Releasing 'Issue 14: Architect' for City of Heroes has added more than just a few tweaks or features, it's opened the floodgates to user made missions.
The developers are amazed at how quickly the community got its creative thinking caps on, and within 24 hours they had 3800 mission arcs, with up to 5 missions in each of them.
"We are simply astounded at the response we've gotten for it," writes an astounded Matt Miller, lead designer.
"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, 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."
Users are already critiquing one another's work, the mission arcs allow a great deal of freedom when it comes to customising the goals and encounters within them. "Players absolutely love fighting custom enemies for the simple fact that they no longer know what to expect."
"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," commented Miller. Have the City of Heroes team stumbled upon the real future of the MMO?
Source: Eurogamer
