Here is the view of the Champions Online team of the last few weeks and what is coming next.

It’s hard to believe that Champions Online has been out for a full month now! We’re hard at work on a ton of upcoming features and content, but we thought we’d take a minute to look back on this past month, as well as give you a peek as to what’s coming up in the future of Champions.

Previously On Champions...

After a bit of a speed bump at launch due to the infamous Launch Day Patch, we bounced back on our feet with continual changes and fixes to powers. Luckily, this also gave us the opportunity to implement the ever-crucial ability to grant free Retcons to players across the board when we make massive changes to powers.

We also made some sweeping changes to our game’s economy, due to players not earning as many resources as we expected them to earn. By increasing item drops and decreasing the cost of Retcon, this paved the way for those unaffordable character changes to suddenly become within reach. It’ll still take some effort if you want to fully reset your character’s abilities, but you shouldn’t have to rob a bank in order to afford a few changes for your character any more.

Lastly, we addressed one of the major content gaps in the game by adding missions to Monster Island. This is just the start, as we’ll be adding more missions to fill in more of the troublesome gaps as time goes on.

We’ve got a bunch of long-awaited features coming up, so here’s a little preview of what we’re planning...

Mission Tracking Updates

A handful of new options will be available to players, including setting primary mission waypoints for a group, increasing mission sharing distances, making over 100 more missions shareable amongst a group, and granting “Assist Bonuses” to heroes who help their friends complete a mission they don’t have. Expect these updates to come over the next two weeks or so.

More Missions

UNTIL missions that send you to take down signature villains, bounty hunter missions that reward you for delivering bounties on specific enemy groups, and more missions in Millennium City (level 18) and Rime Woods in Canada (levels 11-13) will fill in more gaps and give you more paths for leveling up. These will be trickling out throughout October, with the first ones up on the Public Test Server within the next week or two.

Power House 2.0

A new room will be added to the Power House for you to test out your powers against actual enemies, giving you a better sense of a power’s usefulness before you take it out into the real world. Powers Trainers will also suggest powers that you may want to add to your builds based on any types you may be missing (such as Block upgrades or Healing powers). Additionally, we’ll be making the area around the Power Trainers a duel-free zone, so that you can purchase new upgrades without any distracting fights around you. You’ll find the new and improved Power House on the Public Test Shard within the next two weeks.

This is just a small taste of the plans we’ve got for the immediate future. We’ve got even more things planned for the second half of October, including the huge Blood Moon event/update coming October 27th. We’ll be revealing more details about additional features coming as the month goes on, so keep checking back for the latest information. Happy October!

The Champions Online site has been updated with a new villain profile. This time it tells the story of Armadillo.

Randall Gordon is the sort of guy who went in and out of juvenile detention for most of his teens. He’s the sort of guy who would beat you up for your lunch money, or beat you up if you didn’t take him seriously, but would otherwise just ignore you. He’s not actively malicious, he’s just highly self interested and a little insecure.

He is not the sort of guy who would make an ideal super soldier. Unfortunately, nobody told the Army that. To be fair, the Army originally used him as cannon fodder. He was part of Project Sunburst, an illegal experiment to see how soldiers could survive a nuclear blast. He was one of the few soldiers who survived that blast, and it did strange things to his brain.

That was when the Army made their big mistake. Noting the changes in Randall’s brainwave patterns, a few scientists working on MAP (the Man Amplification Project) decided to test out a new suit of power armor on him. Now, you should understand, he wasn’t their first choice. They’d tried it out on countless other soldiers to no avail. They just couldn’t make the right neural connections between the suit’s cybernetics and the soldiers’ brains. The scientists were desperate to just get the darned thing working! Randall’s altered wiring provided them with the chance to try something new. So they tried it. And it worked.

MMORPG.com rates Champions Online with a 7.5, stating that Champions Online has a lot of potential, but it has no content and a myriad of issues.

If you’re an MMOG fan just looking for the next great thing with little tolerance for the growing pains of a new MMOG, Champions Online probably won’t do it for you, as it lacks the longevity and depth when compared to other MMOGs already on the market.

If however, you are a comic book geek who loved City of Heroes and you’re looking for the next step in superhero MMOGs, Champions Online certainly does enough better than City of Heroes to warrant the purchase. Keep in mind though, there isn’t much replay value to the game given the dearth of content to level with and the same is true for a level capped character. All that’s left is essentially rerolling and retreading the same content over and over, or participating in the woefully unbalanced PvP system. Thankfully, the leveling pace is pretty brisk, and that serves to minimize some of these issues a bit. In the end, Champions Online is worth a purchase, if just for the first month included with the box, after that, your mileage may vary.

Bill Roper talks about the Champions Online launch and the future in an interview at Warcry.

WC: Were there unexpected difficulties in shifting to a licensed framework from an original IP?

Roper: The big thing with an original IP is that you kind of have - compared to a licensed game - you have complete freedom. You can make it up as you go along, come up with different ideas midstream; it gives you a very broad palette to change your world.

With Champions, you have 28 years of character development and world development. I think a big plus that we had here at Cryptic, is that the team liked the world so much they bought the entire IP - they own the world. They worked very closely with the pen-and-paper developers - there was a lot of back and forth with the PNP side, making changes to the universe and characters. So we had a lot of the same freedom you have with an originally created IP, but the benefit of being able to do it with this map and framework in place. We had the best of both worlds.

Videogamer brings us a diary from lead designer Randy Mosiondz discusdings the game's evolution from closed beta to launch.

The original design for Champions Online tried to incorporate a lot of different elements: fast-paced, reactive combat which played more like action/arcade games, a “classless” open powers system, and varied game-play environment complete with “weaponizeable”/destructible objects. It was very ambitious - there was a lot to do in a short time frame, but in the end we still wanted to get community involvement in the game development process - after all, MMORPGs belongs to the community as much as it does to the developers. Since we first opened Champions Online to our beta testers it’s undergone some dramatic revisions based on community feedback.

Ten Ton Hammer share their impressions of Champions Online with us.

Combat is pretty fun and is really done in the style of traditional MMOGs but with a slightly more action oriented aspect. The fighting seems much faster paced, but you still pick your skills from the traditional hotbar and wait for them to execute. This can become interesting in groups of superheroes with high particle effects as you can see all kinds of colorful clouds exploding on the screen. You can also block attacks by holding the block button to reduce the damage you receive. This adds a nice strategic element to the game and can often times mean the difference between victory and defeat in a battle. I used the hit, run, and block method with several supervillains to achieve victory.

Massively interviews Bill Roper about balancing and upcoming content.

The difficulty of solo content seems to scale depending on how a character is built. So will future updates allow any build to be solo-capable or introduce a feature showing players which powers work best in solo play?

The desire is to allow as many different builds to be as fun and playable as possible. Obviously this is an amazing challenge with a system that isn't bound by classes and where heroes can choose from any power in the game. It's an ongoing process and we're constantly watching and talking with our players to achieve this goal.

Bill Roper informs us of what they are working on at the moment to further improve Champions Online.

More Content!
Monster Island has three new repeatable mission chains to help bridge our content gap there. These are unlike any of our other missions in that they're designed as destinations you'll revisit and will change over the course of several missions. Here's a sneak peek!

The Hidden Base
Heroes discover the entrance to a secret base in Well's Pass. None of their contacts know anything about the entrance so it's up to the hero to check things out. What secret project lies deep within the VIPER base?

The Lost Caves
A series of lost caves has been discovered by the intrepid Paleontologist and television personality, Professor Plummet. His early reports have come back, stating that Elderworms have also found a way into the labyrinth of caves, and are using them as hunting grounds. Contact has been lost with the professor, and help is needed in finding him.

The Manimal Lab
A group of Manimals are behaving strangely and are guarding a nearby cave complex. Further investigation reveals a hidden laboratory that also acts as the prison for a highly intelligent rat Manimal named Professor Ratso.

We anticipate these mission chains will make their way to the Public Test Shard next week and we'll need your help making sure they're ready for release to the live servers.

Adding Some Meat to Team
We're working on several new additions to the teaming system. We're currently testing new UI that allows players to see the state of team missions even if they don't have them. Upcoming additions (in development) include showing your team members' current objectives on active missions and adding rewards for heroes that assist on missions, even if they don't have the mission themselves.

Do You See What I See?
Graphics performance should be better overall for players. Some high-end users have experienced what appears to be a reduction in performance. But this is actually due to us fixing a bug where sliders that were set all the way up in certain categories weren't actually providing that level of increase. Players with top-end graphic cards should retune their settings for maximum performance.

The Mail That Ate Sheboygan
Many fixes to our mail woes have already been pushed to the live servers, but one big one is currently on the Public Test Shard and will be pushed to the live servers ASAP. We also currently don't have a way for players to send resources to other heroes. This is a known issue, and requires a tech solution to implement. I don't have an ETA, but it's on the list. We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

The Balance of Power
We're currently making passes on all the powers in the game and will be making changes designed to not just bring aberrant powers into line, but increase the effectiveness of those that need it. We're also examining the best ways to inject more resources into the economy. Our top concerns are what are concerning you as players. We're working as fast as we can to address issues, work on the overall balance of the game, and be as responsive to possible. Keep hitting the forums with solid, constructive comments and we'll keep working to make the game better and more balanced in both the PvE and PvP arenas.

Powers Aren't Black / White - Yet...
We're big fans of being able to shift the hue of powers into the realms of black and white. The issue is that these aren't hues, but tints. This means that with the current way our color system works, you would see pure black or pure white colors as opposed to the grayscale subtleties required to give you the look you actually want. Basically, it requires some new engine technology, but we're looking into how to make this happen.

Celestial Power Set
Along with some incredible events and rewards, there's a new power set coming out with the Blood Moon event. The Celestial set is designed to provide assistance to allies and destruction to enemies. The power effects are amazing and the versatility of the set makes it both compelling as a single-focus set and also as supplementary powers to other builds. We're going to be doing a special feature on the website in the upcoming weeks showing off the powers, so stay tuned for a detailed look.

Tutorial? We Don't Need No Stinking Tutorial!
While it sounds simple, there are few things we had to design out to allow players to be able to skip past the tutorial if they've already done it once. It's next up on the list for our content lead, and we're hoping to have this onto the Public Test Shard as soon as next week.

Where the Duels Are(n't)
We've heard your requests for our more social areas like Club Caprice and The Powerhouse to be duel-free zones. Both our content and programming teams are combining efforts to get this in as soon as possible.

A Room of Danger in the House of Power
We're designing a new room for the Powerhouse where you can try out your powers against automated enemies. We'll be sure to inform you when this moves to the Public Test Shard so you can help us test it out!

Before bringing us their review of Champions Online, MMORPG.com gives us their first impressions of the game.

What really gets under my skin is the fact the developers admitted to erring on the side of caution with the current flow of resources available to the player as he progresses through the game. This was explained as being done in order to limit the effect of any possible dupes, exploits, or gold farming on the game's economy early on, but the respec costs weren't adjusted in order to reflect this. Instead, for the last two weeks, players have been faced with a largely dysfunctional respec system whose costs will apparently make more sense only once they readjust the flow of resources to be a bit more generous than what is currently the case.

Here is a list of Champions Online reviews that are not (yet) listed on the official Champions Online site:

The Escapist - No score, but states that fans should play it, but the rest better wait until it is more complete.

Play.tm - 70%

N4G - 7/10

Big Download - No score, but fun and exciting game with a lot of stuff still needing improvements.

G4tv - 3/5

Gamesradar - 7/10

And here is a list of reviews that are displayed on the official site:

Honest Gamer - 90%

YouGamers - 81%

GamesNation - (Italian) 86%

Vandal Online - (Spanish) 87%

GameRadio - (German) 91%

Jeuxvideo - (French) 85%

Meristation - (Spanish) 80%

Gamers.at - (German) 86%

Oli Welsh reviews CO over at Eurogamer giving a mixed review and a final score of 6/10, here's the conclusion:

In terms of quality if not quantity, the game's content is a good effort, and it will be fleshed out. In a year's time, Champions Online has every chance of being one of the better MMOs out there, and superseding its estranged elder brother City of Heroes. Cryptic has proven its ability to make that happen, so all it needs are the resources and the paying audience.

But right now, it's just not quite enough. Technically rough (it doesn't run smoothly, in terms of graphics or lag) with lumpy character progression, shallow combat, a narrow world and thinly-stretched - albeit entertaining - content, Champions Online is off to a scrappy and threadbare start. As it stands, it's hard to recommend. But it's not hard to like - for the customisation, and for offering a genuinely different flavour in MMOs: a bit of poppy, disposable bubblegum in a world of nutritious gruel.

