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While Cryptic Studios has its hands full with Champions Online, NCsoft is still very much supporting the developer's earlier superhero MMO effort, City of Heroes. The next major evolution of the five-year-old (and still counting) game is the Mission Architect expansion, a free update hitting in March.
The update introduces a fictional corporation, Architect Entertainment, into the game world -- it's here where players will craft "virtual" missions for their characters and others. Using an intuitive editor, players can build entire story arcs featuring custom dialog, goals and even NPC friends & foes. Up to three of these missions can be published for public play, rating and feedback. NCsoft will be promoting "Developer's Choice" missions and incentivizing creativity via rewards for players with particularly popular designs.
According to NCsoft, it will be possible for COH players to take a character from level one all the way to 50 all within these player-generated missions, since they'll provide loot and XP just like anything crafted by the dev. An "Architect Edition" of COH which includes the update and exclusive in-game items will also be available in stores next month. Given that we were able to build out a solid (albeit short) scenario in less than 30 minutes, we can't wait to see what the community's able to come up with once the Mission Architect is out in the wild.
Hit Massively.com for more details and an hour-long audio walkthrough by senior game designer Joe Morrissey.
The update introduces a fictional corporation, Architect Entertainment, into the game world -- it's here where players will craft "virtual" missions for their characters and others. Using an intuitive editor, players can build entire story arcs featuring custom dialog, goals and even NPC friends & foes. Up to three of these missions can be published for public play, rating and feedback. NCsoft will be promoting "Developer's Choice" missions and incentivizing creativity via rewards for players with particularly popular designs.
According to NCsoft, it will be possible for COH players to take a character from level one all the way to 50 all within these player-generated missions, since they'll provide loot and XP just like anything crafted by the dev. An "Architect Edition" of COH which includes the update and exclusive in-game items will also be available in stores next month. Given that we were able to build out a solid (albeit short) scenario in less than 30 minutes, we can't wait to see what the community's able to come up with once the Mission Architect is out in the wild.
Hit Massively.com for more details and an hour-long audio walkthrough by senior game designer Joe Morrissey.
