No, my reason is that it didn't beta well. Period. For what reason, I can only speculate (which I did). And while costume and faces aren't insurmountable they will cost time and money to correct. This was before NCsoft bought the Freem 15 from Cryptic. As it was the team working on CoH/CoV didn't have the manpower to even get Issue 7 out in a timely fashion (it took 8 months), do you think at the time Cryptic was interested in slaving off another couple of artists to knock out some better faces and "eastern" costume parts? It seemed Cryptic were more interested in keeping NCsoft from finding out about the Marvel MMO they were secretly working on. Other than some "local" signature characters being designed, it was just a language port.
Whoa, back the truck up, Cryptic wasn't hired by Marvel until the end of that year. The first time I heard about Marvel Universe Online was around 1999. I would periodically check what was going on with it only to find very little progress had been made. The Wikipedia entry on Marvel Universe Online lacks a lot of information because that game passed through the hands of a number studios until Marvel, finally fed up of not having any results, took the game to the guys they tried to sue. This was nearing the end of 2006. I can't really say when Microsoft came into the picture.
The Wikipedia entry on "City of Hero" is the extent of the data I have on that but, while the game would likely have been under the Cryptic banner due to the engine, I'm fairly certain "City of Hero" had it's own development team in Korea separate from the Freem 15. Knowing how short they keep the leash on their subsidiaries, do you really think NCSoft would have entrusted a release into their own market to "foreigners"? Even a simple language port? If you have data that concludes that it was entirely in the hands of the U.S. team, please correct me.
Given recent history, I'm far from convinced that NCSoft has any idea what does or does not constitute a worthy investment. Of course, it's very difficult to see with your head clear up your ass.
You might be on to something there. Although out of curiosity in that theory, I noticed you excluded COH from the phenomenon. Why so?
Because City of Heroes had something. I can't put my finger on it. Put aside the fact that CoH has the greatest gaming community in the history of mankind; other games are online, other games have chat systems, other games have character creators, other games have super heroes, etc. Of course, no other game did these things quite as well as City of Heroes, but they still have these things.
Except for the PvP, which I was never really a fan of, as video games go; City of Heroes was the most elegant tool I have come across.
There is a pile of NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, DS, PSOne, PS2, PS3 and PC games currently at my feet that is a testament to the notion that no other game in the world can provide for me what CoH did in a single package and I don't think I'm the only one feeling this. At some point during development, CoH was going to be a success pretty much no matter what. It could have been a WoW killer; the only thing Warcraft has is that the gameplay itself is addictive, besides that the game is utter garbage (That's a character creator?! Ha!). I'm of the opinion that NCSoft thoroughly failed City of Heroes as a publisher and I've seen enough that I can't be swayed from that opinion even at gunpoint. I'd rather take the bullet than say that NCSoft knew what they were doing. City of Heroes has everything you could want in an MMO. I can't say the same of any other game I know of.
However, the most likely reason why I excluded City of Heroes is because;
It's home.
I miss it. Besides CoH, there's only one other thing in the world that I miss more and nothing is making it okay.
It's been a very long 60 days. (yes, I've been counting them.)
