As Arty points out in the previous comments, Positron also mentioned the following in his 4th Anniversary Message (bolding ine):
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.
Wow. That’s … pretty cool.
I’ll be curious to see what level of editorial control they exercise (or can exercise). It might also point out, depending on the features available, how “cookie cutter” some of the CoX missions are. On the other hand it could be damn fun to play — or write one myself.
Hmmm.
The ability to add content thrills me more than anything else about this game has in a long time.
That might even be worth re-subscribing for.
Go Puck Bunny!
Frankly, the seperation of NCNC’s studio with the Co* franchise from Cryptic has been the best thing to happen to this game. The current developers aren’t as tied to the original ‘vision’ that Jack had in mind and wouldn’t let go of.
That said, I honestly think that his vision made this game the great MMO that it is today, but removing those creative constraints is what will give the game legs enough to have real longevity.
I’m sooo happy to see NCSoft adding this kind of utility since this is the only MMO I’ve been able to deal with for any serious time.
From everything I hear, I12 is going to be chock-full of all sorts of “wow” moments just in terms of interface and Quality of Life bits — smack on the forehead “”how did we ever live without this” or “why wasn’t it this way long before” sorts of things. May even overshadow the content …
I do agree that clearly there’s a lot of stuff that was on the devs’ list that has been reprioritized by the change in management. So far, everything I’ve heard makes me think that’s been a good thing.
It has been noted by the dev’s that this is a content-light issue. I don’t think anyone will notice with all the other stuff coming out.
OK, completly threadjacking, but I started a new RPG Plot Blog. Check it out: http://truthisstrangerrpgnews.blogspot.com/
Cool!
Just a thought, but this seems like a neat(ish) way out of the “what do I do after I hit 50 problem” … basically Open Sourcing the content generation
I will be very interested to see how this is implemented. It could be lame (“Hey, look, yet another generic warehouse mission”), or it could be seriously interesting.
Will the content be monitored, or will people be able to adapt their favorite comic book stories for CoX?
That’s going to be the trick. I would assume there would have to be some moderation to avoid copyright/trademark infringement, obscenity, canon-breaking info (“Yes, it’s true, Statesman is really a Rikti!”), etc. How they will do this (and where the dividing lines will be between permissable and not remains be seen.
So, for example, it’s possible you could adapt a “favorite comic book story” for CoX — bearing in mind that said stories, stripped of their particular characters, tend to be more generic than one would think.
We’ll see.
Mmmmmmmm…. a full-soviet story arc…. mmmmm :)…….
That would certainly be an interesting possibility. I’ll be curious to see, again, how “canonical” it will all be treated.