14 DAY TRIAL // City of Heroes/City of Villains is at the moment the only super hero MMO on the market and it has carved a nice niche on the market. Now, the developers are trying to spice up the attractiveness of the MMO by allowing players to get directly involved in the design of missions that can be undertaken in the game.
The next free update for City of Heroes is coming a bit later this month and is aptly titled Architect. It will be free to all subscribers, as all the updates for the game, and it will introduce the ability to create complete story arcs that can be then shared with other players all over the world.
NCsoft, the developer, is promising that the interface will be judged as intuitive by the players as they will be able to set up everything from environments, missions objectives, enemies, accompanying fiction and even character to character dialog. There are literally hundreds of maps that can be used and a few thousands of characters that can be featured in any of the user created missions.
City of Heroes is also getting a mission browser, which will allow any player to take a look and see which user created content is available. The offerings can be sorted by name, rating, length and the date of creation, making it easy to get into a story arc that is interesting to any gamer. As more and more missions are played, gamers will also be able to rate them in order to make it easier for good stuff to rise in popularity. Content creators that will get constant high marks will receive in game bonuses and the developers will showcase, through a Dev Choice and a Hall of Fame, the best levels.
City of Heroes is set to face stiff competition from DC Universe Online, which is being created for the PlayStation 3 and the PC by Sony, and from Champions Online, which is being developed by Cryptic.