Paragon Reborn

I had a lot of fun tonight logging into a game I'd never thought I'd log into again... Well, that's not entirely true. After City of Heroes got shutdown, not even 2 years after I first started playing the game, we had Icon soon enough. Icon, for those unfamiliar, was a way to get into the character creator and enter the game as a stand alone. Not really into the game, just the world, really.

Paragon City using Icon is a lonely place. Sure, eventually the NPCs where brought back, which was a nice touch, but no game play, no one to role play with, or just chat. But I still used it, to create characters for my tabletop games, and some times just for the ambient noise when I have trouble sleeping. The release of Paragon Chat has changed that. No, we still can't do missions, but we can chat and role play and run a costume contest for the fun of it every now and again.

The shutdown was hard on a lot of folks. It was hard on me because I was just starting, after a year and a half as a subscriber, starting to really learn the game... and break out of my shell. I'm generally a shy person, so spent most of my time in CoH soloing. The few team situations I found myself in early on didn't work out well. And then I found Virtue...

Virtue was known as the role player's server, and I've been doing table top role playing since the early days of AD&D. It was great, I started teaming more, but then, before I got myself truly immersed into the RP community a dark cloud rolled over the city of Paragon. NCSoft announced we had 3 months to live.

With that announcement came a variety of responses. Some played more, some couldn't bare to log in, we had in game rallies, we had the last surviving developer at Paragon Studios spawning tentacles in Atlas Park. Atlas Park 33 was born, and save for a few times it crashed said Dev relaunched it for us every time.

Tentacles in Atlas Park

And I became obsessed with getting my main character to 50. Not only am I a role player, but I'm was an Altaholic as well. In just under 2 years I had generated some 200 or so characters. For me to go an entire 3 months logging in as just one character was ... well, impossible. But for 3 months Willowbright was on probably 75-90% of the time I was in game. The final week she finally broke the big 50, on a DFB of all things. I didn't even get to play any of the level 50 content, I'd hit my goal, it was time to play some of the alts I'd been neglecting.

So, tonight Willowbright was reborn, as Willow Wind. (Never did like the name Willowbright... it was just the first acceptable Willow name that I found.) Also seeing the light of day for the first time was the City of Heroes version of Timelord Tom. It was a lot of fun, chatting and listening to Leo and his crew of misfits as they were livestreaming on Youtube.

How many of my old characters will I recreate? I don't know. I didn't save all my character costumes. Wish I had. Probably a few of the ones I can remember, but then I'll probably be making new ones, too.

Saved costumes and a bit of Demo editing magic...

One thing I do want to do is a weekly Paragon Radio Gallifrey broadcast, as Timelord Tom of course. It will probably only be a couple of hours a week, as I have a pretty full schedule of real life things during much of the week, and I already do a 3 hours show Monday nights in Utherverse. I'm thinking Tuesday nights from 8pm until 10pm EST. Either that, or Saturdays in the afternoon, though weekends can cause chaos that would prevent me from doing so every now and again. Anyone else have any plans to do scheduled events?

Anyways.. it's past midnight here, and I work in the morning.

See you in Paragon City... next time we're logged into Paragon Chat at the same time. Be sure to say hi.