![\"City](\"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/city-of-heroes-architect.jpg\" "\\"City")
Joe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios, discusses City of Heroes Architect — a system that lets users generate in-game content:<\/p>\nJoe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios, discusses City of Heroes Architect — a system that lets users generate in-game content:<\/p>\n
\nWanting tools so the rest of the team could actually come up with content was the idea. Because we have a lot of guys on the team that are hardcore players, they play the game all the time.<\/p>\n
Then they come to me like, \u201cI\u2019ve got this idea for this story, we should really do this arc with this guy!\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cThat\u2019s great. I haven\u2019t got time to do it. I\u2019ve got plenty of other story arcs to work on.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, if we made the tools easy enough, then they could actually come up with the arcs, and we can put them out.<\/p>\n
Then somewhere along that road it dawned on me: Why stop with the rest of the team?<\/p>\n
It was a scary venture, because we were getting momentum from it, and the studio leads at what is now Paragon but at the time was NC NorCal, they wanted to differentiate us from other games out there.<\/p>\n
Architect just kind of kept coming back up like, \u201cHow are we got to do that? That\u2019s really scary to do,\u201d and I\u2019m like, \u201cThat\u2019s why we are going to do it. We are not going to do it because it is easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
We definitely have learned that you have to take risks, even when your game\u2019s been up for five years, especially if your game\u2019s been out for five years, you have to keep reinventing yourself and keep yourself fresh.<\/p>\n