You can checkout Metacritic for a host of reviews ranging from 8.7 to Oli's 6.

IGN have their impressions of Champions Online up.

While it's still far too early to render a verdict on the game's long term potential, Champions Online has definitely won us over on the strength of a few key features. The combat is fun, the settings are varied and there's lots of content to explore. On the downside, the story doesn't seem to extend beyond the quest giver's text box. As a result, you'll find yourself consistently engaged in what you're doing, but never really caring why you're doing it. We'll be digging deeper into the game over the next few weeks, to see if these opinions hold up over time and also exploring new features like super groups and the nemesis system. Be sure to check back later this month for our final review.

And at Inc Gamers:

Unlike some other online games, you're really unlikely to see another character the same as yours while playing because there are literally thousands of different ways characters can turn out. You can pick from male or female, human, beast, android, insect or monster, then adjust the height of characters, their weight, muscularity, facial features, hairstyles, and skin/hair colours. Then there's the costumes, which will be the feature players probably spend the longest amount of time on. For a start, there's the choice of cloth, leather or metallic appearance for each costume part. Along with the standard items of clothing like chest, legs, boots and gloves, there's head-wear, capes, belts, shoulders, wrist-wear and more. You can choose colour themes for your outfit too, or individually colour each part.

Another hero profile can be found at the Champions Online site. This time it features Atlantean Prince Marus.

The first born child of Atlantean Queen Mara and her husband Prince Andros, Marus was raised learning the ins and outs of ruling their underwater kingdom. As far as royalty goes, he’s one of the most well adjusted and free spirited royals out there. He always understood that some day it would be his job to protect his people. But he also understood that that day was not now. So he took to his lessons on statecraft and strategy, while also being playful and mischievous.

Then tragedy struck. His father died in an underwater landslide, leaving his widowed mother alone to rule her kingdom and raise her children. Marus did what he had to, stepping in to help his mother with her royal duties whenever he could. He realized that his little sister, Thalassa, was withdrawing into herself, but he didn’t know what to do about it, or if he even should. Maybe the girl just needed time to grieve for their father. She was certainly more high-strung than Marus. So he gave her the space she seemed to want and hoped for the best.

Champions Online is now available in stores in North America.

(New York, NY) September 1, 2009 – Atari Inc., one of the world’s most recognized videogame publishers, and Cryptic Studios, creators of the acclaimed City of Heroes and City of Villains are proud to unleash the ultimate superhero universe: Champions Online™ is now available for Windows PC online and at stores across North America and will be available in Europe on September 4, 2009. Based on the award winning pen and paper role-playing game, Champions, from HERO Games and powered by the groundbreaking Cryptic Engine, Champions Online taps into a rich universe of heroes and villains with unparalleled intrigue and adventure.

Cryptic Studios, already a leading developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), has taken the genre to new heights with Champions Online’s fast paced, “real time” action combat and the power of total customization. Through Champions’ unique character customization tool the player can create and individualize every component of their hero: name, back story, costume, powers and abilities can all be modified in countless ways. In addition to allowing players to transform into the ultimate hero, gamers can craft an enemy of the extreme opposite, concoct a villainous history for their ultimate foe and guarantee themselves a truly unique experience.

“Champions Online is a great addition to Atari’s line-up,” said John Needham, CEO of Cryptic Studios. “After considerable anticipation and excitement, we are thrilled to present Champions to fans and gamers worldwide, and look forward to seeing what players create with the game’s limitless customization options. We are already hard at work developing new content and updates that will expand the Champions Online world even further.”

Champions Online brings epic heroism back to the MMORPG genre with depth that will certainly challenge the most experienced online gamers, while its fast paced action promises to engage new entrants to the online superhero universe. Enter a world where the diabolical genius Dr. Destroyer has returned to wreak havoc. After he single-handedly destroyed the city of Detroit, many thought he had perished in the colossal explosion, but he is back to inflict his evil plans on the unsuspecting world. Join with Defender and the legendary Champions to stop Dr. Destroyer and his minions in an ultimate showdown of good versus evil.

Ten Ton Hammer has an interview up to mark the occasion.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are things at Cryptic on the last few days before the official launch?

Bill Roper: Things are good – we’re wrapping up the beta and trying to push for some last minute fixes. It’s been really good especially from the standpoint that we’ll have a lot of stuff based on the things we’ve done this week since the open beta started – there’s been lots of good feedback. We’re finding lots of bugs that we couldn’t find without having the concurrencies of 10 or 15 thousand people. You test a lot of stuff with bots but then once you get live players on it always causes aberrant behavior.

And then there’s some balance related things too. We weren’t really able, even in the closed beta, to get significant statistical numbers at different level ranges, such as being able to look at the XP curves. We knew it wasn’t right but when we got all the people on in open beta that was when it became apparent that it was really broken.

Whenever you do testing and you make changes, you tend to swing the wheel far over for course corrections. I think that’s one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that you have to do that. People will ask, “why not make just little changes?” If you think about sailing a ship it’s kind of like you’re going really far to starboard, so you need to swing the wheel hard to port to make a big course correction. Then you can say, OK we went too far, let’s move it back over.

MMORPG shows a comic trailer of Champions Online.

Here is another Champions Online bag of new.

First there is a villain profile up featuring Medusa.

Madeline Poe (nee Bruner) started out as an accountant. It wasn’t precisely any girl’s dream, but she liked money, and she liked information, and she liked being able to manipulate both to her advantage. Lucky for her, the brilliant scientist, Sebastian Poe, needed an accountant and came to her.

It didn’t take long for Madeline to figure out what Sebastian was up to. He was developing a serum to increase psionic powers, and had managed to increase his own abilities. Madeline was fascinated with the entire idea and set herself to seduce the married scientist. It wasn’t hard. Madeline had always had a certain raw sexuality to her. While not the most beautiful woman in the world, she had a very strong appeal for a certain type of man. Fortunately, that type tended to be powerful but also malleable.

Gametrailers has a new video featuring Bill Roper.

And finally ZAM Online previewed Champions Online.

As far as the overall gameplay in Champions Online, I could definitely relate to players who said it "felt" more like a console game than an MMO. It's not really the controls themselves; you can alter the controls any way you'd like. More so, it's how the gameplay action "feels;" I found myself constantly mashing my keyboard, even though the abilities are technically on auto-attack. It's the whole energy-building mechanic; it lends itself to real-time, rapid changes in abilities. You also have to rely on your "block" ability quite a bit; action and fighting game control elements like these are something most MMOers aren't used to. I didn't have the chance to try playing the game with a USB controller—like many people suggested—before the beta ended, but it's something I'm definitely going to try.

Graphically speaking, Champions Online is an intense game. The special effects and textures produce a realistic "comic book world," especially when the "line edges" option is enabled. However, it's not optimized very well. Reducing the game's resolution didn't yield as substantial of an increase in FPS as many other games, nor did the other slider settings. The most viable option I found was a unique setting that allows you to reduce the gameplay resolution while keeping the UI resolution the same, but it's not executed that well; the gameplay resolution often looked worse than the true resolution it was supposed to be.

MMORPG played Champions Online and have a hands-on preview up.

Once you select your instance, you'll enter the game world and be treated to an in-engine intro that depicts the carnage and destruction taking place in Millenium City as the camera weaves through the buildings and eventually centers on your character. Millenium City is being attacked by the alien Qularr (Rikti anyone?) and is in desperate need of a hero. With the Champions being the first targets in the Qularr assault, they are nowhere to be found, so the responsibility lays on you to save the day.

The tutorial consists of some pretty basic quests that will aid in acclimating you to the various game mechanics, including combat and blocking, open missions, instances, object interaction, etc. Once you've completed the tutorial, you'll have a choice between two starting zones: The Desert or the Canadian Wilderness. Whatever your choice, you'll be stuck there until around level eight or so. Once you arrive at your destination of choice, you'll be around level five and you'll be introduced to an area of the game you are sure to spend a lot of time in: the Power House.

Here are some impressions from the Champions Onlin beta.

The first is at Kombo.

I think this might've been the game Cryptic was trying to make all along. There's a clear lineage from City of Heroes, but Champions Online is bigger and better in just about every way. From character reaction to environments, just about everything has more options, more color, and more life.

Unlike its previous effort, Champions Online is actually based on a license. The Champions role-playing game, first published in 1981, is not the most well-known tabletop game, but that long history gives the guys at Cryptic a nice set of characters, stories, and art to work from instead of having to create it all from scratch. Along with the expected big city, there's a desert mesa and freezing Canadian mountains to check out. And even within the first few hours of the game, you'll find yourself fighting a greater variety of enemies. They're still mostly humanoid (at least what I ran into), but instead of "men with hats" or "men with vests," you'll fight bug aliens, irradiated zombies, robot cowboys, and more.

The second is at Rock Paper Shotgun.

I tell you this to create full disclosure; Champions is fun. It’s fun in a ‘oh, that’s quite cool’ way, that moves along being just enough above mediocre, introducing just enough cool new ideas that enough people are probably going to sit up and notice for it to keep going. It’s not fun in a way where I come away knowing this is the next big step forward, innovation leaking out of its pores. It’s full of clever little ideas that make it a little more fun, make your character feel a little more like you own it. The problem is that they’re safe ideas. You can customise your character aesthetically to your heart’s content, creating anything from freaky vulture-clown to armoured psychic warrior. It’s City of Heroes character creator gone wild, dosed up on steroids so it can do things normal character creators can’t; there’s so much choice, and room for customisation, that only the things APB is doing look set to approach it.

And the last one is at Ten Ton Hammer where the staff members did it in a Q&A style.

Mattlow: Let's move on to powers then. Do you like how powers are set up? That you can specialize in one school to get powers earlier, but the option exists to get any power you want?

JoBildo: I'm going to be terrible at being objective here, because I've never played a game that allowed me so much freedom. I love that I can get some lesser skills in one power set like Fire, and then spend the rest of my time in something else like Strength. It really lets me shape exactly how I want my character to be... and I'm a comic nerd, so I do spend way too much time thinking about that.
So in short... yes.

Mattlow: I'm running along your lines here, man. I do love the freedom of power selection. And, as an ex-comic nerd, the ability to create exactly the character you want really rocks.

Sardu: Frameworks are a good example of lowering the barrier for entry I think. Otherwise, I love the overall flexibility of the system is pretty awesome for the reasons William already stated. Being able to have an idea for a character and shape that as you advance is a huge leap forward from selecting a pre-determined path within your first 5 minutes of a game you may end up playing for months or years.

Champions Online has gone Gold - here's the official PR:

CHAMPIONS ONLINE™ HAS GONE GOLD

 

- One Step Closer To Becoming the World’s Next Hero in Anticipated New Game –

 

- Open Beta Available through IGN’s Fileplanet -

 

New York, NY (August 14, 2009) – Atari and Cryptic Studios are proud to give superhero fans the game they've been craving as Champions Online™ for PC has gone gold. Based on the award-winning Champions pen-and-paper role-playing games and powered by the groundbreaking Cryptic Engine, Champions Online taps into a rich universe of heroes and villains with unparalleled intrigue and adventure.

Cryptic Studios – creators of the award-winning City of Heroes and City of Villains MMOs – has taken the massively multiplayer role-playing game genre to new heights with Champions Online. The experience begins with Champions' immensely powerful character creation and customization tool, which enables players to fashion truly unique superheroes by choosing from thousands of costume pieces, body types, powers, and character appearances. Players can then modify their choices with an array of configurable sliders and color options, resulting in a completely individualized hero.

No superhero, however unique, can be complete without a super villainous Nemesis or two. With Champions Online's powerful customization tools, players can also design the perfect Nemesis to oppose their superheroes. These ultimate adversaries appear throughout a hero's career, sometimes issuing challenges, other times ambushing their heroic foe. Champions Online brings epic superheroism to the MMORPG genre with depth that challenges the most experienced online gamers, while its fast-paced action promises to engage new entrants to the online superhero universe.

Be among the first to experience this one-of-a-kind online superhero gaming universe by taking part in the open beta, exclusively run by IGN's Fileplanet. Players can access open beta by registering at Fileplanet. Additionally, this thrilling title is available for pre-order at Wal-Mart, GameStop, Best Buy, Direct2Drive, and Amazon. Gamestop and Best Buy preorders even have the opportunity to join in a special Early Start Program.

Champions Online promises to redefine online gaming with the power comic book fans have been craving. The only question is... What hero will you be? 

Champions Online releases on Windows PC this September.

For additional information, please visit: www.champions-online.com

Another day, another powerset. From the Martial Arts Powers, here is the Single Blade powerset.

