City of Heroes Mission Creator Explained 54
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 can see it now.... (Score:3, Funny)
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Saffi: Oh, give it to me, you big stud! ...JIZZ MASTER ZERO!
Rodgers: I'm not a stud!
Saffi: Huh?
Rodgers: I am not a stud! I'm...
[takes off his mask to reveal Clark]
Clark:
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It's never going to be on par to content created by the company. It'll be poorly worded, have spelling mistakes or just be stupid.
"Go to the building and kill the guy"
Anyway, don't their subscribers pay them monthly? Hasn't anyone asked why they have to make the game content and pay for the privilege?
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It just depends on the flexibility of the tools, and the size and interest of the community. This has a large community built in, so I think it just depends on the functionality of the mission editor.
I imagine that 'recreations' of famous missions fro
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Awesome! (Score:1)
Do these guys look for new ways to get sued? (Score:1)
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Besides that, player created missions are written in plaintext. When you've got a database of inappropriate words, names and variations, a system in place for flagging both inappropriate and wildly popular content, and a human-readable output, catching stuff like House of W is pretty damn easy.
Your quest, should you choose to accept it... (Score:1)
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)
Case of (Score:2)
Too little, too late?
Can anything stop the Warcraft juggernaut?
Hmm sounds like a mission plot right there.
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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
Kinda sad, though (Score:5, Informative)
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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The same folks make Guild Wars and it occurs to me that it suffers from the same sort of problem. In Guild Wars, there are only 20 character levels. Once you hit level 20, you really only "advance" by acquiring new skills. In the Nightfall expansion, you start on an island and play there for a while before moving to the mainland. You have access to most of the skills you'll get on the island by the time you're level 5 and getting off the island basically requires you to be level 20. You get to play wit
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Well, I understand your point, and the comparison has merit. Still, just to clear things up a bit:
1. Well, it's the same publisher, not the same developers. So, to be pedantic, it's not exactly the same people who made both.
2. The problem is that COH actually has 50 levels. So it doesn't even have the excuse of normal content vs endgame content. (By and large COH doesn't even have endgame content.) It's just almost half of the normal zones and content that one has to just gnash the teeth and grind through,
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I get a a lot of your points. IMHO, most of the mistakes with COH are actually simpler than that. The big problem is you start with a name and a costume. Coming up with a name up front is really tough, since people used up tons of them. It's possible to look cool at level 1, and suck. They should have started everyone with normal names and no costume, and given pieces of both as you level. The appearance factor is a huge carrot.
I did say there was more than one issue :P (Score:3, Informative)
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 intera
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You call getting to level 20 a grind. Just who are you playing with? If you focus on doing story archs such as the initial contact arch, the Hollows Story Arch, and stick to a team. You'll to level 20 in less ten hours of play
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I don't know about other players, but I waited a bit more before jumping in a SG. So that option won't help that many new players.
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Pocket D will sell you inspirations whenever you want.
if you're in 8 player groups all the time, otherwise it goes a lot slower
No, actually, if you're in an 8-man team all the time you get there in like an hour or two. Heck, the "Sewer Teams" in Atlas Park will get you to level 6 in less than 20 minutes.
I always wondered what's the big idea o
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That too, but I'd say the biggest problem is that it's vague and uninformative anyway.
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Hero side, I'm duoing with my friend and we hit level 4. Neither of our contacts in AP had any more missions for us. They didn't send us to the new and improved Hollows, no generic door missions, no other contacts in our range to talk to, nadda. We were both referred to Kings Row where after running across the zone the contacts said whoops, must be level 5! All told we spent
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About level 10-12 sounds just about right, come to think of it.
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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.)
Having a single attack is not just uncommon, it's downright impossible. You get brawl and a ranged attack as inherents. They become useless soon, but at the low levels they are indeed quite useful. Brawl does about 20% o
Stop it? Why? (Score:1)
It's cool, but a little underwhelming (Score:2)
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
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NCSoft is scoring big (Score:3, Informative)
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 [aolcdn.com]
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'
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added a number of changes nobody asked for
From what I noticed, the changes were on areas where changes WERE asked for. It was simply a case of "Be careful of what you wish for".
destroying the market economy in their attempts to make the invention system more "fair"
Destroy? Changed, certainly, but I think "destroy" is a little far. And it's settling down, and they have already done some adjustments to the merit values.
showing that they have no clue how to balance anymore when they buffed some alr
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World of World of Warcraft (Score:2)
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?
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