So here’s the plot of the latest City of Heroes mission: Samantha is really upset–so upset she has a blue emo tear stain–because her cousin Jimmy died last year and the crew of same whack-job TV show called Voices from Beyond claims he has a message for her. Your job is to go to the studio offices and get to the bottom of things. Sure enough **spoilers!!!!11!!!1!!** the Grips and Supposed Psychics are holding the ghost of Cousin Jimmy hostage so they can make big bucks shelling out secrets of the departed.  Free Jimmy so he can RIP, take out the Producer of the show, Roger Hackleby, and you have effectively saved the day.

Does that sound totally lame or what? Yeah it does, and I’ll tell you why—I wrote it.

Issue 14 is not just another cool free update for City of Heroes–it’s a first for MMOs. The Mission Architect system gives players story arc creation tools that were originally intended to replace the dated spreadsheet system the developers were using. That was before lead designer on the project, Joe Morrissey, thought it would be fun to let everybody have a go. Both Joe, and Matt Miller, the senior lead designer on City of Heroes, were in San Francisco at the Bently Reserve (architecturally interesting its own right) this week to give us a sneak peak.

Unlike most games with level creation systems, City of Heroes’ is integrated into the world of the game. Every zone with buildings will soon have a branch of Architect Entertainment, a virtual entertainment complex for heroes and villains alike. Logging into a terminal gives you access to the browse and play list, where you can sort shared content by rating (up to five stars), length, and moral slant. You can also search by title, id number, or designer. Meta, but I like it!

Another tab, called My Creations, lets you see the arcs saved locally on your computer (about 100KB a piece), as well as the up-to-three you have already unleashed on the CoH community. Using tools nearly identical to what is arguably still the best character creation system in an MMO to date, you can design your own NPCs and enemies (from their power sets to their physical appearance)  to populate your missions, but let’s take a look at the three basic steps to creating a story arc:

Story Settings

Give your arc an epic title or no one will want to play it! Tell us what sort of heroic/dastardly deeds you’ll be expected to perform. Who (or what—you’re allowed to use objects, like that awesome radio) is the contact? What clues do they give you? You can have up to five missions in an arc (which means up to fifteen missions published at one time).

Mission Settings

There are around 1,000 different maps you can use spanning pretty much every location in the game. Remember those caves that lead into offices? You can totally use that. Any enemy group in the game can be
plopped in there to fight against, but as I mentioned, you can also create your own.  You can even make a custom ringleader and have his underlings be generic gangsters.

Mission Details

There are ten different goals you can choose from—pretty much the typical type of missions you would expect: kill all, fight a boss, rescue someone, collect objects, and the like, but you can chain them together to create stories like the one Joe demoed for us about a group of News Breakers (i.e. us, faithfully recreated in the game world as super-powered game journos) being held hostage by the Developers so they couldn’t write anything bad about their horrible game. First you had to rescue all your allies, and then you had to “hurt The Bottomline.” The creator writes all the dialogue for these encounters, and even set the animations. You can have enemies just stand around or they could be patrolling a specific area on look-out.

There are so many options here it might hurt you brain, but every feature has a handy ? button that explains what it does and what you might want to do with it. I pretty much never putz with level creators because even if they aren’t too technical, they just seem too technical, but with this system I was easily able to put together and test my silly mission (with four custom characters) in just a couple hours.

Since the beta started there have been almost 400 arcs uploaded, and once the system goes live thousands will surely follow, but what are the incentives to playing them? Turns out, pretty much the same incentives to playing anything else in the game. You get equivalent experience and influence (currency), plus tickets (think Skeeball), which are redeemable for prizes in the form of enhancements, salvage, recipes for the invention system. You can also choose to buy cheaper random rolls instead of saving up for something specific.

In addition to just having a lot of customer service in place to make sure the content is acceptable, there are a couple factors that encourage users to make great stories. First of all, there is the chance to get picked up for the Hall of Fame, or even Developer’s Choice. Any arc you create that gets added to the Hall of Fame stays published while being removed from your limited three, allowing you to make more kick-ass content. Plus, every time someone plays a mission you created, you earn tickets, too!

I hope the Mission Architect positively explodes. The update goes live next month and in April a new PC and Mac compatible Architect Edition boxed version of the game goes out. I definitely recommend you check it out even if you haven’t been a City of Heroes player up to this point–this is one update worthy of any MMO gamer’s attention.

Tags: City of Heroes, ncsoft

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2 Comments » DavidGX on February 27, 2009 3:55 pm I remember playing CoH. Fun game, but the quests were so damn boring /repetitive. Go and clear out generic building #2352. Go and clear out generic building #9942 Etc, etc. Emily Balistrieri on February 28, 2009 10:24 am Yeah, there was a lot of that. It seems like some of the stuff they’ve been adding lately (flashbacks, etc) have been pushing story–especially this update! There’s no excuse to not have a fascinating storyline now ;D RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.