Is City of Heroes still active in 2025?

City of Heroes — no relation to Ship of Heroes — is a classic MMO, but is it still active in 2025? Well, technically, yes! The original launch of the game died back in 2012, taking with it the rich, satisfying gameplay of superheroes and supervillains clashing in a fictional setting. This action MMO brought to life the power to create your own superheroes or, for some people, to find ways to create characters from Marvel and DC and play them in this bright, colorful world. An MMO that I have incredibly fond memories of from its original launch, I’m glad it’s kind of still around.

Thanks to a private server, and the goodwill of NCSoft, City of Heroes is technically still active in 2025, though not in its original form. Your old account and characters won’t be there, but you can start over, with new content, to boot.

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Technically, City of Heroes is still active in 2025, thanks to a private server and NCSoft

Back in January 2024, City of Heroes Homecoming was given the green light thanks to NCSoft and was made into an officially licensed product. The private server already existed, but now it received the blessing of the original rights holders instead of hitting them with a cease-and-desist or litigation.

CoH is back, thanks to a dedicated private server, and NCSoft's blessing (Image via NCSoft)

As of this writing, there have been a few major updates to City of Heroes Homecoming in 2024, and hopefully, we’ll see further Issues in 2025. Issues are the major game updates that typically add more story and important content to the game. Since the game has been revived, several Issues have been added to the game.

In fact, there’s an update on the way, Issue 28 Page 2, which promises a wealth of changes to the game. It entered the testing phase back in May 2025 and will bring some serious updates. Sleep Powers are getting a revamp and a ton of balance changes. A major overhaul is coming to Kallisti Wharf, and new story arcs will arrive in the zone as well.

While it’s not the game you remember, that’s almost certainly both a good and bad thing. There have been some huge updates to the game to make it more friendly to a modern audience while keeping what made the game fun and popular in the first place. It’s still the premiere superhero MMO compared to other superhero MMOs that persist to this day, like DC Universe Online.

It’s also free to download, even if you didn’t own the original CoH and want to play and see what you missed out on. It’s a simple matter of downloading the client, making an account, and dropping in to play. So yes, City of Heroes is definitely still active in 2025.

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