The closing of City of Heroes hurt more than I thought it would. It hurt the night the lights went out, and it hurts now, a couple days later. I don't know if/when that hurt will go away, but I'm beginning to worry that it won't.
See, when the announcement was made, I kept telling myself that it was just a game. Sure, it was a game that was endlessly fun, it was a game I had come back to again and again over the course of six or seven years, but it was just a game. When the lights went out, there would still be Chrono Trigger to console me, y'know?
But I spent Friday night playing with four guys from an old SG that had kind of become defunct years ago. We grabbed four other random yahoos in Grandville, cranked the difficulty to +4/x8, and went to town on all the Longbow, Arachnos, and Malta we could find. It was like old times, and it was a blast. I spent the night joining Pinnacle for one last Mothership raid, which cannot help but be a whole mess of crazy and confusion and fun. I spent the night chatting with folks on Pinnbadges, reminding me why I had left Liberty to hang out with the cool kids. I spent the last fifteen minutes pounding Banished Pantheon in Dark Astoria with the first toon I ever rolled, role-playing the shit out of her, and when the lights went out she was in the middle of one last Total Focus, still one of the coolest animations in the game. And when the client closed, it hurt, and I knew the truth: this wasn't just a game. This was a community that I was a part of, and now it's just gone. The thing that brought us together isn't there anymore, and even though I've got an IRC channel I can chat with some folks on, and I've got some email addresses to keep in touch, and a couple of guys I've got the in-game handle for in The Secret World, the fact is I still feel rejected. I feel like a refugee, an outcast who was turned away at the gates and has been sentenced to wander in the wilderness. I had a place where I felt part of something, and even though it wasn't the biggest part of my life in the past seven years, now that I am no longer a part of it, it has still left a hole in me.
Yeah, Chrono Trigger is still there, and I still love the shit out of that game, but I haven't felt like playing it in the past couple of days. I know that this, too, shall pass, but right now? Right now I just wish I could be back in Praetoria, leading a BAF, or in Grandville, blasting the Arachnos Flyer, or in Croatoa, putting the beat on Jack again. Right now this wound is open. And I was not prepared for how deep it turns out to be.
