After over seven years as a traditional superhero-themed subscription MMORPG, City of Heroes will transition to a free-to-play model later this year, publisher Paragon Studios announced today.

City of Heroes Freedom, as the initiative is being called, is
much more than just an extension of the current 14-day free trial
offered to new subscribers, the company says.

In fact, the team at Paragon has been working for about a year to figure
out the best way to make the transition in a way that "improves the
overall customer experience," executive producer Brian Clayton told
Gamasutra. "Frankly, if the customer experience isn't substantially
better than it is today, I don't think there's much of a reason to make
the change."

Clayton said the company is falling back on seven years worth of MMO
content created for the subscription game to provide a robust experience
for free players. Roughly 80 percent of what's available today to paid
subscribers today will be part of the free game after the transition, he
said, with free players able to create two characters from among eight
archetypes and take them all the way to level 50 using over 100 power
sets.

"It's easy for us to make a majority of [our existing] content freely
available to free players and reserve a large percentage for for our VIP
customers and have both be compelling in their own way," Clayton said.
"For some of these other MMOs that are only 2 to 3 years in, I feel like
a number of them may be just they might just be flipping a switch to
change up the business model."

While free players will be able to purchase some specialty items a la
carte, Paragon hopes to eventually entice them to purchase an optional
monthly VIP subscription. which will earn them a monthly stipend of
in-game currency, as well as access to exclusive rewards such as powers,
costumes, and in-game features unavailable to the free players.

VIP players will also be the only ones that can access difficult
late-game Incarnate trials and signature story arcs -- monthly sets of
missions that let you team up with signature characters in "epic story
moments" that have "major repercussions" for the game universe, Clayton
said.

Improving The New Player Experience

Freedom will launch alongside a number of client-side improvements designed to make the City of Heroes
experience as inviting as possible to new players, now that the monthly
fee barrier has been lowered, Clayton said. These include a streamlined
store, in-client user registration, and a new tiered download system
that lets players fiddle with the character creator and tutorial while
the rest of the game content loads. "Within five minutes of clicking
that button saying, 'Hey, I want to play,' players will be in there able
to check out the costume creation system," Clayton said.

That tutorial will also be revamped as a set of new co-operative lessons
that teaches players through actions rather than "walls of text,"
Clayton said. While the old tutorial simply threw seven years worth of
content at new players all at once, that education will now be spread
out across the first 20 or so levels of the game.

"The old strategy - and I think a lot of MMOs still fall into this
strategy - was to squeeze everything into the first 15 minutes of
gameplay," he said. "I think that first and foremost we're trying to put
an experience in place where new players and perhaps more casual MMO
customers can grok what the game is without being overwhelmed with all
the depth that there is."

Keeping Old Players Happy

Before the free-to-play transition, current, paid subscribers will begin
earning loyalty points that can be used for special items and abilities
in the new game, Clayton said. Once the transition takes place, those
paid subscriptions will become VIP subscriptions automatically, and
players won't lose any of the items or characters they've built up in
the past.

Those longtime players could well be worried that a horde of
free-to-play newcomers will ruin the community they've built over the
years, though. But Clayton said Paragon has taken pains to make sure
that doesn't happen by locking free players out of features such as
global chat, in-game mail and forum use. Subscribers will also be able
to hang out in VIP-only servers if they want to stay away from the
free-to-play riff-raff.

"We really want to keep the experience premier for our VIP players,"
Clayton said. "Certainly we've seen in some of our hybrid business
models that our free players have sort of had the run of the place. ...
Once [players] make a commitment to subscribe or purchase some things
from the store, there's a much better chance they're a gamer that wants
to really enjoy City of Heroes and not some gold spammer or griefer."

"It's Still A Subscription-based Business Model"

Even though going free-to-play might seem like a radical change for one
of the longest-running current MMOs out there, Clayton emphasized that
the move is being made from a position of strength for the company.
While he wouldn't discuss precise subscription numbers, he did say City of Heroes had "as far as I know, the highest player retention in the industry."

Rather than saving a faltering subscription model, Clayton said, Freedom
is aimed at growing the game's customer base by lowering barriers to
entry that may have prevented people from joining in the past.

"I think it's very difficult for other types of entertainment to compete
with the persistence and the compelling offerings of an MMO," Clayton
said. "But I think people are daunted they need to purchase a box, and
then there's monthly fee, and then how do they find their friends, and
all those sorts of things, and where do they get the product?"

"At end of day it's still a subscription based business model but it's a
new opportunity to allow more people to try before they buy, and really
have a full compelling experience before fully investing in the
uber-VIP experience," he continued.