GDC09: Mission Architect in-depth, part 4

Before this meeting, I did a little data-mining and I realized that in the three weeks Mission Architect has been out [on the test servers], players have managed to actually surpass the amount of content we've been able to make in five years as developers. And we're still in beta! We haven't even gone live yet. And that's what I mean when I talk about the big lumbering beast that's slouching towards Paragon City. It's going to be when we're live, six months down the road, going "How much content do we have?"

We limit it — you can only have three published stories. To some extent, it's to control that overwhelming amount of content. But if our subscriber base begins to grow dramatically, that's going to go up. And if if that content starts getting dev choiced and hall of famed, that number's going to go up. So there's going to be a lot! And then we have to start looking at management.

Our players — and this is probably true with most MMOs, but moreso of City of Heroes — because of the costume creator and the level of detail people get into it, you kind of get a different mindset of player. You get a very creator-centric mindset. Now we've added on to that with Mission Architect. Now they can become creators of their own stories and everybody wants to be good creators with each other. So it builds this positive feedback where you see all this stuff going. You know, if I ever need to hire a new mission writer, guess where I'm going to look? I'm going to look at the highest rated guys on there. Because that's your resume. You've done it and people love your stuff.

Is there a point at which you see the amount of content becoming a problem in and of itself?
Not really. We have a lot of good systems that scale well for our content. Storage size is not an issue — they're small little text files. We did the math: if everyone in the in the game made three mission arcs and maxed out their file size for stuff we would store 9GB on the server. In the day and age where a terabyte is a hundred bucks, 9GB is not that big of a deal. That's not really the issue. If anything it's more of an issue the amount of content that starts to go back and forth through the network. And we're good right now, we're doing a lot of stuff in beta to keep memory issues controlled. There's a lot of code stuff: they're working on it to make it run smooth is how it translates to.

It's an incredible feature, we hope some day to see more MMOs doing the same.

It kind of makes me think about it. If things go well and now it becomes the norm. Where if you're going to make an MMO, you have to have a crafting system and you have to have a 1 to 50 leveling system and you have to have a user generated content system. Out of the gate if we'd known, 6 or 7 years ago, all the content we made we'd eventually open up to the players and made sure we built stuff that way we wouldn't have a lot of the wierdness that we've had trying to get that out to the player.

But I don't know if it's a good idea or necessary to put, as a default, for most genres out there. It works well for the superhero genre because of the nature of storytelling, but going to a fantasy/adventure or going into a scifi environment... We captured it really well as being a virtual world environment. You go into this danger room or holodeck and you have this experience that's completely separate from the rest of the game. I don't have to worry as a storyteller about the cannon of the game. And the players can do whatever they want — like the story told entirely in second person. I think that was a really smart choice for us.

For example, the Unreal or the Half-Life stuff. You can buy Unreal, close the game down and fire up Unreal edit and go into their game editor. But you have to close down one thing and open it up. And we talked about whether we wanted it to work like that, have it be a separate system. And actually, no, we had a lot of good lore ideas and tied it directly in, where there are buildings you go to and you get little skee-ball tickets when you play through missions and everyone hangs out around the mission computer and jumps into the holodeck to fight crime or cause crime or whatever. So I'll be interested to see what other people do with it.