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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."
I never understood the mentality between trying to create a 'WOW killer.'
There's really nothing that can topple it so long as Blizzard doesn't suddenly go squirrely and pull a Star Wars Galaxies on itself. The MMO market is still quite open, unfortunately most devs don't look beyond the same tired fantasy RPG formula. Some like City of Heroes offer up something different enough in setting to keep an active user base. Others like Eve Online have done something so drastically different that there really is no competition, not even from WOW. The industry just needs to accept that it needs to innovate rather than clone, and WOW will suddenly become a non-issue. I know I'd be all for a Warhammer 40k MMO with Planetside style gameplay.