Arcanaville

Last night, for only the second time ever, I watched a sunset.

(in-game; I've seen the real sun go down a few more times than that)

With the talk of sunsetting City of Heroes and even talk of somehow recreating it recently, I've been asking myself the question: if I was going to write City of Heroes from scratch today, how would I do it? And actually, I have over a dozen PMs asking me this same question. This weekend an idea began coalescing that I thought I would share. Its not intended to be a blueprint for a community implemented City of Heroes per se: its just my own musings of the subject. So how would I do it?

It wouldn't be an MMO. Hear me out. If I were making City of Heroes today, it would be a stand alone single player game.

Or rather, it would start like one.

I would make a game client that would reproduce, to the best extent possible (at least to start) all of the gameplay I love in City of Heroes as a stand alone game that anyone could play solo, forever, without needing any other resources. Everything, from the character creator to the mission content would be run entirely on your PC. It would be the solo version of City of Heroes.

But then I would take this stand alone single player City of Heroes and recreate the MMO from scratch, without any of the design baggage of the past.

Lets take this in stages. We start with a stand alone City of Heroes. And then we add global chat. That's not hard: there are a million ways to make global chatting systems, we just need to integrate one of them into the single player game. So while running around in single-player CoH, you can chat with your friends. You'd have the same CoH global chat communities we have now, you just couldn't actually team with anyone.

So lets add teaming. Single player games already have the means to allow for LAN play and cooperative play, we'll let the single player game connect to other single player games and play cooperatively. So if you want to play CoH with four friends, no problem. But what about your fifty guildmates?

For that, we add community servers. Community servers would be special server nodes that could allow lots of people to connect to them, and they would have the ability to arbitrate lots and lots of separate game clients into a shared space. This would be the equivalent of a server shard in City of Heroes today. But the important difference is that with this version, you can leave the shard and play stand alone, you can move to a different shard, anyone could put up a private shard for friends in theory.

But there's a problem. Suppose I play standalone and level my character to 50, and outfit her with a ton of inventions, and then I decide I want to play on a community server? Well, we'll allow you to upload your character to the server, so you can continue on. And at the end of your session, the character is synced back down to your client. You could take that character to another server if you want, or continue to play it stand alone. In many ways, this is like the old pen and paper days where you could take your character from one gaming session to another, even to another gaming group entirely, and continue to play.

But how do we deal with hacks? If we allow people to upload stuff onto the community servers, how do we stop them from just uploading anything they want? Max characters with max loot? We use trust. The community server doesn't trust your game client. So the server only allows you to upload certain things, with certain limits. Anything you can't upload gets temporarily downscaled on the community server until you re-earn it there. This is done in a way that you could leave the server with your full strength intact: its only "exemped" while on the community server. This is also like the old PnP days where GMs would sometimes allow certain things and disallow certain things on character sheets in the interest of balance.

The interesting thing about trust is that different community servers could decide to trust each other in a limited fashion. So you could move from one server to another and keep what you earned, if the server you are transferring to trusts the server you're transferring from. Maybe unique objects on server A don't get transferred to server B, but maybe everything else does.

So what we have is a single player CoH that we could play cooperatively with just a few friends if we want, or we could play on larger community servers if we want, but we would always have the option to come and go as we pleased. We would never be "trapped" on a central server. We would never be beholden to a server: no one could ever "kill" the game. We play alone if we want, we play with others if we want, but regardless we could still have as much social interaction as we want through global chat, which is how the social structures on CoH primarily work anyway. This would be the ultimate instanced MMO. Everyone is running in their own instance unless they *want* to participate in a larger world.

Of course, this is not really possible for any business to do, because you can't make money off of something like this, right? Well think about Guild Wars. You buy it, and then you don't pay a sub. If you think about it, using their servers costs them money: they would make just as much money but you would cost them less money if you didn't actually use their servers. Their business model is to make money on selling the game client itself, and selling microtransaction items. Can we sell microtransaction items in this kind of game, where everyone could just run stand alone forever? I think so: they could sell items on their community servers and DLC for the game clients even if they were stand alone. In fact, the Architect gives us a hint as to how to make money in a novel way. We could allow players to sell MTX missions through a super-architect, and the business could take a cut, like iTunes. $0.99 buys a story-arc, the player-author takes $0.80, we take $0.19 say. And the business itself sells its content through the same system. If we're really smart and really lucky, we'll figure out a way to get the modding community involved to submit mods to the game we could approve and then allow to be sold through the DLC market as well.

So there's the business and technical model. City of Heroes 2 is a stand alone game, with the ability to join community servers at will. Characters can move from single player to community servers and back, with a trust system that prevents serious exploitation by capping what you can transfer into shared environments. What overpowered nonsense you do on your own PC nobody cares about. We sell the client, we don't require a subscription, we support the game with DLC content released through an appstore-like system where the player community can also contribute and actually make money selling content, even to solo players that never connect to a shared community server. And we glue it all together with an improved distributed CoH2 chat and email system, so anyone, even stand alone players, can participate in the community.

There are lots of details missing from this obviously, particularly where it pertains to community management, exploit control, game balance, and the technical issues of trying to make it work. But that's the idea.

And that's how I would do it. It would be, for lack of a better way of putting it, an optional MMO. An optionally multiplayer roleplaying game.

City of Heroes was unique in its uniquely unique uniqueness.