City of Heroes: Mission Architect

Combining event triggers and placements can have your players running backwards and forwards across the map. I tinker with the idea of having a chain of escort missions about the Chinese Olympic protests, with people trying to extinguish the Human Torch, but you can't type copyrighted names, so that's a no-no.

When you get this deep in, there's a caveat: as the mission objectives grow, the interface stops being so friendly. Objectives are listed in the order you created them, not in which order they're triggered, and there's no easy visual reference to the quickly see the overall shape of the mission.

It's not a serious problem - just use a pen and paper, they still exist - but with so much effort sunk into making this feel right, it's a shame that I ended up with my head fogging over, and deciding not to mess about with too much complexity.

Text Adventure

Most of your time in the Mission Architect will be spent writing text. Whether it's descriptions for your new gang, quest text, clues, pop-up hints, speech bubbles from key characters or information that appears in the stat window and progress bars, the Mission Architect is basically a cluster of friendly forms.

A lot of the text forms are optional, with default text dutifully papering over the cracks in your effort. But if you're doing this in the first place, I think I'm safe in assuming that you're the kind of person who writes Wikipedia entries. You're full of words, right? Words that the world - or at least, the part of the world that you've chosen to believe actually matters - needs to hear.

Either that, or you're a ridiculous child, who just wants to see what he can slip past the profanity filter. Top tip, from one oversized moron to another - Scunthorpe, Hilary Swank, and Bum all pass the profanity check. So there's no logical reason why you couldn't call your arc "Harryhausen's Super-Ballistic Fucklebus To Bumtown". There's community moderation, but you'll still have the satisfaction of knowing you've upset some thin-skinned dick for three minutes.

Sadly, you can't design maps. It's fairly obvious why - that'd eliminate the simplicity of the Mission Architect at a stroke. Paragon has struggled so hard to make it utterly approachable, and map creation is a world apart from forms and character creators. It does leave you with a fairly limited palette of locations, but at the same time, it preserves the purity of the Architect.

Test Run

Once you've got a mission and a storyline, you can test your story arc. There's a very annoying problem here, though: you can only test your storyline from beginning to end. You can't pop in and just test the fourth mission, even though they're all discrete adventures. This is where you find out that your jokes and exposition in the little boxes don't work, because they disappear too quickly, or move around too much.

Nipping in and out of the test area isn't an option, for the above reason - but you'll soon get an idea for what will and won't work. And for a great example of what doesn't, play "The Affections Of Jeff Patarken", the little turd I left in the internet for you all.

I've had fun - but I lack the discipline and narrative drive to make a story that is coherent and enjoyable. As with all systems driven by user-generated content, that's the job of the talented, dedicated 1 per cent of humanity. And even with dwindling numbers, City of Heroes has more than enough of those focused creative types to keep anyone busy for a good while yet. Plus, some good news for newcomers - even the lower levels have a wide range of missions available to them, as people seem keen on using their own characters.

NCsoft and Paragon deserve kudos for the Mission Architect, even if the recession has hit hard enough to render customer support non-existent (currently at 10 days for a reply to a basic question). It's a dream for the properly creative as well as the open-mouthed show-off. Plus, it shares the key to all successful user-generated content - you can ignore it and still have a full game. Paragon City has a few more stories to tell yet.