GDC09: Mission Architect in-depth

by Elizabeth Harper Apr 6th 2009 at 7:05PM

Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Massively Interviews, Massively Event Coverage

At GDC recently, Joe Morrissey, Senior Designer at NCsoft and Lead Designer for Mission Architect talked to an audience about the challenges of implementing a user generated content system in a 5-year old MMO. Afterwards, we had a chance to sit him down and ask a few questions of our own. But to start with, the basics, for those of you who haven't been following Mission Architect's development: it's a system that allows any City of Heroes or City of Villains player to create their own missions, complete with their own characters and stories. (If the idea of user generated content sounds strange and foreign to you, let Captain Dynamic explain the idea to you.) Currently in beta, this content Godzilla will be released upon the live realms in Issue 14. (For people who haven't yet dived into the City of franchise, there will also be a new game box coming out for Mission Architect: the aptly named Architect Edition.)

Gallery: GDC09: Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes panel

Gallery: City of Heroes: Architect Edition

But before we can get into the meat of our interview with Morrissey, here's what you need to know about the Mission Architect system...

What we now know as "Mission Architect" started out as a developer's tool that City of Heroes and City of Villains developers used to make the game's mission content. Originally missions were created in plain text files. Later, missions were created in Excel (85% of the game's content was created in Excel with macros). Morrissey wanted to make a GUI interface that would be easy enough that absolutely anyone on the CoX team could make missions. It was only later that they thought about opening it up to the players.
The UI is based off of the costume creator, which everyone is be familiar with -- so it immediately feels intuitive. There are lots of tooltips and help documentations to explain all of the features -- so the content is as easy as possible to create.
User-created missions that take place in a holodeck-like virtual environment within the game -- so players have the freedom to tell whatever sorts of stories they want to tell without impacting the game's storyline.
Players gain rewards for creating popular missions, which can be selected as Developer's Choice (by the developers' selection) or the Hall of Fame (by the players' ratings). Each has its own badge reward and winning either will allow the author to write additional missions. (Players are limited to creating three story arcs, with a maximum of five missions in each arc -- unless they win one of these awards.)
Players gain rewards for playing Mission Architect missions that are equal to the rewards they'd gain by playing other missions. If there weren't full rewards from Mission Architect, it would never be compelling for players. But to prevent abusing the system, rewards are strictly based off the difficulty of the enemies you defeat in an encounter. The risk/reward ratio can't be tweaked by a mission's author. On completing a mission, players are given tickets that can be redeemed in game for a variety of rewards.
For people playing content, the GUI helps them find missions with easy filtering and searching tools. (Robust search options are necessary because there's the potential to be a lot of content.) They'll automatically see the top rated content first (highest rated, Developer's Choice, and Hall of Fame), so they can immediately dive in to the best of the best of what Mission Architect has to offer.
For people writing content, there's a detailed feedback system, letting content creators see ratings and comments. (This has lead to what Morrissey sees as a new player type: the critic! Some players have a high level of interest in playing and writing detailed reviews and comments on user-created missions.)
All missions submitted are scanned by NCsoft for content violations (inappropriate language or content) before hitting the live servers. If the scanner catches something, it will automatically prevent it from being published and ask the author to fix it. And if a mission gets published that isn't appropriate, players can report it and customer service can review it and ask the author to change it if necessary. If a certain number of players report a mission, it is automatically pulled, even before customer service reviews it.
To prevent report griefing, who reports missions for inappropriate content is also recorded, and anyone report content purely for griefing purposes could find themselves in trouble.

So, should the game be making the missions or playing the missions? Ought missions be fun to make or fun to play? Apparently, the development team is still arguing about this. On one hand, you could say that if it's not fun to make, no one's going to make it. But on the other, perhaps it doesn't matter how difficult it is -- because if only 1% of players make content, that's still more than enough. This ongoing argument seems to have given us a system that's a little bit of both. And, though no one will comment on exactly what happens next with Mission Architect -- and City of Heroes -- it's obvious that a lot of it depends on us, the players. User generated content -- or, as Morrissey calls it, "the content Godzilla" -- is yet untested in the MMO space.

Our interview, part one >>

Tags: city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, coh, cov, cox, gdc, gdc-2009, gdc09, issue-14, joe-morrissey, mission-architect, morrissey, ncsoft, user-generated-content

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Brandon said on 8:11PM 4-06-2009

thanks for the interview, it was a good read

InfamousBrad said on 4:25AM 4-07-2009

That is a good interview, thanks.

Mission Architect is HUGE, even with its current limitations, because it meshes with and expands City of Heroes' 2nd biggest advantage (after the costume creator), and that's replayability. As of right now, there is about five times as much content as one hero character can experience without outleveling it, without turning off XP 80% of the time or using the flashback system to do earlier content, also without XP; for villains, it's a bit closer to three times. So if you level one hero to 50, you might as well start another hero. Not only will the different character class play in a completely new way, but you don't need to or even necessarily want to repeat almost any of the same stories that you played through the first time. But once you get that 5th character through a range, especially the low level ranges? Once you get your third villain past level 20ish? You start seeing the same missions over, and over, and over. There are no surprises, no mysteries, no enemies whose powers you don't know.

On the test server right now, there's about five times as much content in the player created story arc list as there is in the official, canonical game. And contrary to what you might expect, if you skip the obviously shallow or sloppily written ones (the author-written descriptions generally give them away), there's still seven or eight times as much content as there is in the original game, and on average, the quality is actually higher. (An awful lot of the canonical content is /way/ overdue for updating or rewriting.)

And that matters, because not only do the five character classes per side not play anything like each other, but in some classes, like defenders and masterminds and corruptors, even the dozens of distinct sub-classes don't play like each other. It's why City of Heroes players are even more famous for alt-itis than players of any other games; you can easily have 36 characters on a server, no two of whom play anything alike. And that's where Mission Architect steps in and saves your bacon: there are now enough stories, and enough new villain fashions, that you don't have to play any one of those 36 characters through the same content.

InfamousBrad said on 4:27AM 4-07-2009

(Gah. I should stop typing this late. Corrections: in the last sentence, "fashions" should be "factions." In the first sentence of the 2nd to last paragraph, "five times" should be "ten times.")

HDTran said on 4:56PM 4-07-2009

This is my first time posting here, but this article is so amazing that I had to post. You guys covered this extremely well and it is just such a revolutionary feature that I think a lot of MMO players will rethink about what MMOs could be.

I'm also really surprised that 1% of the content is going to be labeled as Dev's Choice! They're going to really need to hire a lot of people to be able to go through all of the player content.