City Of Heroes's Mission Architect Births 20,000 Arcs In First Week

PC subscription MMO City of Heroes' new user-generated Mission Architect system "has exceeded any expectation we have set for it," says Matt Miller, lead designer on the project at the NCSoft-owned Paragon Studios. The Architect update, which lets players design and populate their own mission arcs within the game, has been a success among current players -- and also encouraged lapsed users to return, says Miller, although he declined to specify numbers. According to Miller, users had built 360 mission arcs, each containing 5 missions, for other City of Heroes users within the feature's first 60 minutes of availability. "By midnight on day one, we had over 2600 arcs, and exactly 24 hours after launch we were already at 3800 arcs," says Miller. "We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 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." One week following Mission Architect's launch, Miller says there are 20,000 arcs published and playable -- 6259 of them "heroic" and 2240 of them "villainous." Of these, users have awarded five-star ratings to 2,860 total arcs. Gamasutra is currently running a series of articles written by Paragon Studios' Joe Morrissey discussing the Mission Architect's policing system, with the second in the series to debut on the site in the near future.