City of Heroes (CoH) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing computer game base on the superhero comic book genre, developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCsoft. The game was launched in North America on April 28, 2004 and in Europe (by NCsoft Europe) on 4 February 2005 with English, German and French language servers. On October 31, 2005 the game's first sequel, City of Villains, was launched, allowing users to play as supervillains. Twelve free major updates (Issues) for City of Heroes have been released since its launch. The latest update, "Issue 12: The Midnight Hour" went live on May 20, 2008. The issue introduced epic archetypes to villains and added various powers and gameplay tweaks.