too many levels to unlock, because had they found ways to wrap that into even low level storytelling, that would have been a big deal. One interesting thing Champions Online attempted (and didn't quite succeed at) was letting players build their own main villain. As a player you could see some of that problem directly too in the way Cryptic kept rebalancing the levels of zones to try to offer more variety to early players, more introduction to other plot lines in the game in the idea that maybe you'd fine the one that most interested you/your player faster.

Champions Online is much more a loose association of vignettes and interesting settings with less of an over-arcing story. Paragon City of CoH/CoV had the opportunity of being designed as a singular place with a natural story flow built to roughly coincide with player level flow. It's decades of tabletop adventures that go in all sorts of directions (some light almost parody, some power fantasies, some mixtures in between). Part of the problem with the IP is more that it doesn't have a main villain or follow a central storyline. He does have a somewhat strong arc in the central hub city of the game, that was briefly played up in one of the versions of the tutorial. Destroyer isn't the main villain of Champions or of Champions Online.

Play city of heroes private server