MMORPG with USER CREATED CONTENT????

[CaptainBoots]

Someone posted about this in their blog, and I had to mention it to you folks.

Apparently City of Heroes will be adding user-created missions/content to their game. From the looks of it, people will be able to use the pre-existing palette of their villains (i.e. no new graphics etc) I wish you could create your own maps, but it does look like you have to pick one of those too. STILL, this is an interesting step in that direction.

The post's URL: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=info&Number=10685737&bodyprev=#Post10685737

And the relevant quote near the bottom:

I can’t tell you how excited I am for our game’s future, and although we have some major announcements yet to be made, one of the things I can talk about is a feature that we are planning. Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialog and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall. It is features like these that we never dreamed of including when we first shipped, but are excited to be able to offer players very soon.

[Quinatan]

While that does sound pretty interestings, it will need a high level of moderation and screening to prevent quests titled things like "Punch the kids in the nutz!!!!!" with hints of just swear words.   And for some reason I get images of the boss saying "Money is tight, I'm going to have to fire some people, how can we get new content for cheeper"  and someone saying "Meh, just let the players make thier own content"

[CaptainBoots]

I'm sure they're looking for ways to make players stay around, and the best way for players to feel like it's THEIR game is to let them have a shot at adding content.

As you pointed out, they'll have to moderate things to install to prevent abuse of handing out rewards far exceeding the difficulty of the mission and avoiding cussing or anything along those lines. The whole thing will cost money to put up and maintain, so I'm a little less cynical I think. I think the most selfish thing I can imagine them thinking is that it's a good way to try out new writers without having to go through interviews.

I'm really betting the content will be very like the Elder Scrolls games like Oblivion. Some really awesome stuff, a lot of mediocre, and enough 'why bother? and WTF?' to go around the earth a few times at the equator. Still, if they get in some good stuff that the players like, it'll help the game AND hopefully their paid writers will have a better idea of what players are looking for and later expansions will only get better.

Or it'll tank because they don't get enough good entries. It's an interesting idea though.

[Brasse]

Writing good content means having to come up with meaningful story-arcs.
It is also very time consuming, and not that many creative people have that much free time!

It is unknown how robust the system will really be until it goes in... can related quest lines be strung together? Can there be a more meaningful progression than just taking each quest as a one-off mission?
If so, perhaps there will be a way for people to communitcate which quest lines are worth doing as well.

The "kill ten rats" (go to x, kill y) quests... are boring, so I hope it's a bit beyond that.

;-)#

[Kaid]

One concern is people will make something like UBER master mind map where they stack the mission to be the best/easiest xp gain for a specific class so people just run it over and over.

[Bearmug]

IIRC Ryzom had it, although it was relatively limited. but it was really hard to come up with a good questline/story AND create it how it was imagined.