On Feb. 24 and Feb. 25 in San Francisco, Sylvene attended NCsoft’s Architect Academy press event. The Architect Academy offered a sneak peek at the new upcoming game system for City of Heroes, Mission Architect. The system allows players to literally design their own missions for the game, determining details ranging from environments, mission objectives and enemies, to the written fiction and character dialogue. With Mission Architect, players also will be able to share their creations with the entire City of Heroes community. This is her story.

It is a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco, and NCSoft has rented a room in the impressive Bentley Reserve to showcase its new game system. My flight had arrived a couple hours early for the afternoon session, and I was enjoying a little lunch and chatting with City of Heroes designers about the games they loved to play, the games they grew up with, their favorite games, player mods, user-generated content and why they loved the Mission Architect system they were releasing in City of Heroes.

Who, what, why and how

“I dreamed of being a game designer,” said Matt Miller, senior game designer. “I always thought how cool it would be to create missions in game with the cool tools that game companies would have instead of the way I was doing it in college and high school. Boy was I wrong. They did it the same way. Line by painful line.”

The Mission Architect system is “Joe's Mission Builder” all grown up — Joe being Joe Morrisey, lead designer of the Mission Architect system and the person who had created the fledgling system for in-house use. It was the simple program that grew and grew. Why not a program that would generate the code required for each mission? Then why not a UI like the costume-maker for players to create missions with? How much cooler is that? Super duper, mondo cool was the response from the player base. The first responses from testers were, “That was cool, but you've GOT to let us have an enemy editor! We don't want to be fighting the same predictable bosses. How difficult can that be?” Indeed, to provide a way to craft missions with all the twists and turns that players could imagine, only to face the same bosses they could find in game would be a let down. How difficult would it be anyway? Difficult, but important enough that the launch was delayed from 2008 to 2009.

The first thing the developers had to consider was how extensive and game-impacting they wanted the Mission Architect to be. Would it be a fun game feature, or would it be an extensive game system? Each would carry its own impact on the game itself. They decided on the latter: extensive enough to be considered a system in the game. With all the inherent challenges of game balance and the prevention of player exploitation.

As it stands, the Mission Architect is extensive enough that once enough missions existed in the database, a gamer could level his character from 1 to 50 through missions acquired through the Mission Architect entirely. That does not seem farfetched as currently, in this, the second week of closed beta, there are already more than 400 missions available.

The facts please

The Mission Architect is accessed through a UI in game that guides players through creating missions, which can be a series of up to five missions in a story arc. Each of these missions can have up to 25 objectives, and each account can have up to three published story arcs. So a player can create an epic storyline if he wishes.

The UI is nicely laid out with dropdown menus and tool tips. Creating a mission seems to be the best way to learn the system. This is created locally on your hard drive and after you are done, you can play through it. The system even provides you quality assurance testing. Letting you know if you've got too many mobs clustered together or if text is missing. Clicking on the errors will take you directly to the problem area.

There are four basic mission objectives from which to choose. Fight a Boss, Collect an Object, Defeat all Enemies and Free a Captive. Then you can add secondary objectives, and you have seven types to choose from, such as destroy or defend an object, pick up an ally, some which could be flagged optional for mission completion.

The hallmark of City of Heroes is the character customization available to the player. This now can be found in the Enemy editor. You can customize your Boss mobs. The look, the powers, the level and the name. The missions will scale automatically for the numbers in your party, and advanced options allow further customization such as alignment, placement, difficulty, animations and behavior.

A simple mission can be created in a half hour; an elaborate one can take many days as you craft the backstory and lead players through a story arc that’s epic in scale with cascading objectives, optional objectives and interwoven tales.

Rewards

Are rewards just the satisfaction of crafting a kick-ass mission that others enjoy? No. Apart from the XP from a mission, and that is based on the mission difficulty, the developers have created a system that rewards mission-crafters, people that play them and people that rate them. Rewards are in the form of tickets, and players use these tickets to buy the same kind of rewards that players would get in any other in-game mission. With the added bonus of actually choosing the rewards you want and being able to accumulate them until you can afford to buy a big-ticket item.

There’s also the Hall of Fame, which the best-rated missions will be elevated to, as well as a Developer’s Choice category. A mission that is moved there will open a story slot in the player’s account and allow him or her to publish another mission in game.

Wrap-up

Customizable. Tied to account, three in-game published missions, missions editable, nice rewards ... what else was there? Well, they have got the idea of using the Base Editor for players to create their own maps on the back-burner. So there’s been some discussion of that, but first let’s just see how this basic system goes over and concentrate on making it the best player-designed content for any MMO before adding to it.

A voice-over tutorial will be available on the Web site once Mission Architect goes live, and a new box with the Mission Architect also will be available in April.

On the way back to the airport, I chatted with a journalist from another site, and we both cooed over the hands-on session we had. He was rubbing his hands with glee thinking of the really hard missions that could be made. I was thinking of the stories that could be told and the really fun parodies that can be made.

For more information, visit http://www.cityofheroes.com/.