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City of Heroes senior designer Bruce Harlick on return of The 5th Column
Massively mentioned yesterday that City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary has gone into open beta testing. Along with that announcement and an overview of the Issue 15 features, Paragon Studios senior designer Bruce Harlick has written a developer diary titled "A Circle of Fifths: Designing the Ultimate Fifth Anniversary Task Force and Strike Force" Harlick writes that when Paragon Studios was hashing through ideas for the game's strike force and task force for the City of Heroes 5th Anniversary, bringing the 5th Column back to Paragon City seemed the right thing to do. It also lets them bring The Reichsman into the game, leading to some interesting mission arcs. Harlick writes, "I didn't want the two arcs to be simple mirrors of each others, with the villains doing something and the heroes stopping it." He adds, "I wanted the villains to succeed with their plan and to deal with the consequences, and I wanted the heroes to deal with an emerging big problem." Have a look at Bruce Harlick's developer diary on City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary, for more about what he describes as "a story that's worthy of the return of one of the biggest threats to ever hit Paragon City and the Rogue Islands."%Gallery-64392%
Bruce Harlick on City of Heroes story design: Cimerora
Creating missions and particularly story arcs for City of Heroes/City of Villains is a much more involved process than you might imagine. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Alec Meer talks to NCsoft's Bruce Harlick, Senior Game Designer about this involuted, and sometimes arcane process. Harlick waxes at length about the Cimerora story arcs (for both heroes and villains). Lead Mission Writer, John Morrissey, provided the seed ideas and set Harlick to flesh it all out as a part of learning the tools and process to produce the missions with "the mandate of no new assets or code". Harlick's account of the process gives a revealing look into the way it all works, the frustrations and obstacles, how he clothed his ideas in the MMO's digital flesh, and how he went about breaking Morrissey's mandate in the end. All in all, it is a fascinating look behind the scenes of this popular super-powered MMOG, and we recommend it for those who would like to be enlightened about the process that brings us some of our favorite story moments in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.
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:
'Ask a dev' returns to City of Heroes
Good news for anyone wishing they could personally ask the City of Heroes team questions. NCsoft has decided to bring back the "Ask a dev" feature due to recent expansions of the NorCal team that works on City of Heroes. The very first developer who gets to be pelted with questions is a Mr. Bruce Harlick, who happens to be a senior designer on the team. If you've got any burning questions about upcoming changes/improvements to missions, storylines or their supporting systems head on over to the official forums to ask.We suppose you could ask about stuff that's not related to his job, but you're much less likely to see an answer if you do. Then again, if you were to ask something completely out of left field, he may just respond out of pure curiosity. We know that we probably would!