The following announcement was made of the Champions Online open beta starting at the 17th of August:

We’re pleased to announce the schedule for next week’s Open Beta! On Sunday, August 16th, all characters from Closed Beta will be wiped from the servers in preparation for our Open Beta. When the servers open at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday, August 17th, everyone will have a fresh start, and you’ll be ready to experience the game from start to finish!

Servers will be taken down nightly from 1:00 a.m. PDT to 3:00 a.m. PDT for scheduled maintenance. Other than that, you can play all week long until the 24th. At 10:00 a.m. PDT on Monday, August 24th, the servers will be shut down and wiped once more in preparation for the game’s release. The “Early Start Program” begins on Friday, August 28th, and allows select pre-order purchasers an opportunity to get a headstart on the rest of the world by playing the game a few days before the official release. In addition, all Early Start participants will get to take part in a world event, where special enemies will drop unique items which will only be available until September 1st.

Keep an eye on this site over the next week for more news regarding Open Beta. See you then!

Also villain profile of nasty looking Ripper can be found at the Champions Online site.

And Gametrailers have a video available showing how Cryptic got started and how Champions Online came about.

And today it's the supernatural power set that is featured at the Champion's Online site, with such powers as venemous breath, devour essence, crippling coils and soul mesmerism.

Bill Roper gets interviewed by Ten Ton Hammer about grouping (the sidekick system), death and other stuff.

Ten Ton Hammer: Cool. Could you give us an overview of how the Sidekick system works?

Bill Roper: You can basically select any hero in the world and then right click on their portrait once you have them targeted to bring up the sidekick option. Essentially what you’re doing is setting one of you as the ‘champion’ for the group, which then allows you to either sidekick down or sidekick up from there; so by setting the group’s champion, that sets the sidekicking level. So if I’m a level 22 hero and I’ve got a friend who’s a level 12 hero, he can either sidekick up to my level or I can sidekick down to his level. That allows me to go through content with him, or he can go through content with me at my level.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there any set level restrictions on who you’re able to sidekick in either direction?

Bill Roper: I don’t believe we have any set restrictions going either up or down. Now, you don’t gain additional powers, so if you’re too low of a hero you wouldn’t have a lot of powers to contribute to the fight. So the further you get outside each other’s level range, the less you’re going to be able to help going up. It’s really designed more to let players who are fairly close to one another to be able to help out.

The next power set to be highlighted at the Champions Online site is Gadegeteering, which features practical powers such as minaturization, Molecular Self-Assembly and Attack Toys.

If you were curious about the Sorcery Power Set in Champions Online then you can find all the info here.

Celestar is the next hero to be presented at the Champions Online website.

Celestar has lived a very long and complicated life. He is one of the longest living superheroes alive today, thanks to the nature of his energy powers. Due to an early tragedy in his superheroing career, Celestar also suffers from classic survivor’s guilt.

He became a superhero in the early 1960s, when, as a young physics grad student in Canada, named Lonnie Lawrence, he came face to face with the Land, greatest of all the spirits of the North. Sensing in him dormant mutant powers, the Spirit of the Land offered to awaken his powers if he would battle the ancient evil of Kigatilik.

Lonnie agreed without bothering to think twice. Of course he wanted to be a superhero and do great deeds! Of course he wanted to travel the world, saving lives. It was all much more exciting that studying for quals.

Here is the latest news from the Campions Online front.

The Force power set is now completely described here and the Ice power set here.

The pricing information is now made public.

Retail Pricing:

$49.99 USD, $54.99 CAN, €49.99 EUR, and £29.99 GBP

Regular Monthly Subscription:

$14.99 USD, $16.49 CAN, €12.99 EUR, and £8.99 GBP

And nine new screenies can be found here.

A new video showing duelling in Campions Online is to be found on the official site.

A second video showing melee combat can be found at IGN.

A preview of Champions Online is to be found on VideoGamer. Its a positive preview with a few remarks.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the fact that the game world is divided up into zones that need to be loaded individually. One of the best things about World of Warcraft is that you can pretty much go from one end of a continent to another without a load. Simple exploration, heading off the beaten path, discovering an area you really shouldn’t be in, marvelling at some giant dragon that’s so many levels higher than you, you can’t actual tell what level it is, is one of that game's strengths. From what I’ve seen you won’t be able to do this in Champions Online – travel is done by walking up to a chopper and pressing F to select your destination - and that’s a crying shame.

Still, you’ll probably be too busy gawping at the incredible superheroes other people have created to find flaws. Some of the heroes I encountered during my time with game were nothing short of mind-blowing. Thankfully the Superman/Spider-Man/Iron Man clones were few and far between (fingers crossed it stays that way when the game officially launches). For the most part, Champions Online is filled with astonishing-looking heroes that put Marvel and DC to shame.

And Gamespy has a trailer showing the Champions fighting for the good cause.

A new villain profile is online at the Champions Online website.

He was born Palash Krisharan to a poor family, in a small village in India. Very early on his mutant talent for illusion became apparent. As did his ability to reshape his body. It terrified his family and the local community. They cast him out to fend for himself when he was just a boy. He drifted around the country, using his abilities to steal enough to survive. Eventually he came to enjoy it and set himself up as a very successful confidence man. By the time he ran into Dr. Destroyer, he was already quite happily ensconced in a very comfortable lifestyle.

His mistake was trying to con a bunch of Destroyer’s lackeys. The lackeys, realizing what was going on, captured Rakshasa . He nearly escaped them, first through illusion (and one of them is still half in love with the beautiful woman he made appear) and then by shifting his form so that he could slip out through a grate in the floor. Destroyer, however, was smarter than his lackeys. No surprise there. He sent out a minor blast, incapacitating Rakshasa.

And the info on the current state of the game shows us what is happening at Mythic.

Speaking on Defense

One of the things we're hearing is that people simply aren't aware of the significance of defensive powers. We're going to be doing more in-game to highlight this all-important aspect to building a well-rounded hero, including ensuring there is a defensive power in every single framework (some were being shared across similar disciplines, such as Martial Arts). In the meantime, we encourage our beta testers to get those defenses up.

The Lone Wolf

There was a BIG miscommunication in a recent interview where the writer made it sound like there wasn't enough content for solo players to get to the level cap. While we have been putting a greater emphasis on getting group content into the game, players can easily solo their way to the level cap if that's how they want to play. We hope this clears things up

As usual there is just too much news about Champions Online so here it is in one newsbit.

Some information about the PvP maps and B.A.S.H. can be found here.

Sometimes, though, all of this organized team fighting is too constrained, and superhero battles royal make perfect sense in the Champions universe. In the Hero Games lineup, they're called B.A.S.H.: Battle Arena Super Heroes. The strategy in free-for-all games is more about choosing whom to engage when, so it's important to give players lots of space to choose their fights. Fliers in particular enjoy the fact that this map is outside, so the sky's the limit for their vertical movement! We do paint the other players on your mini-map, so there's never trouble finding somebody to fight if you're so inclined. Our free-for-all map is pulled right from Millennium City's seedy Westside district; the battle takes place in the streets, across the rooftops of condemned buildings, and inside a construction site. It's classic four-color superhero stuff.

A video showing PvP in a UTC arena can be watched here.

And finally Bill Roper explains how microtransactions work at Ten Ton Hammer.

Ten Ton Hammer:  It seems like a main concern centers on the notion that MTs can potentially negate the efforts of tackling high-end content, or that you might be removing certain ‘carrots’ in the game.

Bill Roper: Absolutely not. The thing is there will be a lot of things we’ll never micro-transact. And one of the things we put out there – less because it’s planned, and more because it’s making sure people understood it – was the fact that if we were to ever put anything out that did have a game effect, there would be a way to earn it. I think that’s really important.

If there was some item that had an effect in-game that would give you - I’m going to make something up, so this is not an item in-game or anything – so something that gave you maybe an increased energy regeneration rate or something along those lines, there would be a way for you to get that in the game. I think that the biggest thing though, with the items that people are going to get though micro-transactions there will be some things where maybe that will be the only way you can get them yet none of them are things where you might say, “man, I can’t believe I didn’t get that” whereas there’s tons and tons and tons and tons more things that you can only get by playing the game.

So again, micro-transactions aren’t the focus, a lot of things are simply going to be, I guess you’d say, ‘vanity’ items. But we want to have things like that in the game that players do push for and want to get.

The way I look at it, from a player’s standpoint, there are certain things I’ve wanted in MMOs where I’m like, “man, I really should get that item.” I know that if I was part of a big giant guild and we did raids over and over again, and I got on the list that maybe I’m going to get that item. And it’s not even because that item has a gameplay effect; it’s that cool mount, or that cool pet that is a super rare drop or that kind of thing. I don’t have that kind of gaming time, and I’m not part of a big giant guild so it would be tougher to get some of those kinds of things too. But if I had the opportunity to get something that was similar or something that I felt was equally cool, so not even necessarily the exact same thing, I might say, “Oh cool, I’m going to buy this cool pet for myself.” I don’t think that negates from the enjoyment of my game, or the enjoyment other people have with their game because they’re going to be getting stuff that’s equally as cool if not cooler by playing, but they didn’t have to spend any money on it.

The Champions Online devs gathered 10 tips about the ways to play PvP in Champions Online and share them with us at Ten Ton Hammer.

1. Power Up For PvP.

Cryptic insists they’re building Champions Online so that stats and powers are equally viable in both PvE and PvP, but some powers may be slightly more equal than others when it comes to PvP. “The might power where you rip up a chunk of ground and hurl it, that has an advantage on it that will disable travel powers,” James explained. “If you’re in PvP and someone’s flying, you can literally throw a rock at them and knock them out of the air, then clobber them when they land... I keep comparing it to deck building in a CCG, where you find a few good combos and then kind of fill in the gaps.”

Rob continued the thought: “It’ll be interesting to see how the community goes through the powers options. There are no classes, so it’s not like ‘just roll feral’ or ‘just go ranged DPS.’ So there will be those builds, like ‘I just picked the three powers that maximize my crit, and I have an anti-fly and a self-heal, and I’m self-sustatining.’ That’s as far as powers.

2. ...But Don’t Sweat the Stats

3. Start Small

4. The first rule of fight club is... block. And know your role(s).

5. Don’t check your PvE knowledge at the queue.

6. Watch for lengthy chargeups.

7. Boldly fight the hold.

8. Melee DPS - embrace the hold.

9. Crowd Control makes a huge difference.. for now

10. Don’t forget about deployables

Ten fresh screens can be found in the Champions Online gallery.

The following video interview with Executive Producer Bill Roper and Chief Creative Officer Jack Emmert can be viewed here or at GameTrailers.

Here is another range of newsbit of Champions Online.

A hero profile of the 19 year old Suzuki Katsoru aka Gadget boy can be found here.

ZAM have two articles about the recent PVP event. The first is a report about the event and the second is an interview with Bill Roper.

More about PVP can be read from a developers blog here and watched in a video here.

Missed two days of posting and thus missed all the news on Champions Online (some PR department they have).

There is a preview at IGN UK, based on playing the beta.

Three new screens are waiting for you at the official site.

Bill Roper explains how the character creation process works in a video.

More coverage of the recent PvP event can be found at Destructoid and Giant Bomb.

G4 has an interview lined up with Chief Creative Officer Jack Emmert about the overall goals.

MMORPG has an interview with Bill Roper about Monster Island, a volcanic island located off the coast of Japan.

And Amped Gaming has a more generic interview with Bill Roper.

Finally more about the state of the game of this week can be found here.

Two interviews covering Champions Online are available on Ten Ton Hammer. The first is with Bill Roper to discuss the Power Armor and Might power sets.

Ten Ton Hammer: What would you say sets Might apart from the Unarmed set?

Roper: I think that the Might set is really focused on bigger damage that happens at a slower pace than the Unarmed set. While you kinda have to build up to stunning with the Unarmed set, you’ll do this with a series of quick attacks rather than one big attack.

You could definitely take the two and have a nice mix of fast burst and big hit powers, and either stun them to set up your Unarmed combo or knock off a flurry of hits to pound them into the ground.

The second interview is with Producer Rob Overmeyer and PvP Designer James Laird about PvP.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there any reason to duel, other than bragging rights of course?

James: Nope, you don’t want to have to duel to do well. It’s a fun thing. You do get rewards through the regular PvP - the Ultimate Tournament of Champions [UTC - team based deathmatch by tiers], BASH [free for all PvP instances], and Apocalypse [objective-driven PvP event instances] - you get items and experience, acclaim, costume options, vanity pets, stuff like that. In UTC and Apocalypse, every time the match ends, you get scored based on how well you helped your team. A healer who did a lot of healing will get more points than someone on the other team that got a lot of kills but didn’t help their team.

