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City of Heroes: Issue 13 and More!
Recently, MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh had the opportunity to sit down with some of the guys from Ncsoft's City of Heroes / City of Villains. In the interview, they talk about the upcoming Issue 13 Day Job and Mission Architect features.
In November of 2007, Cryptic Studios made the decision to sell City of Heroes/Villains to NCSoft – their publisher. The entire development team (about twenty of them) made the move from being Cryptic employees to NCSoft employees. I asked Senior Designer Joe Morrissey about the transition.
“It’s fantastic!” Joe enthused. “It feels like a new game. We’re doing what we want to do with the game and we’ve got all this support behind us. NCSoft is giving us the resources we need to really take this game where we want it to go.”
Thus far, they have doubled the development team to about 40, and Mission Design is now a team of three instead of just a single person.
“We have the freedom to plan, and we are actually planning multiple issues ahead. We’re able to get to all those little niggly things that could have been improved but we’ve never had the time to fix and polish, now we have the opportunity to not only bring more content to the game, we can smooth out the old wrinkles. It’s been really liberating.”
I of course asked for examples of improvements. They included full zone re-dos for the zones they felt needed work, UI and chat improvements and have reorganized the contact list which has been categorized and the new UI shows three tabs, the Active, the Inactive and the Brokers. Chris, a current player standing by waxes eloquent over the how much he enjoyed the new Contact management window.
“It was awful, previously,” he agreed. “It was just one long list and you had to scroll through the entire list looking for your active contacts.” Launched in Issue 12, players can also search the contact list by a range of criteria which include name, zone and level range.
“We are also working on what we call Quality of Life features”, said Joe, expanding on the Day Jobs feature that is in the works for Issue #13. Instead of secret identities, players will have Day Jobs – which actually are offline character progression. Depending on where you log off, the game will assume that this is where your day job is, and the character will acquire a thematic buff. For example, if you log off at the hospital, you may get a health buff. The time that you are off game will also provide you an XP bonus when you log back in, and if you stay in the same Day Job for a certain length of time – that is to say, you log off in the same area each time, you can earn a badge and title. Perhaps you are no longer just a health worker; you are a surgeon in the hospital. Joe also mentioned that Accolades (essentially a badge set) are also planned for the Day Jobs feature. How that will pan out is yet to be seen, prompting Chris to wish that Lead Designer Matt “Positron” Miller was about to leak more than he should. Almost every location in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles will have an associated Day Job: a scholar at the University, a Civil Servant or City Official at City Hall, etc.
Issue #13 was announced at PAX during the NCSoft presentation, and that issue would also contain the Mission Architect. Players will be able to design their own missions and story arcs to share across the City of Heroes community. It started out as Joe’s pet project; a way of making mission design easier for the staff. It was to be a development tool. But with one of City of Heroes’ original objectives of allowing players to create their own content such as player bases, it quickly became a planned game feature for players.
Joe showed a couple of mockup screens of what it could look like. Some of their objectives for this feature are; an easy to use interface like the costume creator, a deep selection of choices, hundreds of categories with millions of combinations of maps, enemies, objects, and the ability to write your own dialogue, etc. There are of course limits to what can be done as there is always the balance that has to be considered, of creative freedom versus exploitation possibilities.
The cream will rise to the top as a rating system will be available to players per account to rate the missions in several categories. A few general categories planned are Quick Play, Developers Choice and Hall of Fame. The best of the best will be given full XP and influence at completion. Mission architects will be rewarded via player ratings, and will unlock additional contents such as new mobs and maps to put in new missions they create. Badges are also considered at this time as rewards for mission architects.
Questions were asked about poll stuffing and malicious negative voting, but with thousands of players playing the missions and rating linked to accounts and not characters, Joe assured us that there would be little chance of that happening, apart from the fact that the ratings would be monitored and malicious raters noted for action if necessary.
Community feedback will be paramount for the missions created by players and not only can players build single missions; they will be able to build entire storylines. If this is successful, City of Heroes would be able to boast the most extensive player created content in any MMOG today, truly a game with content that is made by players for players.
wrong game?
Advertising Two Games At Once , Nice ..
Posting FAIL?
This is not the first time this has been done, and with LOTRO to be specific.
I understand Turbine is using you guys as their main advertiser and you're getting a kick back, but really...
LOTRO does NOT deserve this much attention...
LOL... another lame post...but anyway....it DOES deserve much more attention then it does now
its a better mmorpg then most of the crap that is published these days
Sweet Jebus man,
How on Earth do you think that mis-labelling a news story would be something that a company would like? If I hadn't noticed / been made aware of this error (first thing Monday morning, not as on the ball as I shoudlhave been, obviously), I would have expected to see angry emails in my inbox not just from NCsoft, but from Turbine as well.
Posting fail? Yes.
Posting before morning coffee? Yes.
Embarassing moment for Jon? Big Time Yes!
Giant reidculous kick-back conspiracy? Not really.
Seriously, if you want to accuse me of taking kick-backs or bribes or whatever it is you're trying to imply here that's your perogative. It's not true, but it's your opinion and that's cool, but you may want to at least check and see if it makes any sense before throwing around bizarre accusations.
Anyway folks, it's all fixed up now.
I could be wrong on this, but I think he was being sarcastic about the whole bribe thing. Hard to tell on the internet. But hes a Guild Wars player and as a former Guild Wars player myself I can tell you this kind of sarcasam is pretty popular among the users of that game, so I'm 90% convinced we are dealing with sarcasm here.
Besides, you wanna see some guys in the gaming industry who take bribes to hype games then go read PC Gamer magazine. Those guys are so corrupt its not even funny anymore.
