The Hard Problem

Evolving the Superhero MMO

Your trophy weapon is your sign that you've mastered that enemy set. Now anytime you need to help out someone who is fighting the Clockworks, you bust out your Clockwork trophy weapon and kick major ass. Nearby heroes see you wielding that thing and are suitably impressed. It also means that you have a great way to help lower-level characters bust through tough content that you've already mastered. Of course, you don't want to go around wielding this thing all the time; it should be stored in your Trophy Room, whose existence I'll now also posit as being a really fun idea. When you need it, you use it, and the rest of the time it's in your Trophy Room to impress visiting noobs.

Okay, that's Reinventions, Epic Costumes, Trophy Weapons, and (briefly) Trophy Rooms. But I'm not done inflating the budget on our superhero MMO because when I started thinking about Reinventions, it occurred to me that when a superhero comic reinvents itself, it often starts over with issue #1. And then - aha!

Bingo. You see it? Superhero MMOs that use leveling have the name wrong. You shouldn't be a Level 20 Striker. You should be an Issue 20 Striker: issues as in comic book issues. You don't gain levels, you gain issues. Each issue is, of course, a level, but it's also a way to think about bracketing your adventures.

Remember issue 5? That's when you were in the sewers fighting the Scum Rats. Yeah, that was pretty sweet, but then there was issue 14 where you learned to fly. Wow, what a great issue that was!

And then there's crossovers. When you and I team up, it's in my issue 23 and your issue 18. Anytime we team up in a group, our progression log should note the crossover.

Supergroups work the same way. If we form a guild and start playing together regularly, our guild should have an issue number. So while in my own solo series I'm up to issue 47, in the Wrecking Crew guild we're only on issue 6.

Once you start thinking of your progression as issue-based, rather than level-based, a lot of other possible features spill out. An auto-generated log of your character's progression and mission completion could be archived issue by issue, and maybe even spat out to a web site where you can relive your exploits in some kind of stylized comic book visuals. Each time you level up, everyone nearby sees the cover to your new issue - an image composited of you in a heroic pose with your name in a logo (you pick the font!) and "Issue 27" in the corner. There's a ton of fun to be had with this concept.

And then when it's time for a Reinvention, well, you start over with issue #1.

Reinventions, then, are not just a high-level showoff mechanic. They're what you do when you hit the level cap. You start over at issue #1, now with pre-boosted powers and your Trophy Room, and you can then blow through low-level content like it was nothing. You're crazy powerful, you have a ton of amazing weaponry and your costume looks incredibly badass. New content exclusive to Reinvented heroes is the new endgame.

Whew. I'm going to stop there. I think this is fun stuff and while it doesn't directly replicate the lust for epic armor in a superhero-costume context, it's closer than what I've seen so far. It doesn't look like Champions Online has done anything new in this area, which means: DC Universe Online, the ball's in your court. SHAZAM!

John Scott Tynes played a superhero named Jonah Eternity in City of Heroes. He hated how the Circle of Thorns only spawned at night because it was never night on the server when he could play.