In the first of videos from this weekend's Champions Online PvP press event brough to us by Ten Ton Hammer, Cryptic Studios CEO John Needham talks about the Nemesis system and the development progress of the game. Then Chief Creative Officer Jack Emmert talks about the history of Cryptic and Champions Online followed by Bill Roper who gives a demo for parts of the game.

Recently Cryptic Studios held a PvP event and from that event Kotaku came to five things you need to know about Champions Online.

1) Player customization will consume you
The player customization system isn't based on classes and doesn't require you to adhere to any pre-set superpowers. In other words, if you wanted to a be a gadget-using, fire-and-ice based golem or a scantily-clad dark magic cowgirl elf, you could make it happen—and no armor pick-ups or costume limitations would mar your mental image of what your hero is supposed to look like. There are default superpower sets you can choose from and a randomization option for body type and costume that let you get your character going that much quicker. Even better, you can lock certain options while clicking random so that you can keep a color scheme you like but try different body types, etc. And if you decided you liked one but clicked "Random" too soon, you can click "Undo" and go back to it.

This will probably occupy my first three and a half hours of gameplay.

2) Yes, there is PvP

3) The Nemesis System is like the Buddy System, only evil

4) It may be action-flavored, but it's still MMO combat

5) There are no limitations besides the level

A video where Roper explains the process of character creation can be found at Gamespy.

A hands on preview of Champions Online at IGN takes a look at character creation, Dr. Destroyer and the creation of an arch nemisis.

I cut my tour of the tutorial short to jump into one of Champions' group-based instances -- the end of a midlevel story arc in which your team of supers puts an end to Millennium City arch-villain Dr. Destroyer's mech lab. Design Director Bill Roper (who you may remember from his career at Blizzard and his own well-intentioned-yet-doomed excursion into the MMO space with 2007's Hellgate: London) and a team of developers rallied around my juiced-up Dr. Gadget -- no relation to the animated inspector -- for a five-man storming of the bad doctor's facility. A succession of location-based quests (including an interesting cooperative puzzle mission that saw us successively shutting down each wing of a robot-manufacturing machine) gave way to an all-out battle with Dr. Destroyer and one of his gigantic automatons. As in City of Heroes, drawn-out boss are chaotic, a color-wheel of ray guns and fireballs exploding across the screen until someone's life bar is empty.

In this weeks state of the game Bill Roper talks about what they are working on, such as; balancing, European contests, PvP, powers, Nemesis, patrol missions and this:

Another week, another update. Like clockwork they come out, which is just how this time-shifter likes it. As usual there’s a lot happening around Cryptic HQ, across every team in the company. This means that not only is the Champions Online team working on making the game as great as possible, but our core technology teams are cranking out new things, as well. Social features like Twitter support, networking backend tools for better customer support and service, and the web group is putting together more and more features to make our community stronger than ever. Cryptic has done a lot of growing over the past few months, so when you see announcements of new features that aren’t purely game-only elements, that doesn’t mean we’re neglecting things.

At the Champions Online site a description of the villain Dr. Moreau can be found.

Young Philippe Murrow, raised in France by an absolutely average family, found out to his delight that Dr. Moreau had been very real. In fact, Dr. Henri Moreau was Philipe’s rarely mentioned grandfather.

Unlike his father, who was trying so hard to hide from the Moreau legacy, Philippe embraced it! He retook the original family name and obsessively studied all of his grandfather’s notes and journals. Reading those journals, for the first time in his life Philippe didn’t feel alone or alienated. Here was someone he understood, who understood him. Here was someone with drive, brilliance, and the desire to reshape the world into a better place! Young Philippe was determined to live up to his grandfather’s legacy and prove that the Moreaus were visionaries! It didn’t hurt that he actually really enjoyed torturing and vivisecting the small animals he first experimented on in his childhood.

The bag of Champions Online news is a big one today, so here it goes:

Effects Artist Chris Mennard writes on IGN about the challenges in creating superhero effects.

My name is Chris and I'm one of the Effects Artist for Champions Online, which means I work on things like player powers and travel powers. Typically, someone will come to me and say, "We need a quasi-dimensional fraculator cannon." No problem! A little research tells me it's a beam power and I know it has to do certain things when it hits a target, so I make an effect that does just those certain things and looks cool doing it.

Powers aren't cool unless they have cool effects.

I have to bring style to the boring. For example, there was a power in the game that was called "Ice Column". Pillar. Ice. Done. Boring. We definitely needed something snazzier for our polish pass. On my drive in, I fantasized about the fortress of solitude. Who doesn't? Hours later, the Ice Column was killed and Ice Spikes were born. It looks cooler than a column of ice growing out of damn-nowhere. And it also works in-air!

The system specs have been released.

Recommended System Configuration

• OS:Windows XP/Vista
• CPU:2GHz Dual Core or Better
• Memory:2GB RAM or Better
• Video:NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or Better / ATI Radeon HD3850 or Better
• Sound:DirectX Compatible Soundcard
• HDD:5GB Free Disk Space
• Network:ADSL / Cable Modem or Better
• Disc:DVD-ROM
• Driver:DirectX 9.0c

An interview in German with Community Representative Gesine Fischercan be found on MMORPG-Planet.

Another interview (in English) can be found on ZAM where they interview Staff Writer John Layman, who also makes comics.

ZAM: What are some of the similarities and differences between writing comics and writing for an MMO? It seems like a daunting task that must require a lot of collaboration.

John: There are only similarities in a lot of the topes and conventions of a superheroic universe. Superheroes and supervillains tend to do the same sort of stuff whether it is in games or comics, but the approach to writing it is much different. Collaboration exists in both forms, but it is a bigger collaboration in a game. In a comic is it just the writer and the artist, and possibly a colorist, letterer and editor. In a game you are working with literally dozen of different talents, all working to achieve the same goal of making a great game, but there are many more components. Still, at the end of the day, there is a similar thrill to seeing a level or mission you wrote come to life, just like seeing a finished page of a comic book you wrote, or a printed copy of a current issue.

And finally more information is given on the PvP system in Champions Online, which is called Hero Games.

When we looked at the background of the Tournament of Champions we recognized that it was great as an event more so than a complete system. It needed to be spiced up a bit and modernized, but the game was a good start. What it became was the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, or UTC. Once the team decided that the UTC was going to be a game type we immediately started thinking about the other game types we could bring to Champions Online. Lucky for us, or you, the PvP team is comprised of some of the biggest PvPer's in the company (*cough*gankers*cough*.) It took less than a few seconds for a ton of great ideas to flood our little conference room. We all agreed that we would like to have a little PvP for each type of player, (the aforementioned gankers included,) something small and contained, something with objectives, a place for an all-out rumble and the always popular impossible scenario. This was the beginning of the game types within the Hero Games. The UTC, B.A.S.H. and Apocalypse games.

Bill Roper gives more information about the martial arts themed power sets; Dual Blades, Single Blade, Fighting Claws and Unarmed at Ten Ton Hammer.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of attacks can we expect from each set?

Roper: The unarmed power set is really set up to do single target attacks that are very powerful. It also does crushing damage, if players are interested in specific damage types.

The claws are using slashing damage, and they have some specific powers in this particular set that are interesting, such as Viper’s Fang. Basically, when you do the Viper’s Fang attack three times in a row, you actually do toxic damage over time. A lot of the claw attacks are built to be doing these chains of attacks on single targets. It’s really a back-and-forth sort of combat with the claws.

Because, if you’re not getting momentum to happen, you always have to go back to that energy builder, but the good thing about the martial arts is that if you’re focusing your advantages towards building that momentum, you can do more of those “alpha strikes” against the enemy and hurt them more.

The Mystic power sets covers the sorcery and supernatural power sets and are sets that come close to the 'regular' fantasy wizard skills. read all about them on the official site.

Currently, Sorcery is one big power set with many different aspects to it. You've got "Circles of Power", which create areas that, if you stay in them, give you a very strong buff. If you leave that circle, you lose the benefit. "Auras" grant a buff to you and your teammates. "Circles of Summoning" summons a critter that can leave the circle to attack an enemy as long as you stay in the circle. Circles of Summoning and Circles of Power are mutually exclusive, meaning you can only have one or the other up at any time. You can also have one Aura up at any time in addition.

Supernatural is a set intended to let you create a character that is supernaturally inspired: angelic, demonic, etc. Their powers are like, "Condemn your enemy with bolts of holy doom," "Infect your enemy with clouds of pestilent flies," "Bite your enemy and drain their living essence to yourself," and "Summon animals from the wilderness to serve your will." There's definitely a very wide variety of skills in this single power set. It is our intention to break this power set after launch into multiple sub sets. We have plans to add more to these sets in our ongoing post-launch power expansions.

Here is the latest on the state of Champions Online at this moment.

Today is the first day of the rest of July. And that means we’re turning up the heat here at Cryptic, both literally (our AC went out today – go heroic repair guy!) and in terms of getting more polish, balance, and final features into the game.
We’ve been getting some incredibly useful feedback in the beta forums that’s really helping us push forward in numerous directions. Our testers are going to start seeing some big changes in regards to balance and power sets in the next week or two, as well as tons of UI tweaks and tunings. As always, we’re incredibly grateful for the input, so please keep it coming!.

I wanted to address a couple of questions from the beta boards this week, talk about a couple of new features in the beta build, and tease some upcoming additions and re-introductions.

One of the heroes in Champhions Online is Amphibian who feels perfectly happy both in and outside the water.

Even as a child, Geoffrey Lamb took to the water like a fish. He was such a natural and excellent swimmer, his swim club coach thought he might have a shot at Olympic competition. But that was all before Geoffrey’s life took a distinct detour. He was nine years old when he and his parents were caught in a storm at sea just off the coast of Florida. Their boat capsized. That was when Geoffrey’s mutant aquatic powers manifested for the first time, allowing him to breathe under water. He tried to save both of his parents, but simply didn’t have the strength to do so. Shocked and traumatized, he stayed near the capsized boat for nearly a day before he was found.

The aquatic superhero, Sea King, rescued Geoffrey. Even through Geoffrey’s shock, he was able to see a young boy with the potential to become a hero - if he was given a chance to recover from the loss of his parents and explore his superpowers in a safe environment. So Sea King, in his secret identity as businessman Rodger Bright, adopted him.

More about the power sets in Champion's Online can be found on Ten Ton Hammer covering the psychic power set: Telekinesis, Force, and Telepathy, where they interviewed Bill Roper about it.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Force, Telepathy, and Telekinesis power sets, the themes with them, and some of the secondary powers players can have when they pick these powers?

Bill Roper: Sure. Force is almost more kinetics than telekinetics. Force features a lot of powers that shove people back. There is a lot of knockback involved. It’s more of a physical presence, a kinetic power set.

Telepathy is definitely a straight mind set where you are doing things like summoning pets you use, other illusions or creatures of the mind, as well as some direct powers like mental bolts.

Telekinesis features a lot of what you'd expect out of this power set, but it also has the ability to create weapons out of mental energy. A lot of what we are putting in right now is being able to do things like being able to pick up objects with your mind and throwing them around.

And there is some info about power replacers on the official site.

Power replacers are items you can equip, which will change the effect of specific powers you use in the game. These items are not widely available, and will not be available for every power nor every power set. At launch, Martial Arts and the sets that have something to do with using items will have them. There’s talk about letting Sorcery have wands, but it’s still a “maybe”. The amount of time it takes for us to make and develop power replacers is much longer than the amount of time it takes to create a brand new power, oddly enough. It’s our opinion that the majority of players would prefer having a new power than an item that simply makes a cosmetic change to an existing power.

And finally you can take a look at five new screens.

In an update about the current state of the game of Champions Online amongst others the following was mentioned:

We’re getting some last minute tech in to kick things up with the Telekinesis Power Set. More specifically, being able to pick up and throw objects in the world with your mind. This wasn’t as simple as it sounds (if that even makes sense to non-supers) but the basic mechanic is that you’ll want to increase your EGO to lift heavier and heavier objects, just like you boost your STR to physically pick up things in the world.

You should also be seeing another related (and very nifty) bit of polish in the game. Enemies and heroes that use powers which grab chunks of the world to hurl at their targets, those chunks will be representative of where they are. Concrete with steel pipes in the city, brownish rocks in the desert, ice floes in Canada, etc.

The martial arts power set consisting of Claws, Single Blade, Dual Blade, and Unarmed is being explained on the official Champions Online site.

The Martial Arts power sets were all conceived and designed at the same time. They are intentionally mirrors of each other in their basic forms: one light attack, one medium attack, one auxiliary attack, two heavy attacks, and auxiliary abilities. Each power, however, was explicitly designed to have a different purpose.

Unarmed is actually a tanking set in disguise. It is built to be a multi-mob tank. There are a number of area of effect abilities, as well as a number that cause players to gain energy as they dodge.

