NCsoft and Lead Designer Matt Miller announced today that City of Heroes' Issue 13 has been split into two updates: Power and Responsibility in fall 2008 and Architect in winter 2009. Thanks to this delay, players will be able to create custom heroes and villains to fight in their own story arcs in Issue 14.

Issue 13 was originally announced a few weeks ago as including the Mission Architect system, which will allow players to create their own missions and story arcs. Fans gave positive feedback, but wanted the ability to create custom characters, as well. In response, Miller and his team are waiting until Issue 14 to release the Architect system in winter 2009 with this ability included, but are still releasing the rest of their new content this fall as Issue 13: Power and Responsibility .

Here is Miller's explanation for splitting one update into two:

"In order to fully realize your dreams of writing your own missions, you need creative control in one more key area: the ability to create "customized" characters to fight with or against in your missions. Adding custom characters has always been on our Mission Architect feature list, but we had considered it a "stretch goal." That is, we could launch the system without this feature because our confidence was high that the rest of the system was incredibly robust.

But after listening to you guys, we realize that this feature simply must be in at launch. You have convinced us that it is an integral part of the Mission Architect, and we have reworked schedules and timelines to accomplish this. Rather than push the launch of Issue 13 out completely for one (albeit really cool and very complex) feature, the Mission Architect is going to see a slight delay. What is not going to be delayed is the rest of Issue 13. To that end, the previously announced feature set for Issue 13, together with new features that we are announcing today, will become Issue 13 and Issue 14.

Issue 14 will take on the name Architect and contain the Mission Architect feature along with other features we'll announce at a later date. We are planning Issue 14: Architect to be released Winter of 2009. Issue 13 is now called Issue 13: Power and Responsibility and will be launched in the Fall of 2008."

While most City of Heroes fans are probably anxiously waiting for the chance to create their own storylines, Power and Responsibility will include some major updates to the leveling system, power selection and balancing PvP. Here is Miller's detailed explanation of the changes:

The Leveling Pact : A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It's sort of like "Extreme Sidekicking."

Multi-Builds : Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It's up to you.

PvE and PvP Powers Rebalancing : Floyd "Castle" Grubb and the powers designers have been hard at work in finding ways to strike a better balance between the many powers in the game. The scope of what they are doing is too broad to go into details here, but we're very excited and we'll share more information soon. Suffice it to say that we know that you don't want your PvE powers adjusted because of how they play in PvP, so we're taking a new tact in power balancing with Issue 13 .