City of Heroes Issue 14 Mission Architect Details

NCSoft has revealed further details of Issue 14: Mission Architect for the superhero MMORPG City of Heroes.

The Issue 14 update to the MMORPG will include the Mission Architect, a new system which enables players to create their own missions in-game. These missions can be shared with other members of the community across all live servers. Players will be able determine details ranging from environments, mission objectives and enemies, to written fiction and character dialogue, giving their stories nearly infinite depth and personalisation.

System features include:

Create Stories – Present your story to other players in the game through the story title, description, and character dialogue. Stories can be as short as a single mission and as long as five.

Create Characters – Use existing characters from City of Heroes lore or create your own characters from scratch using the costume creator and a robust powers selection interface. Create individual characters which can be used as enemies, allies and contacts or create whole enemy groups to fill your missions.

Write Dialogue – Every character that you place into a story or mission has its own dialogue. Whether it’s the contact that directs characters to their mission, the hostages that you rescue, or the enemies that you must defeat, they all speak through text bubbles at various points during your encounters.

Define Objectives – Defend, collect, defeat, destroy, rescue, and more. Mission architects can string objectives together making missions as simple or complex as desired, using up to a current maximum of 25 objectives per mission.

Use Advanced Options – For characters and missions select alignment, placement, difficulty, animations, behavior  and more. Every mission objective has multiple advanced options, allowing you to truly customize how you want your story to play out.

Test and Iterate Before Publishing – Take as much time as you want to create your content and test it by yourself or with others. Once your masterpiece is complete, you can Publish it for other players to enjoy and rate.

Find / Browse Other Stories - Sort Stories and Search for Key Criteria – Players can use the Mission Browser to sort published stories by rating, date, length, and title, or search for content using key words like the character who created them or the subject matter within the stories.

Hall of Fame – Stories that have achieved a critical combination of high player ratings and number of views will be elevated into Hall of Fame status and will be listed under the Hall of Fame section.

Developer’s Choice – Stories that are hand-picked by the developer will be deemed Developer’s Choice and listed within the Developer’s Choice section.

To illustrate the new system, Rooster Teeth, creators of the hugely popular Red vs Blue machinima  series, have released a video showing the system in action The video series comes in three parts and the first video is available for viewing now.