City of Heroes: Homecoming

City of Heroes is home to an entire multiverse of superpowered beings in a stunning, 3D graphical world. Players take on the roles of heroes, villains, vigilantes, and rogues, while both saving and destroying worlds. City of Heroes was known for its groundbreaking level of customization, its highly community-focused features, and its abundant developer-player interaction and feedback. Homecoming: City of Heroes has been in operation since April 2019 with a wide variety of quality-of-life features such as custom XP rates, alignment switching at will, all costume parts available on character creation, all vestiges of the Paragon Store removed, and a new player archetype, Sentinels. Homecoming has five player shards, four testing shards, and the largest community of players today.

Homecoming is the unofficial revival of NCSoft's City of Heroes, based on an image of the last source code before the game was shut down, plus seven years of adaptation work. The servers are maintained and GM'd by a volunteer team, supported by donations. While NCSoft has not given explicit permission or license, neither has it shut the Homecoming servers down. Negotiations announced in 2019 to 2020 have so far not yielded any announcement, but the general understanding is that it is permitted to operate so long as donations are accepted for the payment of operating costs only. Other than those donations, accepted monthly outside of the game, no payment is required or accepted from players. As of May 2021, the game remains under continued development by the Homecoming Team and has an active playerbase (1,219 players online the morning of this writing).