Building upon our previous post last week about City of Heroes new Architect system, eurogamer.net points out that lead designer Matt Miller is “astounded” with the community response to the new mechanism.
Miller writes on the official COH website, “We are simply astounded at the response we’ve gotten for it (the architect system).”
“I feel like everything we have worked on has really been worth it when I see that within 60 minutes we had 360 entire Mission Arcs (each containing up to 5 missions) available for other people to play. By midnight on day one we had over 2600 arcs, and exactly 24 hours after launch we were already at 3800 arcs.
“We did some data mining of our own,” he adds, “and 3800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.”
Miller also speaks to the fact that 70% of the user generated mission arcs include customized enemies, thereby overcoming the stagnation problem of users becoming tired of the same set of bad guys to face. COH residents now no longer need to wait for developers to refresh bad guy content; users are doing it themselves.
After just one week of going live with the new creation tools, the Mission Server had more than 20k playable mission arcs. 6259 of them are heroic-themed, 112 time travel-themed, 134 feature statesmen, and 794 mission arcs feature use of the 5th column. Users seem to be truly appreciating and eating up others’ creations, as 2860 of the 6259 have 5 star ratings, and only a (relative) handful, 582 to be exact, have received a 1 star rating.
“All in all,” adds Miller, “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.”
If the user generated mission arcs feature continues at it’s current success rate, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see more and more titles beginning to offer similar options. Game developers certainly do a boatload of research and listening to their communities about what they want included in future updates to the game, but are limited by their amount of available resources. By turning over the power of creation to the community itself (within a structured environment), COH has crossed the line between producer to facilitator. This new and exciting concept and game creation and play can only get better from here, possibly opening other doors to user generated content that we’ve not even explored yet. Hats off to Matt Miller and the entire COH team!
Tags: 5th column, Architect, city of heroes, city of villains, CoH, community response, creation tools, data mining, matt miller, mission arc, Villains
