Friday, April 10, 2009

I Have Seen the Future

... and it looks good. City of Heroes recently released Issue 14 which features the new Mission Architect system. This lets people create their own missions that other players can play through. What a great idea to allow an infinite amount of content to be created. I've already played through a few missions that are quite clever (and, yes, of course, a few that aren't.)

I had fun creating my own mission (arc id: 28566) called "You Wouldn't Steal a Car." You, as the hero, must travel into a warehouse and stop the villainous Copywrong and his minions from distributing pirated DVDs! He's stealing movies! I know, it's terrible (gasp). Oh, and he might be putting subliminal messages on them that brainwash the viewers and thereby amassing an army of mindless drones. But, seriously, people should pay for those movies. PLEASE STOP HIM!

5 comments:

Ysharros said...

I'll try that out! Mine's "Catnapped!" if you should have an interest, but I'm not hawking it particularly hard.

I'm a little disappointed (ok, I /ragequit the architect yesterday) about the ridiculously inflated difficulty of the bad guys -- on easy mode, they're already 3x as hard as normal mobs, and med/hard modes are "You're dead: save/quit/reload?"

But still, power to the people!

Lars said...

I'll have to try yours out. Mine is rather short, mostly just a learning exercise to see how it works. There isn't a whole lot to it yet. Perhaps I'll expand it into a full fledged mission arc someday! I've been spending most of my time playing everyone else's missions.

I wish EQ2 had a feature like this...

Ysharros said...

... I was just about to ask what your handle is... till I realised the missions use the @global name now, for comments.

Duh :D

Chris F said...

I love giving more options for fun for players, but it just reeks of "we don't want to hire our own quest designers because you guys can probably do a better job anyway and save us money to boot".

Are their any in game rewards for making content for paying players? Or just the satisfaction of putting one together?

Lars said...

There are badges that can be earned and whatnot, but mostly it's just for fun. This is no replacement for developer-created content, of course. Since players can design their missions any way they want none of it can be considered to be "canonical" insofar as the overarching storyline is concerned.

This is more akin to LittleBigPlanet and similar games which feature user-created content. You still have the main story line and polished levels that the developers create, but at the same time you can amuse yourself with content that fellow players create.

I am building a story arc where I am creating the arch villain for one of my characters. I had this backstory in my head but no way to actually play through it before, and now I can. I think that's a great option to have.