TenTonHammer scored an exclusive interview with NC NorCal City of Heroes developers and talked about the delayed Issue 13 and the later Issue 14, and what players should expect:

Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell us about the delay of the Mission Architect? Why was it delayed?

Brian Clayton: By taking the time to launch Mission Architect as robustly as possible, we never really nailed down a launch date for Issue 13. Now we're just really taking the time to make sure the Mission Architect is AAA, is complete, and will push the MMO genre forward. But we also didn't want to hold back all this great content we've been working on for the last few months.

Really, it's a win-win for the customers across the board in the sense that they're getting great content off the development line and they're getting the Mission Architect exactly the way that they hoped it would be.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you explain to our readers and City of Heroes fans why it was so difficult to add customizable characters into the Mission Architect? Why did it force you to move the Mission Architect to Issue 14?

Matt Miller: We wanted to insure that the customizable characters that we were putting in were as customizable as possible. We had a pencil sketch plan of how you'd be able to do this, but when we looked at it in more detail, there were just a lot of the little things that were breaking in the missions and it was not going to be as easy as we thought it was.

The AI in particular doesn't really know how to use a lot of the powers that the players wanted in their, unless we use a specific type of AI. So we have to go and get that AI written and make sure people have the customization that they want from these guys and make the animations look correct. Some of the abilities have specifically tailored animations and so you can't just slap a particular character model on to any set of powers.

That's just one of thirty different little problems involved in getting these things working, but we all knew that once we got this in it is really what we should be launching with the Architect.

Read the rest at TenTonHammer.com