After five years of writing new missions, City of Heroes' developers have finally put the power in the hands of the people with today's release of Issue 14: Architect, which contains the new Mission Architect quest editor. You can put together multi-mission story arcs, create event triggers and control enemy placement, and so on. It seems like a robust system, and one that players have taken to quickly. Last time I spoke to NCSoft reps about the update, players had uploaded over 400 quests in the first week of the add-on's closed beta.
I got a chance to check out the Mission Architect system prior to release and found it to be quite easy to use. I managed to throw together a dumb but functional mission--about saving Paragon City's daily doughnut shipment from a band of rogue policemen--in about 20 minutes. All player-made quests launch from the same NPC inside a building called the Architect Entertainment Center, so you can't write a mission series and then integrate it into the greater world at large. User quests are all instanced and happen in a vacuum.
What makes the Mission Architect more than a throwaway novelty is the fact you can earn experience and gear just like you can when questing for real. Well, not just like that, but close. Experience gains are based entirely on how tough the mission is, which is a function of the number and strength of enemies, and things like that. You don't find specific gear dropping from enemies, but you do earn a special kind of tickets that you can collect and then cash in at the Mission Architect store for what NCSoft described as pretty valuable gear. You could level and gear up all the way to level 50 using only user-made missions, if you were crazy enough.
User-made content is of course all the rage these days, and I'm glad NCSoft has taken the steps to merge the concept with the MMO genre, which has traditionally had such a static, hands-off sort of feel to it.
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