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City of Heroes Sr. Designer Talks Architect System
Kheldon writes "The MMO Gamer sits down with Joe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios, to discuss the inspiration behind, and current implementation of, the Architect user-generated content system in City of Heroes. Quoting: 'Really for me, wanting tools so the rest of the team could actually come up with content was the idea. Because we have a lot of guys on the team that are hardcore players, they play the game all the time. Then they come to me like, "I’ve got this idea for this story, we should really do this arc with this guy!" And I’m like, "That’s great. I haven’t got time to do it. I’ve got plenty of other story arcs to work on." But, if we made the tools easy enough, then they could actually come up with the arcs, and we can put them out. Then somewhere along that road it dawned on me: Why stop with the rest of the team?'"
However it's not like Second Life. There are two important differences:
1) There is plenty of professional content. The game has loads of content designed by Cryptic's team. In fact, when it was launched, that is all it was. So you aren't running around in an amateur user generated world, that is just something you can play around with if you like.
2) It's an actual game. Second Life had no real point, it was just a place for a bunch of people to get around and act like jackasses. Like IRC, but with giant walking penises and such. City of Heroes is a videogame, there's fun stuff to do, if you like the super hero thing.
Also, user generated content can be really good in some cases. Have a look at Fallout 3 Nexus or the like, there are some amazing user made mods for some games. The main problem comes down to filtering it, because there'll be a lot of crap mixed in.
Second Life's failing was no filters, no professional content and no point overall.