City of Heroes : Hovering Between Good & Evil
A new in-house developer diary has surfaced on the Going Rogue website that discusses the alignment system. Penned by Shawn "Pit" Pitman, the article goes into the creation of the alignment system and discusses how players can potentially start with one alignment but completely alter it to the opposite end through a series of choices made is story-driven missions.
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.
