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City of Heroes Issue 14: NCSoft's New Blueprint for Success

Dubbed “Architect Academy,” NCSoft revealed City of Heroes: Architect Edition (FAQ) to the press in fine fashion. In the posh and secure confines of Bentley Reserve, the former site of the Federal Bank of San Francisco, we sat in a Neo-American styled boardroom in the upper of two “banking temples,” which no doubt saw vast amounts of Pacific Rim assets changing hands once upon a time.

NCSoft likewise has something of value to impart to its players, but the best part: it’s all free with your catchall City of Heroes / City of Villains subscription. In less than a month Issue 14 will herald the release of a companion system to the CoH / CoV games which will allow players to create their own surprisingly intricate missions, and a new retail “Architect Edition” box will follow in April containing (for the first time) the PC and newly released Mac client for the first time.

Customizability and accessibility are the hallmarks of the City of Heroes franchise, with seemingly limitless options to create a unique character at the outset and add such superheroic abilities as flight and superspeed within the first few hours of gameplay. Neither the character creator or the City of Villains lair designer had a tutorial or needed a tutorial, so it was no surprise, then, that Architect Edition (AE) its ease-of-use will never have you wishing for the tutorial it lacks, and is absolutely replete with options to craft just the sort of mission you have in mind. Helpful tooltips at every turn will aid you on the pertinence of particularly confusing settings, such as what setting “Mission Pacing” to flat actually does or when “Mission Send-Off Text” appears.

Creating your own five mission story arc is just a matter of navigating a wizard and filling in the blanks. Being creative is the most challenging - and most fun - part.

Senior Designer Joe Morrissey stated that you could have yourself a playable mission that basically follows the sort of story you’re going for in as little as fifteen minutes, but that polish and creativity could take half a day or more. I found this to be absolutely true; my post-WWII Patton-inspired “Be All You Can Be” mission gave players fifteen minutes to bust into the evil Stallin’s (get it?) lair before he could initiate an insidious T-34 attack against Paragon City took all of 10 minutes to craft before my first test run. The first playthrough was predictably short of substance - Stallin’s cries of “For the motherland!” at the battle’s start and “Vodka!” when he reached 25% health failed to stir even a cheese-factor head laugh - but it was a bona fide starting point.

If you’ve tried your hand at modding Neverwinter Nights or even planned out a mission in the early Rainbow Six games, you know that an hour minutes of design for at least 30 minutes of repeatable gameplay is an excellent trade, and I give all the credit to AE’s wizard-driven, which takes you through mission planning step-by-step, forcing you to fill out only the barest essentials, then generating a thoroughly playable scenario (if not exactly Emmy-winning material) in very little time. The bulk of your design time won’t be spent in AE, but in the shower or on the morning commute, dreaming up the setting, characters, and plot of the story you’ll turn into a mission. Never before has an MMORPG so tempted player creativity, nor sought to richly reward the effort.