I can understand what you're saying might be interesting to some people but the mere act of "photo-shopping" local images of long dead characters holds absolutely no fascination for me. Who's to judge whether I actually EARNED any of it for real all those years ago or not? Sure I could go through the motions of "recreating" a new set of local characters on this private little server of mine but it would not be truly "official" the same way it was on the original live CoH servers. I currently have pretty much all of the "info" I would need to do that stored away in various files/lists I've kept over the years. How difficult this would be would depend on how good the UI is I suppose.Įh, even if were possible to simply "hack" up fully loaded characters like that it'd still be semi-pointless from my point of view.
Grant the character xp to get to level 50, give yourself max veteran status, turn "on" whatever badges you want, unlock costume parts etc. Well, technically we should have complete control over the account and character files on our own "server", just as a dev would have, so if you wanted to recreate your mains, you would just give them the appropriate goodies directly, no need to play through the thousands of hours. I would still never bother to replay the thousands of hours it would take to "recreate" my original main badging characters, but I might just make a few disposable alts just to see how successful the whole thing turns out to be. To be perfectly honest if they actually "launched" something like what you're describing I'd probably load it up just to see what it looks like regardless. Well if they plan to let "anyone" generate modded content to "add" to the basic game that might actually motivate me to give it a try but like you said it would be interesting to see how they would accomplish/organize that.
I enjoy playing through older games every now and then (especially RPGs) and CoX, even frozen at Issue 23 or 24 beta, still has tons of content. Personally, I wouldn't mind revisiting CoX again for old time's sake. But if it gets out in the "wilds" of the internet there's not much NCSoft can do if people keep their heads down. It won't be endorsed by the SEGS team of course, and if people use it to create their own private servers then that's on them if NCSoft decides to do something about it. Of course, there will likely be a community effort to get Issue 24 CoX working again. It looks promising, though likely still years from being "playable." They plan on letting players make their own content, which should be interesting to see just how they plan on implementing this. To be perfectly honest by the time CoH had shut down I had pretty much played through -all- of the game's content multiple times (in service to my badging obsession) so the idea of playing it again without much hope of ever getting any significant updates doesn't appeal to me at this point. I just can't see myself wanting to ever devote serious time to it, even if they somehow managed to recreate a perfect "simulation" of Issue 24 CoH. Again I wish them luck for what it's worth. The second they try to make a dime off of whatever they're doing is when they would most likely be screwed. Well maybe if they don't try to "sell" anything they're working on then they might have a chance.
I agree with you Lothic, I think if a solid emulator had come out many years ago with the content from the final issues people would be playing it but now it is hard to view that project as a shining beacon of hope for the future. Their product would be able to load it, but they can't give the actual content away without putting a big bullseye on them.
If/when they come out with something playable they have said they'll never actually release CoH content, you would have to find that yourself, as a way of protecting themselves from lawsuit. that just happens to be able to interface with the old CoH content. They basically are making a front end that could run all sorts of stuff. They aren't directly touching anything produced by NCsoft. They have been careful about protecting themselves legally.