CoX's Bruce Harlick talks mission building, moral choices

As part of their ongoing Ask a Dev series, the folks at City of Heroes recently took questions from the community for new staff member Bruce Harlick. Bruce has a seriously prestigious pedigree in hero gaming, and has been there since the very early days, when pen-and-paper was king, we moved in hexes, and Champions had us rolling fistfuls of dice for our ranged killing attacks.

Bruce explains how the CoX mission team are going to keep the standard of missions high with custom art and scripts. There are hints of new mechanics coming that haven't yet been announced, and plans to explore the backstories of characters currently in the game.

But the comment that had us sitting up and taking notes was this one, after the cut:

'I'm a big sucker for classic superhero stories, of heroes facing overwhelming odds and being forced to make tough moral choices, and of villains being offered a chance to walk the path to redemption. I like to explore what makes good good, and what makes evil evil, and just how hard it is to walk the narrow line between the two. You'll certainly be seeing stories about that kind of thing from me in the future.'

If this kind of story is definitely coming, then it may shed some light on things that have been hinted at in the past. The marketing survey put forward the idea of a side-changing mechanic, and in our recent interview with Brian Clayton and Matt Miller, Brian said 'I can say is that having players go from hero to villain, and villain to hero, would nicely tie together what we've already done to date with City of Heroes and City of Villains. We certainly like the concept and the idea, but we're just not ready to talk about the details yet.'

As the book and movie High Fidelity pointed out, there's a lot of mileage in that little word 'yet'.