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City of Heroes Mission Creator Explained
Kotaku is running an article with details on an update to City of Heroes which will allow players to create their own missions and publish them for others to play. Quoting:
"The Mission Architect for City of Heroes and City of Villains actually appears in game within buildings belonging to Architect Entertainment, a company that has developed a virtual training program for super-powered beings. Players will log in to a computer terminal in said buildings to gain access to the mission editor, where they can create anything from a quick mission that lasts a few minutes to a massive, five-chapter epic. Players write the dialogue, create the enemies, and map out the goals other players need to achieve to complete their mission. Once they've got it perfect, they can upload it to NCsoft's Arc Server, which delivers their content to all of the game servers. Once it's live, anyone can access the terminals in Architect Entertainment and run through the mission."
- Stand back fools, I Dildomaster have taken control of this building for my feidish plot. You think you can stop me, I have something for you. Peter, Dick; Get those troublemakers boys. Give them a good pounding, ...So you have defeated my henchmen, Prepare to be rattled by my vibro-pummel!!!
Look out, you'll shoot Dorkus.
... like Captain Dynamic awesome ...
I mean this is a cool idea and all, but it seems like any quest that could be considered a rip-off of a comic book plot could be another invitation for Marvel to sue. And with 60 years or so of comic books it's not likely that any story, even one that is an *entirely* original creation, will have great similarity to something, somewhere, in that massive pile.
Is to battle the giant flaming cocks of planet PEENZOR.
Which will no doubt make up 90% of the user generated missions (judging by pretty much all other user genrated content available in any game)
Too little, too late?
Can anything stop the Warcraft juggernaut?
Hmm sounds like a mission plot right there.
I think you're thinking about this incorrectly. Blizzard made a successful piece of software with WoW, and its working well for them. Good for them, they found something that works for them. It's still good to have competition out there, to have other MMO's, variety, and so on. Eve Online comes to mind. I've been playing Eve Online for over two years now, and I played WoW for 4 months. Eve has enough depth to hold me, and in my personal experience, WoW is too cartoony. But more power to them! Why stop them? Laud them for being successful, but if you don't like playing it, personally, support something else!! Tell your friends about it, get them involved, teach them how it works.
It's kinda sad, though. The game had actual potential, so it was a bit painful to see it fuck up repeatedly. And while it's not half as bad nowadays than in Statesman's time, the game still has real problems.
The biggest of which IMHO is the screwed up difficulty curve, which makes it really hard to keep newbies there even if they try the game.
See, for example WoW starts easy and simple. You're awesomely powerful at level 1 compared to level 1 enemies. (The wolves in Northshire do 1hp per attack, so it would take a while to kill you even if you were trying to get killed.) There is no downtime. There isn't much running around. As the game progresses, actually you become weaker compared to the enemies. You need more tricks, more talents, purple equipment, etc, just to kill an enemy as easily as you were doing it at level 1. But at any rate, you can start having fun right here and now.
In COH it's exactly the other way around. In the beginning you have:
- buggerall attacks for a long time. (As a tanker or defender it's not uncommon to have one single weak attack until the mid-20's or so, and much twiddling your thumb while you wait for it to recharge.)
- you run out of endurance (think: mana) within a fight, and the "rest" button recharges once in a blue moon, so mostly you just get to sit around twiddling your thumbs for 3 f-ing minutes until it slowly recharges. And it gets even worse if you actually use your defenses, because those suck your endurance even faster.
- get to run to the other end of a zone and back all the time, and often through enemies which can kill you easily (running into level 6 enemies when running to a level 1 mission is not really great fun. And as that level means, it's more like running through level 10 enemies on WoW.)
- your accuracy sucks, so you'll have big streaks of missing the enemy
- you only need to take one wrong turn to wake up at the hospital
Etc.
And, you know, because that sucks already, let's add some enemies which make it worse. E.g., I know, if everyone is missing lots already, let's give them enemies which debuff to-hit. (The Circle Of Thorns ghosts, for example.) If everyone is already running out of endurance all the time, like they're The Amazing Asthmatic Man, let's give them enemies which actively drain endurance. (E.g., Clockworks or the Mu guys on Arachnos missions.) Etc. Oh, and just because nobody has any defense against knock-back or status effect yet, let's give them enemies which mez (tsoo) or that Kadabra Kill guy in a villain mission, which can perma-bounce you to death if he gets his Singularity out.
