City of Heroes Wrap Report

NCsoft has been a tremendous support to Cryptic Studios throughout the development of City of Heroes. Firstly, it was a wonderful resource for all things MMP related. The South Korean office runs the worlds' most successful MMPs, Lineage and Lineage II. With several million subscribers, they had pretty much seen it all! Secondly, the NCsoft branch in Austin Texas has such MMP veterans as Richard Garriott and Jeremy Gaffney; both of them were willing to offer advice whenever it was asked. But perhaps the best thing about NCsoft is that they respected our right to design City of Heroes according to our creative vision. They never made onerous demands in design or art; it was a collaborative effort all around.

High-Level Goals There were several overall design principles that we wanted to hold to throughout the development of the game. First, every player should feel like a super hero. That means every player should be able to create a character they feel is both powerful and unique. Second, we wanted combat to feel fast and furious. We wanted to up the tempo of the traditional MMP to go along with the superhero theme. Third, we wanted to make the game accessible. Sometimes, games are so difficult that there's a very long ramp-up time. We felt that a super hero game would attract a lot of first time MMPers into the genre, so we didn't want to postpone the fun. Instead, we tried to create a sleek UI and game system that allowed players to focus on the game, rather than its rules.

These design principles, as well as the theme of the game (superheroes) are what make City of Heroes stand out. It doesn't look like, or play like a lot of the traditional fantasy titles.

Technology We didn't use any licensed or third party technology because the Cryptic CTO, Bruce Rogers, had already created a dynamite game engine. It could handle the issues that a superhero game would face better than the other possibilities out there in the market. For instance, City of Heroes doesn't take place in a forest or plain, but in a modern, East Coast city. This obviously entailed buildings, streets, citizens, etc. That's A LOT of stuff on the screen at one time. But the Cryptic Engine was designed to handle this issue - and you can pretty much judge the quality of Bruce's work by the accolades we're getting.