City of Player-Made Content
By 
Hib in
City of Heroes, City of Villians, Ryzom, Saga of Ryzom, features on
April 28th, 2008
City of Heroes/Villains Lead Designer Matt Miller has a message up at the CoX website, celebrating the game’s fourth anniversary. Miller takes this opportunity to tout the various things that have been added into the game since its launch back in 2004, including various new archetypes, customizations and the introduction of loot…excuse me, “invention salvage”.
As someone who participated in the City of Heroes closed beta, I can honestly say that the game as it stands today is, in some ways, a completely different game. And now, it looks like NCSoft is going to change it up yet again, at least according to Miller:
I can’t tell you how excited I am for our game’s future, and although we have some major announcements yet to be made, one of the things I can talk about is a feature that we are planning. Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialog and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall. It is features like these that we never dreamed of including when we first shipped, but are excited to be able to offer players very soon.
If you notice some similarities between what Miller is talking about and the gone-but-fondly-remembered Ryzom Ring addition to Saga of Ryzom, you’re right. This could be a nice draw to get old players to resub, and new players to pick up the game for the first time.
Or it could be a horrible disastrous failure, destined to follow the dev team like the stench of a thousand rotting gerbils the rest of their days.
No predictions here…I’m just saying.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this feature will be implemented, but if you see Miller at Target stocking up on FeBreeze, you’ll know the gerbils are starting to decompose.
In all seriousness, this could be a feature that becomes almost standard in future MMOs…letting you actually run a part of the game is even better than player-housing in terms of immersion.
Unless it’s FeBreeze time.
A couple of interesting facts about the game given by Miller, by the way:
- More than 32 million characters created – that’s 4 times the population
of New York City!
- Players have spent a combined 292 centuries playing City of Heroes and City of Villains
- More than 100 million items have been traded through the consignment (auction) houses since they were launched in 2007
Some neat stats indee….HOLY FLAMING MURLOC ON A HOVERBOARD; OVER TWENTY-NINE THOUSAND YEARS OF PLAY TIME?!? To put that into perspective, if years were pounds that would be equal to almost half a Kirstie Alley. Geez.
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April 28th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
One hundred and ninety two centuries ago she was totally smoking hot, man.
She had a good run, nothing to be ashamed of there.
Which is pretty much exactly what I think about COH too heh.
Dude, how many godzillions of thugs have all those poor superheroes had to one-two one-two punch-out at their keyboards for thousands and thousands of years until the blood came out of their eyes man I bet you THAT number is just SICKENING ahaha.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Twelve. They’ve had to kill twelve.
The SAME twelve OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER and…
April 29th, 2008 at 11:33 am
AHAHA yah man AHAHA.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Heh, unless you’ve played the game recently you don’t really know what you’re talking about. It really isn’t the same game it was in beta, certainly it’s no more repetitive than any other MMO out there, and at least it offers a variety of mission objectives, unlike most games where it’s simply “enter dungeon, kill everything, loot, leave; rinse and repeat”.
Player made content is an interesting idea, but I wonder how they’re going to balance it without neutering creativity. It’s a nice idea, and I’d like it to be cool, but unless they make the creation tools extremely robust I don’t see it being all that useful. If the player’s can only make the same things that are out there, what’s the point? But if they can make more than the devs, what are the devs doing?!
May 1st, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Hmmmm…Grak, I never said I hadn’t played CoX since beta. In fact, if you look above, I said “As someone who participated in the City of Heroes closed beta, I can honestly say that the game as it stands today is, in some ways, a completely different game.”
I very plainly acknowledged that it’s a different game now…I know this because I let my latest subscription lapse at the end of March, so unless they’ve had one doozy of an patch in the last 30 days, I’ve got a pretty good idea of the game as it stands today. (I eagerly await Issue 12, and plan on renewing when it hits live…there’s some good stuff in there.)
Don’t get me wrong…I love CoX…for what it is. And yes, it’s no more repetitive now than most MMO’s out there, but that does mean that it still is repetitive in a lot of ways.
As to the player-made content…well, just because you buy a Lego set that includes the pieces to build a Millennium Falcon, that doesn’t mean that the Falcon is all you can build with the pieces you’ve got. I’m willing to bet that, within a month of the live launch of such a system, there will be an encounter built by a player that makes you say “Wow…now THAT’S cool.” when you play through it. Does that mean the devs are slacking off?
No more than it means the folks at the Lego plant turned in a shoddy performance when they gave you the pieces to build a Falcon…or whatever else you want.
Just hang on for this one…if (and that’s a gi-normous “if”) it’s implemented correctly, it’ll be a great addition to the game…and yes, the robustness of the tools will play a large part in what side of “if” it falls on.
If it’s not on the right side of “if”…well, I’m sure Target will have the Febreze on special sometime soon.