Like most MMORPGs, City of Heroes has provided its players with regular updates to the game.  Over the five years since the game launched, these updates, called “Issues,” have added significant gameplay aspects, such as an increased level cap, player-vs-player combat, new power sets, a full-on physics engine, and an invention system.  The 14th and most recent update, entitled “Architect,” was released yesterday, promising a major new feature that, for the first time in an MMO, will allow users to create their own content and share it with other players.

The Architect update allows players to create original storylines, complete with unique characters, factions, items and mission objectives.  Once you’ve created your own story, you can publish it, allowing others to play through your adventure and rate it from 1 to 5 stars.  Creating these stories, or “Arcs,” can be a bit of a daunting task, as the interface is extraordinarily complex.  Each arc can consist of up to 4 separate missions, each with a slew of details to fill in.  The massive menu allows you to set your location, what type of enemies players will face, what mission objectives must be completed, and even what each enemy and NPC will say at various points during the mission.  You can even choose to create your own villainous characters, complete with power-sets and costumes; as well as additional characters, like mission contacts and allies.  Crafting an interesting, engaging story that appeals to many players is up to you, but at least you’re given ample space in which to write that story.  Every line of text, from the mission description, to the leads that your contacts give you, can be modified, allowing players to truly create their own tone for their stories.

While its easy to come up with a simple story and plug in the necessary parameters (there’s even an icon that pops up to let you know if you’re missing a mandatory mission element), it can be difficult to balance these missions for play.  After several hours creating my own mission, I used the option to save and test the story.  My tale was meant for a solo hero, and I thought I had set the difficulty thusly, but I was unable to get through the very first part of it, and had to go back and make sweeping changes in order to make it playable.  A certain level of trial and error is expected in a creation tool like this, but having to repeatedly play-test can be annoying and time consuming.

While the options for creating story arcs is impressively deep, it’s not terribly broad in scope.  Sure, you can customize every little detail about your mission, but it still has to follow a pre-set structure.  There’s no ability to create branching paths or alternate endings, meaning that everyone who plays your story will get exactly the same experience.  The in-game explanation of the Architect program is surprisingly elegant, but does present a small problem.  Architect is an entertainment company that allows heroes and villains to create their own alternate timelines, then lets them and others enter those pocket dimensions for some consequence-free crime-fighting fun.  The problem is that every mission concludes with you re-entering an Architect building to talk with your main story contact, who exists only in that building.  It definitely takes you out of the experience when you have to leave the pocket dimension every time you complete a mission, and I would have liked to see them implement mission selection a little more fluidly.

In addition to creating your own adventures, Architect allows you to search for and download the adventures of others.  After only a day, there are literally thousands of stories already published.  Searching for the missions is easy and efficient, with search parameters for mission length, morality, and user ratings.  Many of the stories out there feature some clever writing and interesting characters, and there are even some massive, multi-part stories beginning to take shape, especially on the servers that tend to attract more role-players, but you get the feeling that the community has only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible.

User-created content is one of the prevailing trends in gaming today, and City of Heroes is the first to bring the concept to MMOs.  It’s not a perfect system; creating stories is too complex for dabblers, but not quite deep enough for hard-cores, and the lack of support for cut-scenes is disappointing.  Still, it’s an impressive, innovative new idea with a ton of potential, and it’s bound to be copied by other MMOs in the future.

 

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