Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

A day in the life of a super hero often includes rescuing cats from trees, ending nuclear proliferation, and posing for the latest cover of GQ magazine. These all may be commonplace items, but a super hero's life rarely involves designing missions for a massively multiplayer online game. Instead, that task falls to the "heroes" at NCsoft NorCal where a group of developers is putting the finishing touches on the upcoming missions for City of Heroes' Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. Ten Ton Hammer has your inside scoop into the latest missions, as we've published an exclusive dev journal from Senior Game Designer Bruce Harlick that features the twists and turns of the latest mission arcs. Interested? Keep on reading!

The second Sister Airlia arc went a little more into her background and had her using the players to help her set up a political power base in Cimerora, to try to circumvent her mysterious curse. The first mission has the player bringing someone back from the future and helping that NPC to infiltrate the Sibyls. During the kickoff meeting, Vince and I discussed how to get the character from the future to change into Cimeroran-appropriate garb, and he came up with the concept of the “Sibyl hut.” It took a little code wizardry and a lot of me banging my head on AI behavior, but we ended up with I think is a pretty neat sequence there. The third mission let me use Darren Wade; it’s always fun to visit established characters and write stuff for them. You need to get your head into their character voice and attitude, and Wade’s just a fun guy to write.

• To read the rest of the exclusive CoH developer journal, click here!