Extra! Extra! Read all about it! According to an official announcement
from the target="_blank">City of Heroes / City of Villains
development team, the highly publicized Mission Architect feature that
allowed players to create their own custom mission won't be making it
into Issue 13 of the CoX franchise and has instead been moved to Issue
14 to allow the developers time to include the ability for players to
customize charaters to fight with or against players in their missions.
Issue 13 has been rebarnded "Power and Responsibility" and Issue 14 has
been dubbed "Architect."



Here's the official release.



Good morning! When we
announced Issue 13: Architect a couple weeks back, we were overwhelmed
by the positive response. Much of the feedback was centered around the
Mission Architect system which allows players to create their own
missions and story arcs. We have been actively following forum threads
and private messages about the feature, and have even discussed it with
players in person at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.
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It became apparent that
you guys really want this feature, but in order to fully realize your
dreams of writing your own missions you need creative control in one
more key area: The ability to create “customized”
characters to fight with or against in your missions. Adding custom
characters has always been on our Mission Architect feature list, but
we had considered it a “stretch goal.” That is, we
could launch the system without this feature because our confidence was
high that the rest of the system was incredibly robust.
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But after listening to
you guys, we realize that this feature simply must be in at launch. You
have convinced us that it is an integral part of the Mission Architect,
and we have reworked schedules and timelines to accomplish this. Rather
than push the launch of Issue 13 out completely for one (albeit really
cool and very complex) feature, the Mission Architect is going to see a
slight delay. What is not going to be delayed is the rest of Issue 13.
To that end, the previously announced feature set for Issue 13,
together with new features that we are announcing today, will become
Issue 13 and Issue 14.



Issue 14 will take on
the name “Architect” and contain the Mission
Architect feature along with other features we’ll announce at
a later date.  We are planning Issue 14: Architect to be
released Winter of 2009.  Issue 13 is now called
“Issue 13: Power and Responsibility” and be
launched in the Fall of 2008.  
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style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; font-style: italic;">Issue
13: Power and Responsibility
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Issue 13: Power and
Responsibility will contain the bulk of features we’ve
announced previously, including:
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* Shield and Pain Domination powersets
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* Merit Reward system
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* Day Jobs (that include a suite of new costume pieces)
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* Additional Cimerora and Midnight Squad mission arcs
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In addition, we have
some other new exciting features to reveal that will be included in
Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. These include:
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* Leveling Pact
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* Multi-Builds
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* PvE & PvP Powers rebalancing
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* Villain Patron Power Respec
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* Supergroup Base Repricing
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Over the coming weeks
we’ll be providing more details about the above points, but
let me give you an overview of some of them now.
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The
Leveling Pact:
A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a
buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync,
whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same
level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do!
It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”
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Multi-Builds: style="font-style: italic;"> Another innovation to City of
Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs
of each character, including which powers are selected and which
Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who
want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch
the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use
this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different
power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even
makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE.
It’s up to you.



PvE
and PvP Powers Rebalancing: style="font-style: italic;"> Floyd
“Castle” Grubb and the powers designers have been
hard at work in finding ways to strike a better balance between the
many powers in the game.  The scope of what they are doing is
too broad to go into details here, but we’re very excited and
we’ll share more information soon. Suffice it to say that we
know that you don’t want your PvE powers adjusted because of
how they play in PvP, so we’re taking a new tact in power
balancing with Issue 13.



style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; font-style: italic;">Summary
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Issue 13 was so big we
had to turn it into two releases, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility
and Issue 14: Architect. Issue 13 will be going into beta soon and
launching this Fall. It will include most of the previously announced
features of Issue 13, and then some. Issue 14: Architect will include
the full-featured Mission Architect and is scheduled to launch to the
live servers in Q1, 2009. I am really looking forward to getting Issue
13 into your hands as soon as possible, and starting off a kick-ass
2009 with the release of Mission Architect.