Tattered Page

City of Heroes started trickling out information on Issue 13: “Architect” and I’m already chomping at the bit.  The title is a reference to one of the core components in this update: a mission/story editor that allows players to create their own adventures in the City of Heroes game and share them.

It’s been over two years since I posted my rant on “the missing gamer” (the DM/storyteller).  We’ve seen MMO’s cater to the adventurer, the explorer, the socializer, etc, but even though the DM/Storyteller was the center of so many pen-n-paper games, few MMO’s risked putting so much power in the hands of the players.

I was intrigued when Star Wars Galaxies added Storyteller tokens… a powerful way to let players bring events to life by placing NPC’s, combat critters that only affect story participants, and scene items ranging from crashed starships to containers to race waypoints.  They were neat, but kinda limited: only available when the storyteller’s there to run things.

The mission editor, though… this has much the same potential.  From what I hear, it’s less about editing a map than selecting from a library of maps.  It’s less about placing spawn points than saying what the spawns should be.  The real customization comes from more specific selections of key characters and control over the dialogue.  This should keep “farming builds” to a minimum (it’ll be hard to make a mission that’s more farm-able than a dev-made one) while still giving a decent amount of control to those of us that want to tell our stories.

:Crossing my fingers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under City of Heroes / Villains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.