Single Blade was designed as the single-target elimination set. It’s built for causing maximum possible damage against a single target. Dual Blade is the henchman-killing set. It is very focused on scoring critical hits. The more critical hits scored, the harder and faster the Dual Blades go. Claws is something of a hybrid set. It is similar to both Single Blade and Dual Blade in that it’s better than Dual Blade versus bosses, and better than Single Blade versus mobs. It’s also the one that has the most stuff in it (as of right now, anyway).

Stingray is one of the villains in Champions Online and like most villains she was not born as one.

Once upon a time, there was a tremendously talented and intelligent little girl. She was also a princess. In fact, her mother was the Queen of Atlantis, an underwater kingdom. Like her mother before her, this little girl had a remarkable talent for magic. Unlike her mother, she was also extremely emotionally fragile. High-strung and easily hurt, she didn’t understand why her mother ignored her in favor of her older brother. He was not so talented in magic as she. He was not so intelligent as she. He was older, but so far as she could tell that’s all he had going for him.

That princess grew up to become Stingray, a notorious supervillainness. However, if just a few things had happened differently when she was a child, her life would have been completely different. She might even have become a superhero instead.

Bill Roper gets to answer some questions about Sorcery, Darkness, and Supernatural powersets in Campions Online.

Ten Ton Hammer:  For those not in beta, can you give us a brief overview of what the sorcery, darkness, and supernatural power sets are like? What are the big themes behind them?

Bill Roper:  Darkness, supernatural, and sorcery go together in the way that they are in the feeling of "otherworldly".  We tend to group powers around what their base ideas are, so sorcery and supernatural go together really well since they are otherworldly powers.  Darkness fits into that as well, although it isn't as magical in nature but it can be laid out that way.

Darkness and sorcery are predominately ranged power sets and supernatural tends to be a mix of ranged with a lot of melee.  For example, the energy building power in supernatural, which is Beastial Fury, is a melee combo.  We want supernatural to have the ability to have both ranged and melee flavors.

Sorcery blows into the areas of blasts and bolts and actually has a whole series of "circles" that give AoE type buffs or defense and allows you to cast your spells. It kind of gives you an area-based gameplay where you're laying down these circles and trying to be near them to gain their advantages.  That's how it's designed to work.

With darkness, the secondary tier of powers that you're doing other than damage, is fear.  Fear is a very common idea for RPG players where you control different enemies and lock them down distances away from you getting them off of their aggressive mode.  We also have within darkness a feature that when you defeat an enemy that has been feared, it gives you an additional way to gain energy with a secondary energy builder.  So with a lot of the combinations, you’ll fear different enemies and then when you defeat them you’ll get a little energy return.

Supernatural is built around a secondary damage type.  Lash, for example, is the second power you get in the basic set.  As you add ranks to it, you not only get additional damage, but you can also add things like Aspects of the Celestial which has a chance to do a heal over time for you and your allies, or Aspects of the Inferno which does additional fire damage over time, or Aspects of the Dragon which does toxic damage over time.  So basically you can add different DoTs or heals that can be either positive or negative over time effects using different supernatural powers as a secondary feel.

 

Four new screenshots are to be found on the Champions Online site.

Also some more information about the Energy Projector power has been made public.

At first, many of the Energy Projector power sets probably seem identical. But a great deal of work went into making the differences, which appear to be irrelevant subtleties to an amateur, be game-changing to a professional.

In general, Fire and Electricity are ranged, with easy access to Area-of-Effect damage. But it’s not as simple as that. For example, Fire is all very much about location-based AOE. For example: I hit you, and I cause damage to any friends that are near you. Electricity has arc-based damage: I hit you, and an arc will bounce to a friend of yours, and that arc could be double or triple what the Fire damage would be. Fire damage tends to linger over time, while Electricity has more up-front damage. Fire is built more to be a “fire and forget” set, where I blast the person, they catch on fire, and then I can ignore them. Whereas Electricity is built to beat-down one guy and then move on to the next set. To a novice player, they may feel very similar in what they do, but to an expert player, it’s an entirely different playing style.

And a villain video showing the supervillain lairs.

And finally there are two editorials; one from Bill Roper where he talks about the allure of superheroes in today's culture and how Champions Online is attempting to tap into the special nature of heroism and the other from designer Kate Banks where she talks about polishing and improving missions in the game.

More information about the powers in Champions Online has been made available on the CO site. First of all some beta testers get to say what their favorite poweres are.

"Force, by far, is my favorite power set. What is more fun than pummeling bad guys with pure kinetic energy and seeing them get knocked around like ping-pong balls? Nothing. And when you get surrounded by pipe-wielding mutants, you can explode in a brilliant (and pretty dang cool looking) eruption of energy, flinging everything around you like little rag dolls. Uh huh, Force is the way to go baby." – Icedanno

"I like mixing it up. I utilized Fire, Ice, and Lightning because in Champions I don't have to settle for one specific element I can choose them all. Then I can throw in a Rocket Launcher if I want to!" – Demoman

And designer Brian Urbanek discusses the various power sets in the game and what it takes to balance them.

Colin: What are you doing with Champions Online’s powers and combat systems that’s new and unique?

Brian: I came into this project about a year into a three-year development cycle. A lot of early groundwork and principles had been defined but there’s still been room for adjusting course along the way.

The original design team did a really good job creating some new paradigms. One of the things that they wanted to play with - as soon as they told me about it I thought it was wonderful - was as follows…

Most game models are a degenerative model, right? Think in terms of the way most RPGs have worked; they have something like a point system. The fight starts and you have all of your resources and as the fight goes on you become weaker and weaker, you have less and less resources to do things with and your points go down.

This always bothered me and, as I found out, it also bothered some of the other early developers for Champions. Fundamentally it just isn’t the way the fiction works. In the fiction, as the fight goes on for heroic characters and for villain characters, your resolve hardens. You draw upon ever greater reserves of your internal energy to fight harder and harder as the stakes get higher. You actually get an escalating model in fiction.

Missed posting news yesterday, so here is some various news about Champions Online.

Qwyjibo is the next villain to be profiled on the Champions Online site.

Qwyjibo was one of the many manimals Dr. Moreau created in his drive to create his own personal army. As a gorilla, Qwyjibo was quite naturally strong, and should have been an ideal soldier for Moreau. However, much like Dr. Silverback, another gorilla manimal Moreau made, Qwyjibo began to question Moreau’s way of life. Qwyjibo simply didn’t take to evil. He was naturally good.

When the New Knights of the Round Table attacked Dr. Moreau’s base of operations on Monster Island, Qwyjibo was among the Manimals who turned against Moreau and helped them. He was also among the manimals who decided to stay on the island and create their own peaceful society.

In the next editorial about the Nemesis system content designer Noah Holmes talks about making stories.

As you probably already know from reading what Randy and Poz had to say, the basic idea is that players get to create their own Nemesis. You come up with what your nemesis looks like, what their powers are, what their minions are like, and what their back story is. You even get to choose their personality type. You go after your nemesis to stop them, but they almost always get away and come back to haunt you later. It’s a great storyline and really fun to play. The big challenge for me was working with all of that within the larger context of the game.

Think about it. Your nemesis is unique. I have no idea what they’re going to look like, what their back story will be, or any of the other choices you’re going to make about them. But, I had to build missions that took into account all the possible nemeses our players could create. And I had to make those missions make sense within the game. They had to feel superheroic for our players and mesh with everything else going on in the Champions Online Universe. I needed to come up with villainous deeds that your nemesis could do outside of just harming innocent people. Those dastardly deeds would all depend on the personality of your nemesis: masterminds would do one thing, maniacs another, savages still another.

And finally at IGN they have the latest installment of the Campions Online developer diary available where content designer Adam Lee talks about the Open Missions.

Each Open Mission is located in a different area, like there may be one in Downtown Millennium City and one in Burial Butte in Canada, so the theme behind each mission will be different. Often times, coming up with the idea behind the mission is the hardest part of the design. We typically gather a few designers in a room with a lot of donuts* to get us hyped and then we start bouncing ideas off each other and see what sticks. Quite often one person comes up with a great idea that's close but not quite what we need, so the other designers make all sorts of crazy suggestions and the next thing we know we have a finished concept for the mission.

Next up is implementation where, sometimes, something we decided on in the design proves to be more difficult to implement than we'd realized. For instance, we had an idea for an open mission where you need to escort refugee relief vehicles through enemy roadblocks. Then we remembered the mission was under water, so players could just swim over the roadblocks. Clearly, that wasn't going to work. So we had to find a way to work around that to make the mission work. That sort of thing happens more often than you'd like it to, but we often end up with even better missions than we'd initially envisioned.

A lot of news about Champions Online showed up in the last 24 hours. To start with there is an article about the technical challenges of the Nemesis system used in the game.

Having a Nemesis is iconic in superhero comics, and we are very excited to bring it to players in Champions Online. Battling and defeating your Nemesis brings a special superhero feel to Champions Online. Also, other games haven’t really given players a chance to customize their own adversaries. We also like that it brings the fight to you. Instead of making the player always go out to find missions, we wanted the Nemesis to reach out and grab you, bringing you into a story. All of that sounds great, but the big challenge is how to implement it.

Then something about the current state of the game.

Making Your New Character’s Easier to Make

Both the character and costume creation systems in Champions Online are incredibly flexible and powerful. This has many positive effects for our players, but also presents some problems because of the complexity of the systems. We’ve been banging away at this issue for the past couple of weeks and are currently in the process of simplifying the character creation flow without losing any of the power behind the system. We should start seeing the first stages of this (power set selection) in beta next week.

Honest Gamers have finished their preview.

Thanks to a great, original art style, venturing through different areas becomes a leisurely stroll rather than a mundane chore. Even character skins follow this refined (if not a little loony) aesthetic. Combat is kept fun and varied not only by the aforementioned power-ups corpses leave behind, but also through the personalities and looks of foes. Enemies are wacky and include crazed, steampunk robots and leather-clad dominatrices. The game almost becomes one giant self-parody, with quest-givers presenting a serious story to the player, before getting them to go fight giant, humanoid chickens. This balance of humour and emotion is just right, and offers a far more compelling atmosphere than the click-through text screens in World of Warcraft or Age of Reckoning.

Senior Game Designer Randy Mosiondz spoke with the Champions Online Daily News to discuss what it means to be a hero in Champions Online.

“The game is very action oriented. You’re often in very high pressure situations and you have to go in there and start kicking ass, as a superhero. There’s a big problem and you have to solve it. It sets the stage, so to speak, of why you’re here, right now, and what these other people, the public, are doing here.

“You help bring a resolution to the immediate crisis, and thereby you progress the story arc. Then you’re dealing with the aftermath of that crisis, dealing with all the other factions and situations that are occurring, the stuff that real people have to suffer.

And finally you can win a personalized tour of the Champions Online Beta Preview with David “Hot Stuff” Bass? They are giving one random Facebook fan access to the Champions Online Beta Preview. That fan will also get to spend an hour with David “Daeke” Bass exploring the ins and outs of the Champions Online Beta Preview. All you have to do is become a fan of the game on Facebook.

A preview with some input from Bill Roper can be found on Ars Technica.

"We’ve worked hard to strike a balance between getting solo players into the game easily while also ensuring that our hardcore players have some real challenges and long-term goals in front of them," Roper said. If a hero wants to be a lone wolf and fight crime all on their own, they can easily do so. Advanced players that want the ultimate challenges, however, will join teams and form super groups to assault villain hideouts and lairs which are designed for multiple heroes... the career of a single hero is an exciting path, and we’ve done a lot of work to make it interesting and engaging, with over 900 missions to possibly uncover and explore. There are numerous small story arcs that occur for all players across the game represented in the various mission chains. There are also six major, overarching global story arcs that span all the zones in the world."

For more Champions Online information check out Gameshark for and E3 round-up and Gaming Nexus for a 3-part video interview with Bill Roper.

Steve Long, of Hero Games, has written an article about the Champions Universe and its relation to Champions Online. It's been posted in different languages at VideoGamer (UK), Onlinewelten (Germany) and Gamereactor (Finland).

I first got involved professionally with Hero Games in the early Nineties, when I started writing for the company as a freelancer. I turned out half a dozen books for the company, including Dark Champions (which looked at gritty, “street-level” heroes like Batman and the Punisher) and Watchers Of The Dragon (which delved into the martial arts side of the Champions Universe). Based on the strength of that work, Hero chose me to write the Fifth Edition of the HERO System when it decided to release a new edition of gaming’s greatest rules.

