The Making of City of Heroes

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published a new "Making of" feature, this time spotlighting City of Heroes with added commentary from Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert.
City of Heroes is a game which knows what it wanted. Rather than dozens of half-functional aspects, its launch focused tightly on two areas: tight combat and huge levels of character customisation. (You can only do so much well,) Jack insists, (It was just a decision we made in January/February of 2003. We just said that (We really should start focusing on what this game is going to be). We wanted it to be everything, but it wasn't realistic. We'd run into too many issues. We thought it was better to have a really stable, fun game and then add to it. The essence of a superhero is combat, so that's what we did, knowing we could grow the game over time and add more through patches. And to be honest, it's a mistake many MMOs make, is that they try to be everything that Everquest does. forgetting that Everquest wasn't Everquest when it released). Their focus on characters was particularly well judged, with the character-creation a virtual game in of itself. Sensibly, rather than limiting the number of characters you can have, Cryptic lets you express yourselves. (We knew that people would love doing that,) Jack claims proudly, (And in America we have eleven servers, so you can create up to 88 characters. And that's fine people should enjoy that. If it's something fun, let them do it.)