Mission Architect

Architect

Overview

The Mission Architect, fictionally presented as a training exercise for Heroes and Villains, allows players to build their own Missions and Story Arcs and share them with others in the game. Using an intuitive interface similar to the game's detailed Character Creator, players can create missions by selecting options like size and type of map/environment, mission objectives and encounter types, and difficulty level of each encounter. Additionally, players can write all mission story fiction and character dialogue.

This feature was announced by Positron in April 28th 2008[1].

Players can create their own missions and they can play missions that have been created by other players. Once you have finalized and "published" your missions, they are accessible by all players across all servers. All players can rate player created missions and a Mission Browser lets players find available missions and story arcs through a variety of tabs, sorts and filters in an auction house type environment.

As missions are played and more people positively rate them, the creator gains rewards and access to unlockable content for his/her missions. Rewards will also be given to players of the missions. Players will gain rewards such as badges and even XP for playing user created missions and story arcs.

The Mission Architect will allow you to create your own named bosses, such as their costumes, powers, and spawn places. You can only have maps for missions that you have visited. By getting high ratings and having many people play your story arcs, you gain rewards such as Signature Villains/heroes as well as some unique maps to make into missions.

Background

Architect

Architect is a company created by Dr. Thaddeus Aeon AQSA, with Crey Industries funding. The prime motive of the company is to bring opportunity to all citizens of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles to create their very own pockets of theoretical existence for others to experience first hand as a new form of entertainment.

Key factors in the origins of the company include:

Possibility of new perspective on how to deal with Professor Echo.
Revenge on Television for forcing Dr. Aeon to write a scientific report encouraging everyone to watch more television.
To follow up the commercial success of NutriPaste.

Dr Aeon and Positron have both noted individually that Architect has the potential for great beneficial and humanitarian results throughout the world.

More Info

What is Mission Architect?

Mission Architect is a new game system for the City of Heroes massively multiplayer game. It allows players to create their own stories and share those stories with other players on the live servers. Creators can pick from hundreds of maps and thousands of characters. They can use existing characters or create their own custom enemies. They can get even more detailed and create full enemy groups, giving each enemy unique costumes and powers. Players are allowed to write all of the dialog for their story as well as decide on level of difficulty and enemy placement. The developers have even given players the ability to trigger one mission goal off of another, creating a chain of events within a single mission. Each story can have up to five chapters or missions and each mission can hold up to a maximum of 25 achievable goals. For people who just want to play the user-created content, they can access the mission browser that shows all the generated content. Players can sort these stories by name, highest rated, length and recently added. Players can also filter content to show only those with specific ratings, arcs you have or haven’t played, as well as the alignment of the story. As people play content, they’ll be able to rate that content from one to five stars. Creators will actually get in-game benefits for making content that gets highly rated. The developers even offer a Dev Choice and Hall of Fame standing for the best of the best. [2]

What it's not

The Mission Architect is not a power leveling, farming, or badging tool. (Exception for badges directly related to the Mission Architect.) The developers have taken various steps to prevent this feature from being used for those purposes, but I'll discuss those later.

Architect Entertainment Stations

It will all start at Architect Entertainment Stations (AES) placed in multiple zones throughout the game. (1 in a co-op zone was implied, but not guaranteed.) Here you will be able to search for other player made missions to go on with or without a team, or create, save, load, test, publish, or unpublish your own missions. (More on those new terms later.) A quick note about the mission search engine. It will have to sort through content made by ALL players that have published a mission. So it's expected to load slower than the markets load. (Honestly just the search engine alone on the Architect was a big undertaking and we appreciate all of the devs' work that went into it!)

What to Expect

A published arc can contain up to five missions. All Architect missions will be instanced and not in an open zone. While you are on an Architect mission it will be similar to being on a Task/Strike Force in regards to other contacts being greyed out. You may well notice that your toon's level has changed while in the mission. Your level can shift in either direction and can even vary with each mission in the arc.

