City of Heroes set a new standard for player creation and customization in MMOs with its Character Creator. Now, players will be able to use an intuitive interface to create their own missions from the ground up by determining details ranging from environments, mission objectives, and enemies, to written fiction and character dialogue - giving their stories nearly infinite depth and personalization.

What is the Mission Architect?

Mission Architect is a new game system developed for the City of Heroes massively multiplayer game. It allows players to create their own stories and share those stories with other players on live servers. Creators can pick from hundreds of maps and thousands of characters. They can use existing characters or create their own custom enemies. They can get even more detailed and create full enemy groups, giving each enemy unique costumes and powers.

Players can also write all of the dialog for their story as well as decide on level of difficulty and enemy placement. It’s even possible to trigger one mission goal off of another, creating a chain of events within a single mission. Each story can have up to five chapters or missions and each mission can hold up to a maximum of 25 achievable goals.

For people who just want to play the user created content, there is an integrated mission browser that shows all the generated content. It can sort stories by name, highest rated, lengthy and recently added. It can also filter content to show only those with specific ratings, arcs that the player have or haven’t played as well as the alignment of the story.

As people play content, they’ll be able to rate that content from one to five stars. Creators will actually get in-game benefits for making content that gets highly rated and there will be a Dev Choice and Hall of Fame standing for the best of the best.

City of Heroes Issue 14 is scheduled for release in March 2009.