Mission Architect Impressions

Apr 19

Well, I’ve now had a chance to play the City of Heroes Mission Architect. Both creating my own short story arc (called the Supplier if anyone fancies a look) and playing some missions others have created.

I’m incredibly impressed.

The development team have managed to put together something that is both easy to use, and very powerful. With no real tutorial I quickly went in and built up a story arc, consisting of three missions which included a custom-designed group of villains (of all ranks up to Elite Boss), all with their own look and powers. One of the missions involves finding certain objects in the map and defeating a boss, whereas another involves you rescuing a rookie hero (also custom designed for the story with his own powers) who will then follow and help you for the rest of the map.

Of course, you don’t have to go with your own characters, and dropping in any of the pre-existing characters and groups is also a snap. Levels let you choose from any of the existing map layouts, from any of the designs used in the game.

As well as the usual rewards of XP, influence and prestige, when running missions created in the architect you also amass “tickets”, which can also be exchanged for goodies, including the ability to unlock additional maps, costume parts etc for building your own missions (for example, full capes aren’t available from the outset for your custom characters, but can be bought with architect tickets and accessible from then on). Don’t be worried though. From the outset, there’s more than enough flexibility in the options available to build unique characters and missions. Its just that these add even more.

Of course, as expected, there’s a good few missions where people have just picked an open map and chucked in loads of high-level minions to be farmed for rapid XP. They’re not particularly original or well thought out maps, but they do what they set out to. Hopefully though once there’s a good few of these caught on, we’ll see less of them overall, and the truely creative maps will start to shine through, with people building up interesting story arcs, filled with crazy characters.

City of Heroes, Gaming, MMO

Comments

Pie Man 70

April 23rd, 2009 at 10:49 AM

When I get my big machine running again, and if I get Wife & Kid packed away somewhere for a while, I will check this out.

I wonder if there will be a crackdown on farming missions though.
Alan

April 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 AM

That’s what I’ve been wondering. Back in the day, the team were fairly quick to stamp out missions that people found they could farm. They must’ve known when they were creating the mission architect that this is what it’d be used for.

There’s two possible scenarios, that being they lower the XP you get from MA missions, or raise the main missions rewards. I don’t think they’ll uniformly nuke the rewards from the MA though, as they’ve said they’re keen to build it to the point that characters can go through the whole game just playing MA missions.

Perhaps they could lower the XP per target, and raise the mission complete xp in the architect? That would mean, well-developed multi-mission story arcs could still give a generous amount of XP.

Alternatively they hike the XP rewards from their own missions, but they’ve already done that a lot over the years to combat farming and street sweeping.

Of course, maybe its just something they accepted would happen from the outset, and will turn a blind eye? CoH has been going for years now, and in light of upcoming competition from the likes of Champions Online and DCU Online, maybe they’ll take the stance that they’re not keen on the farming, but the benefits overall of the MA and user-generated content in terms of their subscriber base will outweigh the damage done to the gaming experience?

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