After the published mission is complete, you can rate it as thumbs up, thumbs down, or inappropriate and why.

Not for Farming or PLing

Opinions on farming and powerleveling are seldom neutral, and this isn't a forum for that discussion. It is, however, where you get informed of how the devs are going to discourage the Architect from being overrun with intentionally mindless stuff from folks that do not care about the stories the Architect is intended to encourage. Please keep in mind things can change between now and implementation.

The developers are granting full experience (XP) and influence rewards for defeating enemies in player-made content. They are also giving players tickets in place of random drops. They can take these tickets to an Architect ticket vendor and redeem them for various in-game rewards, such as enhancements, recipes and salvage. They are also allowing players to purchase unlockable content with their tickets. They’ll be able to get maps, costume pieces and different characters. [3]

While in an Architect mission, players will NOT get: end mission bonus, salvage, recipes, or enhancements.

The only badges that will be awarded are those tied to the Architect. "Kill x amount of y", Healing, Debt, and other non-Architect badges are not awarded.

Creating a mission for you and/or others

The exact order of mission creation isn't known, but at various points you will pick a mission type and goals, enemies and level, possibly a NPC combat ally(s) and/or custom boss, and a pre-made map and write the thing and save. The devs have promised us over 1,000 maps to choose from at launch, including all unique maps. (They also said no one wants to see Hamidon in the 5-layer room.) They would like to get us a mapmaker at some point, but that point will not be at launch. (It's a lot of work for that, folks.) Likewise mobs will spawn on the maps at preset points.

The ability to add a custom boss is the feature we demanded and the reason we are getting the Architect an issue later. It's known that in i13 we get the ability to save and load costumes from our toons to our local computer. We will also be able to download it to a custom boss. Each one will get a primary (attack) and a secondary power set. It was asked by an audience member if we would be able to scale our custom bosses to Elite Bosses or Archvillain/Hero, but I wasn't clear on the answer given.

No ambushes will be possible with the Architect. Also no cut scenes.

Mission type and goals like glowie clicks or kill-alls are easy enough to understand. Turns out there is a link between enemies and level though, as enemies exist in various ranges and don't always scale out of those ranges well. Call it quality control for a better play experience.

Enemies and allies can be pretty much anything you can already fight somewhere in the game. At the time of Herocon, even Giant Monsters were available for use in Architect missions. I inferred that Giant Monsters may change before launch however. One member of the panel commented that the day before they had fought against 6 AV Clockwork Kings with another one helping them in an Architect mission!

Writing well is always a challenge, and this won't be any different. You will be able to compose briefings, NPC dialog, clues, debriefings, and souvenirs, just the same as the devs! Please keep in mind that the developers have spell checking software in their process that isn't in the Architect. So take some time to double-check for typos is my advice.

Saving is done to your local computer, and you can save an unlimited number of missions. You can edit your saved missions offline, as the data is contained in a text file.

Test

You can load up a saved mission and run it for yourself or your team. This can be useful for laughs or less widespread applications like SG initiations and the like.

Publish

You can only have three published story arcs (which can contain up to five missions each) per account, but you can publish and unpublish at will.

It is worth noting that the character that is logged on when you publish the mission is the character that is getting any Architect badge credit for that mission.

Dev's Choice and Hall of Fame

There are two ways around the three published per account limit. Dev's choice and Hall of Fame. These actually copy your mission onto the game servers and delete it from your published slot, freeing it.

Dev's choice simply means a dev liked it enough to save it. It's not canon, but they liked it!

You get a mission into the Hall of Fame when an as of yet unknown number of players rate it thumbs up.

Both of these will be search options in the Architect menu.

How long does it take to make a decent five mission storyarc?

You can create a single mission rather quickly, in less then ten or fifteen minutes. However, to truly craft something unique and excellent, you’ll have to spend a decent amount of time in the tool. It could take someone a couple of days of to write, build and test something really good. [4]