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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.
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.
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
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