To get an idea how bad it can get, I was in a low-level task-force again recently where I was actually hitting the enemies 5% of the time. Measured, ffs. Whole chains of 20 to 50 swings at thin air, because some idiot designer thought it would be fun to fill the mission with accuracy-debuffers, at levels where nobody can have much accuracy to start with. That's the face that COH shows to new players.
What I'm getting at is that for the vast majority of classes, levels 1 to 20 are a frustrating grind. Unless you were the kind of masochistic guy who actually likes being kicked in the nuts hard and often. Or for some classes (e.g., controller) a grind to level 32. (Which in terms of time and effort invested is akin to having to grind to level 60 on WoW.) _Then_ you can start to actually enjoy the game.
Could they stop losing to WoW? Well, they could. The game keeps getting new people trying it all the time. I know I meet new newbies in it all the time. It would just need to give them a reason to stay there. But it just doesn't even try to be nice and gentle to them, so it loses them right back. Whoever expects to just enjoy the game right away, instead of gnashing teeth, counting xp and grinding to a level where it stops sucking, is gone by level 14.
Which incidentally is also the level cap in the downloadable demo. Yes, you've heard that right. They put the worst and most frustrating
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am looking forward to it though.
On the plus side, you can create your own custom villains, using anything in the costume creator, which gives you a ton of options. You can also create your own dialog, story, etc.
On the minus side, you can't build your own maps, nor do you have any direct control over exactly where any villains/objects/etc. are on your map.
So in the end, the only thing you can *really* customize in any meaningful way is the appearance of the villains. It's a great idea, but I think for it to really work, players are going to have to have more creative freedom.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Player comments over at the official boards are pretty much ecstatic. NCSoft and their players are getting endless free content and every fanboy who's interested in 'rolling their own MMO' now has a way to write for a real MMO.
Oh, there are concerns about abuse and stupidity, but the general consensus is that Mission Architect is a very, very good thing. It's been designed from the ground up with player requests in mind and NCSoft has a pretty decent track record of pleasing players.
No one at NCSoft, nor their players expect CoH anything to be a 'WoW Killer', but City of Heroes is profitable and has an active community. This will only help expand that.
- A very lengthy podcast about the design and testing of Mission Architect
Basic features include:
- Ability to create NPC allies and enemies using CoH's costume creator and power selector
- Ability to link up to 25 mission objectives into one mission
- Ability to link up to 5 missions into one arc
- Ability to customize all dialogue, souvenirs, etc...
- User voting for 'Hall of Fame', Dev selection for 'Dev's Choice'.
- Vote tracking to reduce 'vote griefing'
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I did say there was more than one problem, and yes that's another one. The game violates the principle of least astonishment big time.
E.g., based on actually interacting with newbies, the ED is _the_ biggest and least obvious surprise, and it isn't documented anywhere except on the forums. I've had at least one sidekick o' mine get all upset and outright quit the game when he discovered that his 6-slots in Hasten early became 3 wasted slots once he got to SO's. There was absolutely nothing in the game to warn about it. Either you just knew about the soft cap from somewhere else, or you can shoot yourself in the foot big time with it.
Glad that you mention that, because that's a thing that got even _me_ angry: the game does give you some info, but actually it flat out _lies_ to the player. Because the detailed info screens are not generated from the actual info used by those powers, and nobody updates them.
E.g., both the load-screen tips _and_ the detailed info for the powers, still tell new players that Brutes taunt with their attacks like the tanks. That hasn't been true in more than a year. Probably even two, IIRC. E.g., after the activation times for most of the Assault Rifle attacks were reduced to 0.9s, and the patch notes said so, last time I played my AR Blaster the in game info for those powers still said 1.0s activation time and calculated the wrong DPS by 11%!
I'm sorry, but that's just bloody sad.
Just for the record, I've been there for more than 4 years, according to my veteran awards.
But that brings me to another thing: it's not us "greybeards" that the game needs to cater the most to. It's the newbies that are needed to grow, or even to replace the oldies that eventually get bored anyway and bugger off.
My perfect example are the veteran reward attacks. Everyone who's not a DPS class needed extra attacks at low levels, but they give them only to veterans of many years. Why? Just so they can continue to shed new players almost as fast as they get them?
Oh, I have Mid's Hero Designer. Newbies don't have it, though, and that's who COH really needs to start retaining more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So in the game you can create game adventures you play on terminals in the game you play on your terminal?
Can I create a game in the game where the goal of that game is to create a game?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?