Development Gag: A long history of them. Just one example. A long-standing bug was that, if the game couldn't find the proper model to display for a hostage, it would use the first model on the list — a 5th ColumnMek Man. Fast forward several issues to two 5th Column Mooks discussing whether disguising robots in hard light holograms will work. And in an example of Cosmic Irony, said dialogue happened in the issue which broke that bug (now instead of a Mek Man there is another model, a 5th leader).
The new tutorial level for Going Rogue has been referred to as the "Praetorial".
The underground city of Orangebagel.
Certain terms for players who play "hybrid" character, like "scranker" for a player who plays a tank but acts like a scrapper, or vice-versa. More here.
Builds of the Arachnos Soldier elite archetype that stick mainly with the basic Wolf Spider powerset (without diving deeply into the Bane Spider or Crab Spider upgrade paths) are nicknamed "Huntsmen", after Arachnos' mid-level Mooks.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: This is actually an incredibly important game - for starters, it effectively made standard the idea of letting the player have full control over the appearance of their avatar in MMOs, which even bled into many non-MMOs - but the way NCSoft shut it down led to one of the biggest preservation panics in the history of interactive entertainment, as the original game simply couldn't be experienced any longer, and the loss of the servers took immense amounts of character work with it. There were various emulation projects that attempted to put together a semblance of the game as it was, but with limited success. However, this all changed in April 2019, where news emerged that a fully functional server had been running for the past six years, but was kept secret from the world at large. The code of that server leaked within several days of this discovery, and several unofficial servers are now up. NCSoft has publicly disapproved of the leak, but doesn't appear to have taken active effort to pull servers down yet. 2024 has given an official response to the rogue servers, by licensing one subtitled "Homecoming", giving them their blessing to continue operations.
Apparently, Jack Emmert (the lead developer) was planning on implementing a skills system. This never came to be, with the Invention System instead.
There were plans for a vast Expanded Universe, some of which was told with comics and two books titled Web of Arachnos and Freedom Phalanx. However, a third book detailing the events of the Ritki War was in development. They were also planning to have a TV series and a movie. Obviously, that all got shelved when the game was shut down.
On a broader scale, City of Heroes was released about a decade before the big superhero entertainment boom and cancelled on the edge when superheroes became the big thing in entertainment, just months after The Avengers broke all kinds of records at the box office. If it managed to last a little longer, and was supported by NCSoft, CoH could've very well gotten a new lease on life and the rumored sequels would've propelled the series to further success. One can only wonder...
In 2018, former developer C.W. Bennett aka pohsyb stated that a proper sequel aptly called City of Heroes 2 was indeed proposed to NC Soft, but they were uninterested in supporting it because they wanted something more "MMOEy" (ie something with much more grind than City of Heroes). They were actually in the pre-production phases with City of Heroes 2, along with two other games, namely a futuristic superhero game set in London and a survival game. All of this got canned when NCSoft pulled the plug entirely.
There were, of course, stories that never got to be told because of the game's shuttering:
The big one was the arrival of the Battalion, the "Coming Storm" that Ouroboros had been warning about for years. It had started with the revamped tutorial, and the main story was to span four issues (25-28), culminating with the arrival of the long-expected Moon Base. Lady Grey was originally intended to be a Battalion spy, but they had changed their mind and were going to make Steven Sheridan the spy instead.
A story was planned where Serafina helped Scirocco break free of his curse and become a hero along with Ice Mistral.
There were loose plans for Tyrant to become the new Statesman.
Miller, Bianco, and several others had attracted enough investors that they had begun the process of buying Paragon Studios outright from NC Soft. For unknown reasons, the purchase fell apart almost at the last minute (Miller has said it was literally down to one NC Soft executive refusing to sign which killed the deal).
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