I finished the Fifth Edition in 1998, and did some revisions in early 1999 at the company’s request. At last the project was done... but by that point Hero Games itself wasn’t in good shape. The Nineties hadn’t been great for roleplaying game companies in general, and by the end of the decade Hero wasn’t in a position to publish a big new edition. But in 2000, it seemed as if there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. A company called Cybergames purchased Hero Games and began efforts to get the game line back on its feet. Unfortunately, more logistical and financial hurdles arose, and nothing came of it.

The third interview about powers in Champions Online is now to be found on Ten Ton Hammer. This time the powers; fire, ice and electricity are discussed.

Ten Ton Hammer: The elements are kind of like the "standard" super hero powers for any universe - you've got your Iceman, Sandman, Human Torch, and lots of others. What did you do in Champions Online to make player heroes stand out but also give them a traditional sort of feel?

Bill Roper: I think because we've always been trying to strive for that four-color comic appeal in an MMO for, all of those examples you gave are perfect for what we're trying to strike. Obviously characters within the Champions Universe and player heroes will use those elemental powers, and really what we wanted to be able to do is really play off of how those powers work with other powers that you may have and any sort of special effects they might produce.

With Fire for example, we make sure that there's this synergy within the Fire power set so the more you use your fire powers, the more they all work together. For instance, the fire powers build endurance whenever you're around enemies that are on fire or generally around fire. Another interesting one is the synergy with electricity and how it has a chance to do a negative ion charge which basically means that the next time you do an electrical attack there's a chance it might arc to an additional enemy.

So basically all our powers have things built into them that if you elect to stay within that power set you get a different side benefit to those powers. That's where the uniqueness of our power sets come in. We're sticking to the traditional powers in fire, ice and electricity, but we're then giving you an added bonus in how those powers interact with each other.

Eight new screens can be admired at the Champions Online site.

Radiation and super strength are the powers of Gigaton, one of the villains in Champions Online.

Tim Colton was not the sort of man you would ever expect to become a supervillain.

Tim Colton was an ideal soldier. Handsome, clean cut, loyal, well organized, and capable of leading a squad of men. He liked to party a little bit, but no more than any other young soldier given leave. He was also the sort of soldier who would volunteer when his superiors said it was important. Which is how his life changed completely. In the early 1990s, Tim volunteered for Project Sunburst, a war game that would involve a nuclear war scenario. What his superiors didn’t tell him was that the nuclear blast would be real.

Tim was one of the lucky ones; he lived. Many of the other volunteers died that day. Some few lived on a few months more, sickening and slowly dying. A very lucky few developed unusual powers, but even many of them died over time. Tim, and two or three others like him, was merely in a coma.

The army doctors were perplexed. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him. Nothing at all. Except for the fact that he was in a coma. His body was healthy, and getting healthier by the minute! In time they realized that they didn’t even need to feed him, he survived just fine on his own. He might have stayed there, in the army’s “Crypt,” forever if not for Dr. Destroyer. That’s right. Dr. Destroyer came to his rescue.

The devs of Champion Online took some time to answer some of the questions that live in the Champions Online community and nicely collected them on one page.

As a player who works a normal 8-5 job, will I feel left behind by those whom I play with that are able to dedicate more time with the game? (Realaride)

Not at all! We have a system in place that allows you to play with higher level or lower-level players by temporarily raising or lowering your level to that of the team leader. Even if your friends get ahead of you in level you'll still will be able to team up with them!

Are all powers viable in PvP or will we be seeing just a handful of cookie-cutter builds? (Sspider)

I spent a pretty good amount of time thinking about PvP related issues and believe that all our powers are individually PvP viable (some even more so than PvE viable) but that the emergence of a cookie-cutter mentality is inevitable to a certain degree. The nice thing about a non-class based design however is that we are somewhat insulated because of a la carte powers selection; most of the cookie-cutter combinations will consist of two or three powers instead of complete builds.

Champions Online's producer Chris Lena gives some insight into the ups and downs of the recently announced delay for the release of Champions Online.

When we announced a delay for the release of Champions Online we understood that there would be some negative reaction, both from gamers disappointed that they would have a longer wait and from the media who have long experience of games that delay because, it often turns out, there are problems with the product.

But for us the reaction was actually positive, because people understand that an MMO is a very complicated proposition that needs to be just right. And because we have been very open about the game and people are familiar with what we are doing here.

Champions Online was due to launch in early June and will now arrive on September 1.  When we decided to delay the game we knew there would be some pros and some cons, which I would like to discuss here. And we knew we had a duty to use the extra time we have been given in the most optimal way possible, which I would also like to talk about.

Together wth Bill Roper the guys from Ten Ton Hammer got the opportunity to check out Champions Online.

When seeing all the different travel options players have there is a mix between crafted items and super powers, obviously some heroes can fly, but what about burrowing under the ground to pop up in the middle of your foes? These are some of the ideas Champions Online is implementing into their game. Players also have the chance to craft various transportation devices, not vehicles, not yet, but Bill mentioned they have been talking about motorcycles and cars somewhere down the line after the game is launched.

The one crafted device we got a close look at was a steel disk that flies the hero around the city. Players can also attack and fight from the top of the disk giving some strong ranged combat options. In opposition to the metal flying menace some players will have access to a flying carpet when using the Mystic crafting ability. Players will sit comfortably in a meditation position as they whisk off to fight the bad guys attacking the city. Another idea on travel was a giant ball that players can roll around in moving at high speeds to solve their missions faster. Bill explained that there will be a lot of travel options in the game and looks forward to showing more of them off to players before launch.

Bill Roper discusses character themes and customization from Champions Online with Massively at E3.

Acrobatics sounds fun, but what about teleportation? "Teleport breaks everything," Roper says. That is, it would if they just slapped it into the game and moved on. Fortunately, Cryptic Studios has put a lot of thought into this. For players who aren't necessarily physical types, Teleport would be the most efficient transportation power in the game, allowing them to bypass mobs and enemies and remain untargetable. If left unchecked, though, Teleport powers would be overpowered.

"It immediately breaks all the rules," Roper continues. "You have to start putting restrictions in -- you can't go through walls and so on." Cryptic Studios had a clear goal of departing from the Teleportation game mechanics of City of Heroes where you click a point to 'port over to it; they decided to create a system where players step into a nether realm and move through it (while still needing to navigate surroundings and terrain like anyone else), emerging in another location. From the perspective of onlookers, the character (not Roper's own words here) pulls a Nightcrawler sort of *bamf* to a new location.

Here is an opportunity to get some of your own artwork in Champions Online:

How would you like to see something you’ve created actually placed in Champions Online? We’re giving you the chance to create a chest emblem, which will then be implemented in the game as an option for all future players to use. Our art team will select five of the best submissions and add the designs to our Costume Creator. The top ten submissions will all receive beta keys as well! Submissions must follow these guidelines:

• Emblems should only use two colors – black and red (on a white background). This is so players in-game can modify the colors as they like using our Costume Creator.
• Emblems should be symbolic, iconic, and ‘basic’ enough to read well at a distance – lots of fine detail and noise tends to get lost.
• Emblem images should be exactly 512 x 512 pixels, and saved in TARGA format (.tga).

Click "Read More" below to see some examples of good submissions.

Submissions must be emailed to contest@champions-online.com and will be accepted until June 18th, at which point our team will judge the submissions. This contest is only open to US residents. You can check out the official contest rules here. Good luck!

The profile of a villain female character named Talisman from Champions Online can be found on the official site.

Pamela Duquesne is hot stuff, and she knows it. She’s also evil stuff, but she doesn’t really care about that. As far as she figures it, good and evil don’t really matter. What matters is getting what you want, and being the best.

She goes by the name Talisman now – it’s a lot cooler than Pamela – and she has a history of both getting what she wants and being the best. She was born into a witching family. Both Mommy and Daddy were dark witches in the Circle of the Scarlet Moon. So far, a perfect setting for a gal like Talisman. Except for one thing: her twin sister.

Where Talisman was selfish and self centered, her sister Bethany was kind and generous. Where Talisman was outgoing and sexy, her sister Bethany was shy and awkward. All of which was horribly annoying, but not enough to cause a major problem. The problem was that where Talisman was tremendously magically talented, so was Bethany! It was completely unfair. Talisman didn’t think she should have to share the limelight with a wimp like her sister.

After all those interviews PR machine Bill Roper has even more to say about Champions Online. This time its for his first editorial in the games own newspaper where he has a weekly column.

Some games are more fully a direct competitor with WoW than others. Warhammer Online was always going to be a more direct competitor to WoW than Champions Online. It's a fantasy setting. It's got orcs. It's got dwarves. To a certain degree, it feels similar to WoW. Conan was a competitor because it's a fantasy setting. You've got fjords and shields and magic spells and rogues and wizards. You've got core fantasy components and very similar mechanics in terms of combat, how many guys you're fighting at one time.

Champions Online has a very different focus. Perhaps the biggest difference is the customization that is available which is such a core element of the superhero genre. In a classic fantasy, MMO progress is all item driven - you're going up in levels so you can get the next level of loot, but when you get to the level cap, every warrior or character class looks the same because they've all gone out and there and won the same loot.

So all their equipment looks exactly the same. The difference in their character is going to be whether they're a big brawny guy or maybe a smaller guy. It's going to be a silhouette but every piece of gear they have is probably going to be the same. My top end fighter looks just like everybody else's top end fighter.

In a game like Champions Online it's about being able to create an iconic character. That's something really unique and makes it a very different type of game. Of course I want to be finding gear and equipment and items and costume pieces and these things that I can use to make my character better. But I can create an iconic look for my character and if I never want to change it I never have to. I am able to equip these different upgrades and elect not to show them off so that my character looks the same as when I created him or her.

 

Six new screens of Champions Online can be found on the official site.

Another interview with Bill Roper about Champions Online can be found on TenTonHammer. This time he talks about Munitions, Archery, and Gadgeteering power sets.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about Gadgeteering?

Roper: Gadgeteering is more along the lines of one of those “mad tinker” character types. There are a lot of pet powers you can use in that power set. That’s everything from robots to attack toys.

That’s actually one of the crazier Gadgeteering powers. You basically have constructed these attack toys, so you can adventure through the world as this wild toy master. Some of the toys include helicopters and little soldiers.

There’s also an experimentation ray, which is this wacky looking ray gun that does a de-buff on your enemies but also has a chance that there’ll be a sort of side effect. An example of that would be actually shrinking your enemies.

Really, the Gadgeteering powers are really going to encompass a lot of the less serious, more tongue-in-cheek sort of powers. It’s really just a crazy mélange of the “everything else” that isn’t encompassed or doesn’t thematically fit with a lot of the other “gadgety” power sets. It’s a big catch-all, and that’s why there are so many different types of powers and/or pets in this power set.

A lot of news popped up about Champions Online, so here is an overview.

Cryptic's game designer Aaron Safronoff discusses how a new Crisis zone is built from start to finish in this week's Dev Diary over on IGN.

Design for all our content begins with story. John Layman, our resident comic book author, pundit, and editor, sits down with the heavy hitters (Randy Mosiondz, Jack Emmert, and John Hopler) and lays down the major plot points. Most often the mighty Layman provides all the expected mission types and contacts as well. The story, mission, neighborhood, or Lair then gets assigned to a content designer, an artist, a powers designer, and a producer. I'm content.

My first task is to read through all the notes and digest them. I have a lot of questions to answer at that point. How long will it take to implement? Can all of the items be implemented? What kind of assets are required and how many? Anyway, that part of the process sounds boring, but it is really exciting. (As a designer, I haven't hit any roadblocks yet.) Production does a lot to help with asset call-outs and assignments so I'm not alone with the e-paperwork.

MMORPG.com had a Q&A session with Bill Roper about Champions Online and his general thoughts on the current MMO market.

MMORPG.com: So do you believe that publishers and fans have an unrealistic definition of what makes a game a success?

Bill Roper: I'm pretty sure that's what I said. Yes. Some do. Not all, but some get blinded by the aberrant hit and then place that same criteria of sales or features on every game. That would be like saying, "Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in a single season. We're just expecting you all to do the same."

MMORPG.com:What, in your opinion, categorizes an MMO as a success?

Bill Roper: Creating a game that is fun, challenging, and engaging, takes the community into account, works to grow their world, and offers excellent customer service. From a financial standpoint, there needs to be enough players to support the continued development and upkeep of the game and the online service. Puzzle Pirates, as an example, is very successful but doesn't have the size of a player base as many other MMMOs that are less "successful."

In their second part of the preview of Champions Online VE3D have two characters talk to each other to tell something about the first five levels.

