Following on from some previous posts:
- In a City of Heroes / Villains (CoH/) livestream summary it has been confirmed that Cryptic Studios isn’t blocking CoH/V’s engine licence from being renewed – “the license was purchased in perpetuity for CoH and another unreleased project”; and
- Jim Hague, who worked on the never released CoH pen-and-paper RPG, has released the pre-City of Villains writing and story bible he received that shows the proposed narrative direction for the game at that time.
The other thing the livestream summary points out is that saving CoH/V will be very difficult, given the kind of agreements that would need to be made and the availability of investors / backers to provide the necessary funding.
World Class Villains 
What sort of agreements? What does that mean?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
By “agreements” I meant –
– NCsoft would need to agree to sell
– But then would come the question of what are they selling. Just the rights to the IP? The player database? All of Paragon Studios, including the office space?
– Who would go, given that NCsoft is already offering people new jobs within NCsoft studios?
– Need sign off from NCsoft Korea, which takes a lot longer
– What happens to all those in-game points people have paid for: does NCsoft refund them or are they passed as liabilities to the new owner? Or does NCsoft just wipe the points?
– And what happens with any existing contracts that may have been signed jointly with NCsoft and Paragon Studios, or that Paragon Studios may have been included in thanks to their NCsoft parent
– EDIT TO ADD: And apparently NCsoft has shuttered Paragon Studios, which would trigger various employment clauses and legal requirements. I’m not sure how easy it would be to unring that particular bell.
It’s not impossible, but it is complex.
I’m kind of glad the new project won’t see the light of day now, due to it using the same crappy engine CoH was stuck with. I love CoH, but the engine was always my least favorite part of the game. The thing performs like crap (compare performance of DCUO with CoH. Unreal 3 is a seriously great engine).
I’d characterize the saving of CoH to be not just difficult, but impossible. It isn’t going to happen. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I won’t be. Best we can hope for is the Titan Network to start a private server.