I've been reading around the fourms a lot and reading and listening to interviews with Warcabbit, and some disparate things occurred to me and then crystalized, and I just wanted to mention them for discussion.

VERY frequently-put-forth keys to the real success of CoT as a game are:

1) Story. The game story, your individual story that you want to tell. LOTS of good story.

2) Content. We won't have voice-overs at first to foster tons of good content.

3) Customization. Nuts, crazy, over the top customization. Anything and everything possible.

I agree with all of these and was thinking about what game features, once in place, support this with the least long-term effort from the Devs, and had some Ideas.

1) Obviously, the character creator and customization, and they are planning on knocking this out of the park already. Warcabbit has stated that he feels part of the endgame is alting. PART! Not all or most, just part, don't worry.

2) Player created content (ie Mission Architect/Foundry). This was a CoH innovation that had problems at first but is now much copied, VERY popular. and on it's way to becoming standard. And it becomes another form of self-generating content and endgame if done well. If you only know it from CoH, look into the Foundry. Once the bugs are worked out, it's amazing for fun in a game.

3) An adversary system (a la CO's Nemesis system). This is an AMAZING and amazingly fun innovation of Champions that was started and never debugged or developed. It's potential is equal to MA/Foundry, but noone has done it right yet. It would allow you to create PERSONAL STORY BASED CUSTOMIZED CONTENT THAT YOU COULD SHARE WITH OTHERS. I could see people spending as much time dinkering around with their Arch-enemy and their minions as they do with their builds and costumes. Nuff said.

Since we are a playerbase with tremendous creativity who love to spend game time creating as much as playing (in general, I know some of you don't, but that is a unique trait of our community and genre), these things would spit out TONS of unique, inventive, and creative content that only costs the Devs the initial feature creation plus some debugging and developing.

Now, I KNOW gameplay and endgame content are important too, and feel free to discuss the relative importance of them--I was just basing this on what I heard MOST mentioned on the forums by perspective players and MWM folks. Also, I know the "Path System" that has been discussed could subsume some--or maybe all :O--of these features. If it did, then wow. Just wow.

Whatchall think?