To: The Bronze Hornet
From: Wadpuff Footloaf

Dear Friend, this may be our last communication. Millennium City is under attack from the Qularr. Remember when we were in the academy and you told me that I would never amount to anything? You were wrong. Despite my striking resemblance to a little pink meatball and my love of women's clothing, I have been called to active duty. Yes, it is true, the fate of Millennium City rests in my hands. If it were not for all of the purple nurples and wedgies that you and the other super-jocks gave me at the academy; I'm not certain that I would be tough enough to handle a mission of such importance. I realize now that you were a true friend after all, and only doing what was best for me. I owe you my thanks, friend, and so does Millennium City.

To: Wadpuff Footloaf
From: The Bronze Hornet

Sorry, I don't remember you. Perhaps you have me confused for someone else.

and finally busy Bill Roper also had a chat with Australia's Atomic MPC (does this guy actually find time to work. or is giving interviews his new line of work?).

David Hollingworth: Champions Online obviously makes use of the Champions pen and paper roleplaying license. How close have the devs stuck to the feel and mechanics of that license?

Bill Roper: The core of the original system is being able to make whatever hero you can imagine. It's an incredibly deep and flexible system from which we've been able to use many of these core ideas of the original RPG (statistics, power sets, talents, etc.) in Champions Online while also making the changes necessary to create an MMO. The spirit and many mechanics of the paper-and-pencil version of the game are definitely alive and well within our game, but with an eye towards what needs to be different to fit the expectations and needs of MMO players.

Also, the vast majority of the heroes, villains, and setting in Champions Online are directly from the paper and pencil game. We've done a lot of rework in terms of updating and altering certain looks and powers to better fit the MMO genre, but we're in constant contact and communication with the table top RPG team to ensure a very cohesive crossover between the two systems

MMORPG had an early look at Champions Online and penned down something about character customization, quests and console mentality.

All would-be super-heroes should remember this advice as they approach Champions Online. Yes, Champions Online is an MMO, but the game is much easier to play and enjoy when approached with a console mentality. Due to its reliance on character positioning, fast reactions and selective targeting as an essential part of combat, the game plays much more like an action console game than the average “click and get a sandwich MMO.”

Granted, there are times where combat is more straight forward (i.e.: “ get x and give to y”), but for the most part gameplay, especially when solo, requires a little more thought. Heroes need to consider how they’ll get to their enemy (route) and which ones to attack first. Ignore this advance, and the game becomes a lot harder to play. At first, I felt like it would need a friend just to finish the tutorial, but once I took the console gamer’s approach, it was as if I had pressed the easy button.

In addition five new screens from Champions Online can be found on the official site.

An interview with Bill Roper about Champions Online can be found on Gamesource.

GS: Porting a Mmo on consoles, even if it's an action-mmo, it has never been easy. How is it going for Champions Online? How much the xbox360 version will differ from the pc version? Which were the biggest problems with the interface and control differences?

Obviously the biggest challenge is the interface, making sure that the game plays equally as well on a controller as with a keyboard and mouse. We’ve always had both consoles and PC in mind as platforms, however, so our design decisions have always taken this into account. From a technology standpoint, there is no reason players on the PC and consoles can’t play together, but we’ll have to address that when we get to it from a game balance perspective.


GS: Champions Online's Lore does not fit properly to the music of the Poxy Boggards but we will ever listen to any of your songs during the game? Is there any plan about it … especially after your arrival at Cryptic ?

While I’d love to have the music of my band The Poxy Boggards be in a game at somepoint (trivia note: There is a brief moment in Warcraft II where you hear us sing “Deo Gratia” as you click on the Church) I don’t think it quite fits into Champions Online. We do have some fantastic music and sound in the game, and I DID manage to get some voice-work in as one of my favorite wacky villains in all the Champions universe – the MIGHTY FOXBAT!

Senior Game Designer Randy Mosiondz working on Champions Online was interviewed by Gameshark.

What is the Nemesis system? Why is something like this important in a game about superheroes?

The Champions Online Nemesis system is a mid-game component that allows players to create a persistent enemy to plague their hero. Players select their Nemesis’ name, costume, motivation, personality, power template, and minions which then show up from time to time as players progress through the game. There are various Nemesis storylines that players can play through, uncovering their Nemesis’ plots and eventually putting them away (if they can!). Eventually players may build up a whole gallery full of Nemeses!

Why did we feel incorporating a Nemesis system was important? For one thing, it’s a common trope within the superhero genre; how many comic book heroes have earned the eternal enmity of a villain for some real or perceived slight? Also, this is another great way for players to create their own custom character content and put it into the larger game world. We’re also looking at expanding the functionality of Nemesis in the future. Maybe some players would like to turn to the dark side and play their own Nemesis…

A video showing the use of power armor in Champions Online appeared on IGN.

Every Champion has their tools; some call on magic, while others use sheer strength. But not every hero calls on extradimensional energies, or relies on genetic advantages for their talents.

There are those that enhance themselves through technology, making themselves better, faster, stronger, -- with shoulder cannons, eye beams, and wrist blasters. These are the Champions who wear armor instead of tights. They are iron and fire, forged to protect the innocent from death and darkness. They are power.

Not one, but three Champions Online interviews on one day with Bill Roper.

The first is in Spanish at Meristation. No clue what Bill is saying here though as I don't speak Spanish.

The second is I don't get either. It can be found on the Romanian site Eurogamers.ro.

Luckily the third at Ten Ton Hammer is in English and it's mostly about Customization and exclusive powers.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there easy ways for players to find powers from a particular archetype of character? For example if somebody wanted to play support, would there be an easy way for him to figure out which powers would be best for his character? Are the powers pretty much self-explanatory or is there some other way that players could figure out which powers to use?

Bill Roper: We’re actually doing a lot of work on the UI right now to try to get that not only explained really well in the power descriptions but also different methodologies for sorting. Right now when you go into any power set it will show you if it’s offensive, defensive or utility; it shows you what type of power it is, so you could sort it that way. We’d like to add just being able to say, “Show me all utility powers across all power sets” so it could be just, “oh, great, here they all are.”

We also actually just started this week going through and starting our pass through on all the powers to write the descriptions better, make sure things are looking correctly and making it really explanatory so players will know what they are. But we’ll have at least a couple of different ways that players can parse through the power list – go through sets, go through functionality – to find the exactly the type of power they want for their character.

The latest character from Champions Online is named Kinetik. And as is often te case with super heroes; an accident was the reason he got his powers.

It was an accident one late night in the lab that turned Brendan Grant into a superhero. A fire broke out in one of the neighboring labs, releasing an extremely potent cocktail of gasses from several different experiments. By the time Brendan realized what was happening, he’d already been exposed to the fumes.

It took several days in the hospital for Brendan to recover, but when he did he discovered he had superheroic abilities he’d never even dreamt of before. The chemicals that had infiltrated his body during the accident worked a mutagenic metamorphosis on him. He now had super human speed. Not only could he move impossibly fast, he could also think faster than any normal human. His body also generated a protective aura that protected him from the dangers of friction.

Two new Champions Online screens can be found on the official site.

The official Champions Online site states that the release date has been set back to the 1st of September.

We wanted our fans to hear this from us first... We’re changing our Champions Online launch date from July 14th  to September 1st of this year.

Why? Here’s what our own Bill Roper, Design Director and Executive Producer on Champions Online, had to say about it:

“It is critically important for an MMO to be as good as it possibly can be at launch. Through our constant dialogue with our vocal and supportive community of beta testers, we quickly realized that in order to implement certain features that we all considered important the development of Champions Online would require more time.  So that's what we're going to give it. Cryptic has a proven track record of releasing solid games and we want to maintain that with Champions Online.”

What does this mean for you? Simply, more beta play time right now and a better, more polished game at launch.

Cryptic Studios™ have dated Champions for worldwide release. The press release is here.

Who:

Atari, Inc., one of the world’s most recognized videogame publishers, and Cryptic Studios™, a leading developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), announced today Champions Online for PC systems will be available worldwide July 14, 2009.

What:

On July 14, European and North American gamers will be able to pick up their copy of Champions Online and dive into a massive world of super powered heroes, villainous Nemeses, ancient gods, underwater civilizations, alien invasions, and much, much more!

From Cryptic Studios, the creators of the acclaimed City of Heroes and City of Villains, comes one of the most exciting new MMOs of 2009... Champions Online! Powered by the groundbreaking Cryptic Engine and based on the award winning Champions setting from the HERO System of pen & paper role playing games, Champions Online taps into a rich and established universe of heroes, villains, and intrigue.

Bill Roper brings a little insight into Champions Online at Eurogamer.

Bill Roper has tasted what must be some of the highest highs and lowest lows in game development. At Blizzard he played a key role in the development of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo into the multi-million-selling franchises they became, working as a producer, project manager, director and ultimately vice president of the Blizzard North studio. Then he left to form Flagship Studios, a venture that eventually ended in financial collapse and the cancellation of its only operating game, the multiplayer RPG Hellgate: London.

Late last year, Atari-owned Cryptic Studios parachuted Roper in as design director and executive producer for its new superhero MMO, Champions Online. Due for release this spring, the game draws on Cryptic's work on the originator of the genre, NCsoft's City of Heroes, and Microsoft's cancelled Marvel Universe Online. It's also based on Champions, a long-running pen-and-paper role-playing game with its own cast of characters and universe, as well as a ruleset famed for the freedom it gives players.

Video interview of Bill Roper at NYCC.

Champions Online Executive Producer Bill Roper discusses what makes Champions Online unique in the exploding niche of comic book MMORPGs. A big part of that uniqueness is the customizability of both superheroes and their powers - or as Bill says: "If you can dream it, you can do it" in Champions Online. He goes on to discuss the nemesis system and a new topic for the Cryptic Studios crew: PvP via a sanctioned superhero "fight club" in an arena in Millenium City. This and more details in this eight minute video from NY Comic-Con 2009!

'Bill Roaper' demos Champions Online at NYCC.

In the latest edition of Ask Cryptic several topics are covered, such as travel powers, the Nemisis and balance of flight to name a few.

How will you balance flight with other powers, particularly melee powers, in combat? I'm concerned about some Gen-con footage in which the giant metallic dinosaur that was previously owning the hero suddenly couldn’t touch him after he took to the air. It doesn't really matter that your equilibrium is zero if your foes can't do any significant damage to you. (The_Dark_Lord)

Every creature in the game has a ranged attack: every creature in the game can hit flying people. In this specific case, the reason the dinosaur had no effect is that the player had GM powers turned on that made him immune. Normally, Mega-Terak has a power called static field which means that in a 200 meter radius around him, the faster you move the higher the electricity zap you get hit with. So, if you use super speed or flight around him, you’ll explode violently. If you want to fight him, you need to tiptoe slowly. He’ll quick flash fry any normal flyer.

The Games Convention '08 coverage continues. This time the superhero MMO Champions Online gets some attention by IGN in a preview:

Instances in Champions Online are referred to as Strongholds and the Stronghold we found ourselves watching was a mission into the maniacal heights of Teleios. But wait, there's more: the tower is located somewhere in the Canadian wilderness! Awesome.

Teleios is the mad scientist that waits upon the top of the tower, so the representatives began working their way through the enemies that were scattered throughout the blue-toned cybernetic passageways. After dispatching a number of normal enemies, the aforementioned dino-gaurds were brought in and -- at that point in time -- I had pretty much seen everything I ever wanted to see in life.

Combat in Champions Online looks pretty straight-forward. You run around the environments in typical fashion and you execute all your attacks and special moves in what appeared to be total real-time, though there may be some timers governing when you can execute power moves. Champions Online also boasts a certain degree of environmental interactivity which influences how you might go about defeating a particular Stronghold.

Kieron Gillen has a week's load of articles for Champions.

Cryptic invited us over to have a long, hard look at their Champions Online. We had a good stare, talked to anyone who never actively hit us and came back and wrote up a full week of features about it, which I compile now here for the full-on RPG ultromegafeature experience.

• The Game’s Afoot: An overview of the game, what’s new, their aims and a first look at the Monster Island section.
• Jack Emmert Interview: Cryptic’s Chief Creative Officer talks about Champions aims, the learning curve and how MMOs need to grow for the future.
• George MacDonald interview: The designer of the original Champions roleplaying game talks about how it came about and the influence of one school of games on the other.
• Randy Mosiondz interview: Champions Online’s Lead designer talks about the challenges of Champions and how City of Heroes was the game which finally taught him to love the MMO.
• The Character Creator. Art Director Shayne Herrera explains exactly how Champions will redefine defining your characters.
• And we give away a Champions Skateboard. Without wheels. Hurrah!

Frankly, if you can find a more thorough examination of Champions Online elsewhere, you probably work at Cryptic and it’s your bloody design docs. Sez us, arrogantly.

 Interview with Jack Emmert you can read here.

