I am waiting anxiously for what they can produce, but I would not be expecting to get the original COH or even a close facsimile from them.
Consider how much City of Heroes has changed from launch to the end of 2012. Had City of Heroes itself continued along until 2014 or 2015, say, plus or minus when I would expect to see playable code from either project,
City of Heroes itself would not have been a close facsimile of City of Heroes. So I think asking either project to recreate CoH exactly as it was on October 31st 2012 is asking way too much. We didn't even hold the devs themselves to that standard.
Consider how different City of Heroes was at shutdown from when I first started playing it shortly after launch.
- Crafting (inventions)
- Auction Houses
- Villain content
- Side switching
- Bases
-
Icon- Respecification (planned, but did not exist at launch)
- Flashback
- Quick content (newspaper missions)
- Turnstile content (incarnate trials, special event trials, other trials)
- Zone events
- PvP
- post level-cap progression (Incarnate progression)
- Player generated content (Architect)
- microtransaction based content
And we know that additional major changes were coming to the game post I23. LUA scripting of missions and events was being introduced which was going to create enormous opportunities to make more complex and interesting content. LUA scripting had the potential to be a larger game-changer than inventions, auction houses, flashback, and incarnate content
combined.
Some people really want to know if they will be able to play their Fire Blaster exactly as it was when the game shutdown in either Plan Z offering. Probably not. But that Fire Blaster also didn't play the same way as it did in I10, say, before the D2.0 changes. It didn't play the same prior to I5 and the D1.0 changes.
It would not have played the same in Issue 24 due to the I24 blaster changes. Most of us who played City of Heroes have gotten used to the fact that the technical elements change, but - for most of us if not all of us - the core feel of the game remained the same, and that's why we continued to play it. I think its only fair to the Plan Z developers to reserve judgment on their efforts until we can actually play them. Very few of us are really capable of accurately judging a game from a written description of it.
Plus, I think its interesting that some players are reluctant to play a "spiritual successor" that isn't identical to City of Heroes, but more willing to play a clone that replicates Issue 3 (SEGS). Nothing against SEGS, but Issue 3 is probably more different from the game we were playing at shutdown than either Plan Z offering is likely to be.