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NCSoft and Paragon Studios have updated the website for Going Rogue, the recently released expansion for the super hero themed MMO, City of Heroes. The new addition to the site is a dev diary from Shawn Pitman explaining the design and implementation of the game's alignment system.

From the very beginning, we knew that we didn't want to offer an 'Im naow teh evilz' button. Many well known comic book characters go through a moral journey at a certain point in their development, so why shouldn't our players get to do the same with their own characters? So with that in mind, Joe "Hero1" Morrissey and I would begin crafting a system where players were presented a choice on how they wished to approach a mission. An example of this is a mission where the player finds information leading to the location of an illegal drug lab. A hero would choose to take that opportunity and swoop in, arresting all of the culprits involved with creating and selling the dangerous narcotics. A vigilante, however, would instead choose to plant bombs around the lab, blowing the place sky high with all dealers still inside... fixing the problem once and for all.

The story was always the most important thing that we kept in mind when writing these missions. Each mission had to be the character's story, not the game's story. One of the biggest challenges in an MMO is making the player feel like they're the stars. Since morality is a personal thing, we wrote these new missions in such a way that kept the player's character the main focus rather than the assistant to the mission granter. This is why signature characters such as Statesman and Lord Recluse now take a backseat to lesser-known characters during these missions. Instead, you'll interact with people such as Flambeaux, the attention-craving brat, or Frostfire, the punk who whupped a lot of lower-leveled hero butt... but always just wanted to be a cop. This Rogue's Gallery of characters drawn from earlier missions would be the ones to revolve around the character's story, rather than the other way around.

Crossing the Lines Between Good and Evil

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