One of the biggest challenges that developers face when going live with a massively multiplayer online game is keeping the game fresh enough to keep players involved. What that generally means is content expansions and upgrades.

With NCsoft’s City of Heroes franchise, part of that equation has been solved. After all, the CoX (referring to the City of Heroes and City of Villains co-joined product lines) games are not exactly strangers to charting a new course and giving players something that no one else has. When the game launched, the character creation was the most ambitious seen in an MMO. Well, NCsoft has done it again and in the process, has raised the bar in the MMO genre.

While the dev team will continue to work on expansions for new zones, storylines and content, the team has – with the release of the City of Heroes Architect Edition – put a huge chunk of the creation of new missions and storylines into the hands of the players.

Simply put, the Architect Edition allows players to create their own storylines, create their own enemies for the mission, and design the mission parameters from goals, side rewards up to the placement of the enemy units. It is ambitious, yes, but the dev team has pulled it off.

In city hubs, players can find the Mission Architect building that allows them to create instanced zones that step outside the parameters of the “real” world of the game’s zones, but still allows a player to create a mission that others can play as well and gain experience from the effort. Completing missions earns players tickets that can then be used at vendors to buy items and rewards. In actuality, players can go from level 1 to 50 just running missions and story arcs created by other players.

So how does it all work? Well, in a fundamental level, players enter the building, access a computer console and take on the role of a developer. You can create your own enemies, but the design – which might take a time or two to get truly comfortable with, especially if you want to tell a deep story and create a more intricate mission – is somewhat guided. You can build an enemy from scratch with the character creation tools, and even name him or her. You select your location, and then determine how the enemies will be placed, which can include such elements as determining if – after you attack the boss – you trigger waves of henchmen to swarm at you.

The dev team at Paragon (yep, that’s the city name of the collective group of hero-based zones) estimate that a new player can create and upload a mission within about 20 minutes.

As mentioned, the system of creating missions is tied into the game. Architect Entertainment is a holo-deck environment that is located throughout 19 different zones in the game world. Each player account (not the individual characters) has up to three published story arcs available to upload (the arcs can feature up to five missions, with up to 25 mission objectives in each mission). All local stories (the stories the player creates) are stored on your hard drive as text files. There is a My Published Stories, My Characters (custom characters) and My Enemy Groups (you can create your own enemies as well) categories that help the player create a rounded mission. And because players are taxed with creating the descriptions for the missions, it is possible to be as creative as they want (within certain filter parameters, that is). In addition to creating your own enemies and enemy groups, it is possible to step outside of the game lore and create their own legacy.

Once you have created a story and mission that you are satisfied with, you can upload so that other players can play that mission. When others are playing your adventures they get the equivalent experience points as if they were playing outside the mission editor. They also get to rate the mission afterwards and the player who created the content will receive benefits and rewards for higher-rated content.

About the only element that is not totally customizable are the mission maps, though there are 30 map sets with three different sizes per map sets and 20 options.

In addition to the mission architect creator, the new expansion CD contains bonus material that allows players to select between two super booster packs – cyborg and magic. This means a new intro power plus new costume pieces for the character creation area.

Ok, in truth, the Architect Edition doesn’t truly add anything to the base game format. City of Heroes is still an MMO that has been going strong since April 28, 2004, and while there have been expansions that catered to different levels and added different zones, this is still the superhero MMO it was when it launched. But MMO gaming is as driven by the imagination of the players as much as it is driven by the lore, graphics and gameplay mechanics. This expansion targets the imagination of the players and gives them the power to create the mission arcs they have been asking about but in the way they would like to see it play out.

Chalk this up as another benchmark moment in the MMO genre, and another example of team of developers stepping outside the box and delivering an idea that others might have thought either impossible to achieve, or simply didn’t think of. Allowing players to create viable content with a game is a nice big step forward for the genre.

Gameplay: 8.0
The architect editor is semi-intuitive and the experience has nice guide points. There might be an itsy-bitsy learning curve for someone who is not familiar with the game overall, but players should not have a lot of trouble creating and uploading their own content.

Graphics: 7.5
Some new costume pieces and a theme-based power are about the only new graphical additions. The game is five-years old, but is bearing its age well.

Sound: 7.0
Nothing new has been added here. It’s still solid, though.

Difficulty: Medium

Concept: 9.0
A brilliant development idea broken down and made simple for the players to use. Kudos to the dev team for putting this kind of gaming power into the hands of its players.

Multiplayer: 8.4
This expansion really targets the multiplayer aspects of the game, allowing the playing community to create mission arcs for others to play. And the social element, in terms of the ratings, is spot on.

Overall: 8.0
This is a very nice expansion though on a different plane than what one typically sees. This is about putting the creative juices into the hands of the community and allowing them to continually add new content. Some of the missions are rather creative and some are just downright amusing as you read through the text associated with the mission. This expansion is all about the player and what they bring to the gaming table.