14 DAY TRIAL // Comic books have played an important part in a lot of people's lives, especially gamers, who have been offered a wide variety of titles based on popular comic book characters. From Marvel and DC to any other comics company, the market is filled with them.
NCsoft, a company specialized in online games, has decided to benefit from this popularity and release the City of Heroes MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game, which lets players create their own heroes and star in various adventures.
We reported last week that the subscribers to this game had just received a new update in the form of Issue 14, bringing the mission architect feature, which allowed players to create their custom story arcs for their own heroes, each of them consisting of five missions. The response that the developers hoped for was pretty big, but after its release all expectations were easily surpassed by the big number of story arcs that were created.
In only a day since the release, players built more than 20,000 mission arcs, showcasing the ability of the community to create high-quality content for the game. In perspective, the 3800 story arcs the players produced easily surpass the amount of content that the development team made during the game's existence, as highlighted by a statement issued by Paragon Studios to the community.
“All in all, the actual launch of Issue 14 has exceeded any expectation we have set for it. We aimed very high with this Issue, but even the most Pollyanna dev on the team never expected the feature to take off this fast, with this amount of awesome buzz behind it. Players and the press have been calling this revolutionary, and I think we at Paragon Studios are just bringing our heads up to see exactly how revolutionary it actually is.”
It definitely seems that there are a lot of people who want their own super hero to live out its own adventures. Hopefully this trend of giving storytelling tools to players will continue in other online games.