GDC09: Mission Architect in-depth, part 3

We're looking at City of Heroes competing with some new, next-gen MMOs coming into the genre...
You can say their names!

...is there a specific plan to keep a game that's five years old competitive in the market? Is Mission Architect a part of that?

First of all, the game's always been competitive. We've always brought these free updates that a lot of other MMOs don't do — you have to go out and buy a boxed expansion. We do a mini-expansion three times a year. That's one of the things I think has really kept our subscriber numbers as high as they are.

As far as worrying about other competitors in a similar genre, personally, I kind of welcome them. I've never seen great games come out where there's only one in the genre. You need to have competition in order to make your content that much better. City of Heroes has been doing really great stuff being the only guy on the block. The conversations we're having now about what we want to do... does it play into stuff other people are doing? Because we now kind of have to prove ourselves because there's going to be someone else? Hell yeah it does. But now we're gonna bring it. We want to make it that much better.

Some of this is because when we were with our previous owners, we didn't have the money or the team to pull this stuff off. And now that we do we're like the little kid who's just been put in the candy shop. We're excited. I'm a huge comic book nut and I think every game on the shelf should be a super hero game. So I'm not really worried about what that's going to do to our game because it's a great game.

What was your favorite part of working on Mission Architect?

My first thought was it's actually now. Playing other people's content; going in and seeing what people have done with it. But that's really the quote "I hate writing; I love having written."

I think during the development of it the part I liked the best was seeing the team get behind it. Where you saw the buzz get generated from... it didn't matter! It might be one of the engineers working on the bandwidth for IT or whatever — I don't even know what the guy does — say, "This is really cool, do you realize what you could do with this?" And everyone came together. As our team's gotten bigger, this is one of the things we looked at as kind of a benchmark for the new studio. We're at NCsoft and this is what we bring when we put stuff out. Seeing all come to life would be the short answer.

What sort of numbers would you be looking at to consider this a success? Are there any specific numbers you're looking for?
For me, personally, if we maintain our subscriber base — because we have a very healthy subscriber base, where it's at, I don't expect our numbers to drop with this feature. I don't think we really have expectations. I never had a conversation with anyone that went "If you don't bring in an extra 200,000 subscribers from this, this is a failure." Our game is doing really well. We're well past where we need to be for our subscriber base. So this is a feature we're excited about. Are our numbers going to go up? We hope so. At the end of the day, if it went up by 2 or 200,000, though, it's still a success for me.