Not bad, but still just minor "fixer up" touches.
Remove the cookie arch types, move all powers into a single power pool, and let us REALLY make the hero or villian we want. Instead of having to settle for some 1 dimensional imitation.
Agree, who wouldn't want to be able to mixup powersets, always wanted to be able to have katana/kin just like the Tsoo ink men
Yeah sounds like they're taking Ryzom's Ring and adding it to CoX.
More power to them.
Originally posted by tkobo
Not bad, but still just minor "fixer up" touches.
Remove the cookie arch types, move all powers into a single power pool, and let us REALLY make the hero or villian we want. Instead of having to settle for some 1 dimensional imitation.
That idea kind of sounds like Champions Online, and something I think many were expecting or wanting CoX to be.
You got it...*WHEW*
Strictly sarcasm...Methinks Jon needs a second cup.
lol
Anyways, I know it was a mistaken post, and I thought it was funny that he did it to LOTRO twice within a few short months.,..
I just think he knows how I feel about LOTRO, and I DO agree they need less publicity...lol!
Later champ!
(PS: next time, I will include a /sarcasm)
After playing the free trial, I liked the character creator, but the action/gameplay felt kind of restricted, and the stories just not very deep. Maybe it got better later but I wasn't convinced enough to buy. This architecht system has really peeked my curiosity though and I can't wait to hear more about it. Do any other MMO's have something equivlent? The closest thing I know of is the ElderScrolls mod community.
Sounds promising, but I'm getting cynical. No real "news" revealed.
My curiosity is piqued as well. I'm trying to not get excited about it in case it's not a fantastic as they would have us believe.
Cant wait for Mission Architect!!! Lovely idea!!!
It is going to be fantastic. This information was just recently given to us. (Hero 1 is talking in Ritki dialect, that's why it looks strange)
"
Honoree: Request Channel: Active
Honoree: Mission Architect: Announced
Honoree: Questions Regarding: I13 Possible
Honoree: PAX: Persona Active as Hero 1 'Joe Morrissey' Alive
Honoree: Lost Cure: Inaffective
Honoree: Super Group Basses: TBA
Honoree: NPC Design: Something to consider
Honoree: AV & Heroes in Mission Architect: True
Honoree: Day Jobs: Player Housing: Negative
Honoree: Custom Maps: Not Available At Launch: But 1000 maps will be.
Honoree: The extent that we're going to have unlockable content for Architects is somethign we're going to determine from testing, but some will for sure be locked.
Honoree: Cross faction will be possible: True.
Honoree: You will be able to cuztomize existing heroes, villains and enemy groups with a dozen or so options, if not more at launch.
Honoree: Custome Text: True. All mission text: Open.
Honoree: New Cimerora Content: No comment.... but it's cool.
Honoree: Custom Made Bosses: Maybe.
Honoree: Ally Pets: Totally In!
Honoree: Own Character As Entity in Map: Maybe.
Honoree: Escort To Object: Possible.
Honoree: Access to Mission Architect: from all viable city zones.
Honoree: Mission Architect Location: Top Secret... share later.
Honoree: Cross Server. Cross Game CoH+CoV
Honoree: Souvenir. Temp PowersL Details Still To Announce.
Honoree: Players of Mission Architect: Rewarded XP, Influence, Badges... and more.
Honoree: Day Job Quanitity: TBA
Honoree: Mission Architect + Bases = TBA
Honoree: Coralax Story: Expanded = Mission Architect
Honoree: Lady Sadako: Reads Minds
Honoree: 5 Minutes: To Termination
Honoree: Plasma Stream: Greetings
Honoree: Player's will police missions: Profranity Filters in place: And More.
(someone says I love you in request channel)
Honoree: Hero 1: Thankfull
Honoree: Signing Off
Honoree: Stay True
"
They will constantly be adding new features to the already amazing system. I think it's going to be a major success and innovation in the MMO genre.
Hmmmmmm. No mention of graphic updates. If they want to compete with CO and DC online,then they need to revisit the graphics and touch them up. A large part of their customer base are players born in the late 1980's and early 1990's. They love their graphics. I can't blame them. Yes, gameplay needs to be the main focus, but great graphics are like a glass of wine that adds that finishing touch to fine dining. I wonder if the combat system will be looked at too, and made more real time to comepete with CO and DC? It wouldn't be a bad thing imho.
Champions online is down the hall to the left
A) You have far too much faith in Cryptic,hence where Champions "is" doesnt matter.
B) If you were around for the early development of CoH, you should remember that Crytpic at first promised exactly that, an open power based character design that would allow you to mix and match as you saw fit.
Kinda like they are now promising for Champions.
So what changed ?Crytpic in their "ultimate wisdom and competence" (which translates into not very much of either) decided it was too hard to make such a system and that the players would end up "gimping" themselves with "bad" character design choices.
And so they scrapped the open powers systems, and adopted the lame class system they have now for CoH.
Real-time combat in a zone with potentially thousands of targets is very, very hard to do over the wire, especially if one had to design for the 56K median user. (Not everyone has a broadband connection, still.) My guess is that DC (at least) and maybe CO will be closer to console/arcaders than a true MMO.
CO and DC will be runnable from console controllers. Both are being designed to run on consoles, which is about the most lame-brained and useless thing I've ever heard. (Reasoning: game controllers limit interactive choices, force lots of menus up front before the action takes place, and leaves one having to use arcane "combinations" in order to get anything done.) For example: breaking holds will involve repeated (and perhaps cyclic) controller button mashing, which controllers are built for, but PC keyboards and mice are not. CoX, at least, does not cause repetitive stress injuries.
Me? I'm not going there.