<GT:> Now, this is probably going to sound like a funny question, but why co-develop across the 360 and the PC when MMOs have traditionally been PC oriented?

<Jack Emmert:> Because somebody’s got to do it. <Laughs> We developed the technology and somebody has to break through that barrier. Eventually it was going to be somebody else and not us and its a perfect genre to give a shot on the console game. Super hero games sell quite well on the console. I myself, I’m looking quite forward to playing the Incredible Hulk game, the movie game, and that’s just one example. Iron Man, not so good, but the Spider-man titles and Ultimate Alliance are great.

Kieron Gillen got invited to Cryptic to take alook at Champions.

While there are obvious similarities to City of Heroes, there’s a strong influence from console titles like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and God of War. For example, rather than an simple exchange of attacks, there’s an increased use of “tells”. So if an attack is lining up on you, they’ll telegraph the blow, demanding you turn to a block move to avoid the worst of the attack. Simultaneously, there’s an adrenaline style link between your attacks – your lowest ones will build up an energy bar, while the more powerful and useful attacks will spend the attack. The tactical decision of when to build and when to spend is of crucial importance. You can also do things like lob bits of the scenery at the enemy, because you are, after all, a super-fellow. Enemies go further into AI routines than in COH – as well as a larger gent with the telegraphed knock-out attack, we see ratmen summoning reinforcements, because they’re bloody cowards. Growls!

That said, despite all the action tropes, it’s still primarily a role-playing game. “I wouldn’t say it’s 50:50 – the RPG is predominant,” says Emmert when asked, “but there’s more of an element of skill than in City of Heroes”. Those who were hoping a return to the early days of City of Heroes are going to be disappointed – a hero will be facing down around three to four henchpeople a piece, and increasingly few as the power levels climb.

 Jon Miller reports on an exclusive look at the in development Champions.

In our demo, we watched Cryptic play through Monster Island, the project of the grandson of Dr. Moreau. His experiments have predictably run amok, and Cryptic's power-armored character created for the demo made quick work of the enemies using a combination of melee attacks and laser beams. The controls were designed with the Xbox 360 controller in mind--even developers play the PC version with a USB gamepad--and powers are mapped to the face button. The main attack is a simple power that causes minor damage but builds up your super power meter. The meter acts as currency for your three other powers that cause major damage. All of the combat is in real time and plays out more like a traditional action RPG than an MMOG, which is sure to please console gamers who aren't keen on queuing attacks.

The Monster Island demo lasted only a few minutes, but we did learn about some of the other locations in the game. Heroes will receive missions and quests from the Champions and other characters in the universe and then duke it out in deserts, tundra, jungle, alternate dimensions, outer space, and, of course, Canada. Thankfully the Canucks will have Justiciar, the cybernetically enhanced hero and leader of the Toronto-based superteam Star Force, watching over them. Cryptic wants every area to stand out visually, so each will feature a "point of interest," something that's visible from any location on the map. Similar to the Citadel in Half-Life 2, giant mountains, telescopes, or huge fortresses will loom over their respective areas.

 Cryptic to team up with 2K for publishing their new Super Hero MMO.

New York, NY – July 10, 2008 – 2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), announced today that it will be the North American and international publisher for Cryptic Studios'™ highly anticipated massively multiplayer online (MMO) action game, Champions Online™, being developed for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft* and Games for Windows®. Champions Online is scheduled for release in spring of 2009.

"2K Games is excited to work with such a talented group as Cryptic Studios," said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. "Given their stellar pedigree and amazing grasp of the MMO genre, we are confident that Champions Online will deliver an innovative and exciting action MMO experience to gamers."

Cryptic Studios, based in Los Gatos, CA and established in July 2000, is one of the leading independent developers of massively multiplayer online games for the PC and current generation systems. As an independent, employee-owned company, Cryptic is committed to delivering high quality, innovative cross platform MMO gameplay. Cryptic is best known as the creator of the award-winning City of Heroes® and City of Villains™ MMO titles. Based on the popular Champions™ pen-and-paper RPG, Champions Online will give players the power of total customization for their hero experience while they explore a vast comic book universe.

"2K Games is a terrific publishing partner for Champions Online," said John Needham, CEO of Cryptic Studios. "Cryptic is proud that Champions Online will be 2K's first MMO title and we look forward to working together towards a tremendous launch next year."

Champions Online is not yet rated by the ESRB. For more information, log onto www.champions-online.com

*Champions Online for Xbox 360 is not yet concept approved by Microsoft

Lead Designer on Champions Online Randy "Arkayne" Mosiondz has written a dev blog post on how community response influences game design:

Collectively, the Champions Online community made us re-evaluate our initial game design with regards to archetypes. Considering our open power selection system, did we really need archetype bonuses? One of our vision goals was to provide a very flexible powers system to players that they can play with to their heart's content – why put impediments to this goal by adding in archetypes? We took the community feedback to heart and went back to the drawing board. We asked ourselves, would it be possible to create an open character creation system that still solved the same problems that character classes did? You'll need to stay tuned for the results!

In short: thank you for all your feedback to our game design articles. This is ultimately your game and we want to make sure we meet any reasonable expectations you might have. While it's impossible to please everyone, we'll do our best to review all your ideas and evolve the game design where we can.

The official website of Champions Online has another "Ask Cryptic" Q&A. Five fan submitted questions are answered:

Will there be any "in-house" resource for the players to showcase our characters and their backgrounds, and perhaps superteams, bases, and so on? Something similar to the CREY threat pages, or the City Vault that NCsoft is planning? Can we get a larger amount of space (character limit) for in-game character background/biography? (Starhammer)

Sporkfire: Hey, Starhammer. We're currently making plans for our web integration with the game. We're looking at the best features from previous MMORPGs, community-driven data sites, social networking apps and anything else that's cool online, and we're putting together a plan to combine those features to create a useful and fun site where you can connect with your friends and show off everything you do in Champions Online.

We're planning to have everything you've come to expect from an online game's web presence, and then some. Character pages, superteam sites, game info – it will all be here! We will start rolling out these features throughout the game's beta phases, so people will have a chance to check them out and suggest what they want to see.

This is the first preview of Champions Online we've covered. This one is quite interesting too:

For the uninitiated, Champions is simply a pen-and-paper RPG about superheroes. "It has thousands upon thousands of players to this day getting together in their basements or local game stores, rolling six-sided dice and playing," says Emmert. "It's a game that a lot of people -- if they haven't played it themselves -- have heard of." I've played my fair share. My main, so to speak, was a wind-wielding college student code-named Turbulence who whipped up tornadoes and was a cocky douchebag. And despite the fond memories forged over awful Round Table pizzas, Champions still strikes me as an odd name to latch onto. Unlike a Marvel or DC universe, Champions isn't known for its personalities or places -- its Batmen or Gotham Cities. To wax industrial, I thought the point of acquiring intellectual property was to wrangle folks hoping to cross sabers with Darth Vader or go spelunking in the Mines of Moria -- otherwise, why bother with the headache? And as far as I know, no one holds a patent on the concept of superheroes. City of Heroes flew on its own; Lewis uses the word "debacle" when discussing Cryptic's dalliances with Marvel; I tell them I'm surprised they chose to go with a license once again.

"There's no license here," says Emmert. "We bought Champions and own it. We really wanted an IP...we believed strongly in an IP, and we thought we could capitalize on its strengths with an MMO. And when we acquired the Champions IP, a lot of interesting things came out of it. The way you design your characters in Champions is different from what we were thinking about in Marvel."

Zeke Sparkes, lead content designer on Champions Online is next in line:

Q: What do you do as the lead content designer for Champions Online?
A: I lead a team of awesome designers that are tasked with planning and implementing the persistent and instanced content for the game. That includes designing big outdoor zones, smaller interior game maps, critter AI and behaviors, scripting missions, populating maps with spawns and hooking up events.

It usually starts with us talking with our writer, John Layman, about what types of things and stories should be going on in a particular area of the game. Then we sit down and sketch out a map of the physical play space and what we want to populate it with. After that, we work closely with art to make sure they can take what we're planning and make it look good without working 120-hour weeks for two years straight. Depending on what the chunk of content is, we'll either provide a quick white box in game for the artists, or work with them directly to make a more detailed white box. At that point, the team starts placing scripts, missions and spawns down on the map, while art turns it into a snazzy looking environment. Afterwards we clean things up to match the final art and then we play it, play it, play it, play it, and play it some more to make sure everything feels good and is fun.

It's pretty much the job I've wanted to do since I first started playing computer games on my 8086.

Concept artist Imario Susilo has been Q&A'd at the official website:

Q. What is your process to create a character for the game?
A: When I get a request to create a character, the first thing I do is go to the Champions books. If it is an existing character, I study how it is represented in the IP, and then I talk to Shayne about the artistic vision for the character and what he wants to see. I'll bounce ideas off other artists and designers too.

Then it's research. We have a library of art books here at Cryptic, but for some things I go to the Internet. If a character is supposed to have an awesome chain gun, for example, I'll look up weapons to find one that's a good example.

I do all my drawing and painting on the computer, using a Wacom Cintiq tablet. It takes a day or two to complete a concept. Then I'll get feedback and requests for changes, and we'll work on it until it's perfect.

Following up their Doctor Destroyer profile here's Menton.

For centuries, the Medinas have been one of Spain's wealthiest, most prominent families, with blood ties to royalty and an open invitation to Europe's most exclusive social events. What the European glitterati do not know, however, is that shortly after the end of World War II the Medina family pledged its loyalty and obedience to Albert Zerstoiten, the fiendish mastermind known as Doctor Destroyer.

When Destroyer recognized latent psionic potential in the twin children of Pacorro Medina, he demanded that the children be turned over to him. The Medinas complied, and for the next ten years the lives of Alejandro Medina and his sister Isabella were a whirlwind of studies, tests, experimental treatments and painful surgical procedures.

Next up to be interviewed is John Layman, writer on Champions Online:

Q: What do you do as the Champions Online writer?
A: I come up with many, if not most, of the missions, as well as figuring out the big picture "overplots" for various neighborhood maps and the game's overall story. A lot of this involves coordinating with Jack Emmert and making sure the stories match his vision and his ideas, and talking things over with Steven Long at Hero Games to make sure that stories effectively utilize existing Champions lore whenever possible. I work with designers to get the missions into the game and provide them with villain and henchmen dialogue and mission-giver text and flavor. It's a job that provides a great deal of variety and opportunities to write in different tones and styles, a challenge which I enjoy.

Shayne Herrera, art development director at Cryptic Studios, is the next to be featured in the "Meet the Team" Q&A series:

Q: How did you set the art style for Champions Online?
A: I was watching an episode of Dastardly and Muttley and thought to myself, "Why are you drinking Pine-Sol and watching cartoons at 1 p.m.? Isn't Michael going to be mad that you aren't at work?" And that was it! I had the idea for the art style.

Wait, that isn't what happened. We spent a lot of time thinking about what jumped out at us when we look at comic books and superheroes. This game had to feel like it jumped out of the panels of a comic. To get there, we needed to have a certain style of shading, so we developed what we are calling "comic shading." By combining comic shading and some interesting post-processing tricks, we are able to achieve Champions Online's vivid color range.

When it comes to creating the Champions Online universe, we decided to marry two very different art concepts. The first is based on basic art and design ideas, including asymmetry, strong silhouettes, smart usage of color theory, etc. The second concept is to take what we think looks realistic, whether it is an animation pose or a character's costume, and then push it to extremes by exaggerating it. Everyone knows what a punch should look like in real life, and everyone knows what an exaggerated punch in a comic book looks like. It is my goal to make that comic punch feel as natural as the real-life punch.

Jack Emmert who is Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios has written a blog entry describing his work day. The specific day is Friday the 21st of March:

5:00 – 5:45 p.m. – Randy Mosiondz, the Champions lead designer, has put together a really nice system for the end game. There was a meeting this week to kick it off, but I didn't read the documentation. I know the broad strokes of it after several conversations with Randy, but now I sit down and read it pretty thoroughly.

Lead Programmer Charles Grisafi is the next one to be interviewed by the official site's "Meet the Team" Q&A series:

Q: What's an interesting fact about you that players would be surprised to know?
A: I did some time in Folsom.

Cryptic are answering fan questions from their forums in what seems to be the start of a regular feature. Example:

What will the "death penalty" be? (Hythian)

Arkayne: The "death penalty" is fairly simple, Hythian. After a player is defeated, he or she can choose to wait until another nearby player with healilng powers puts them back in the fight. Failing that, the player can choose to go to a nearby recovery point. Those points are spread throughout zones and instance maps.

Regardless of what the player chooses to do, they have to pay a small price for defeat: upgrade degradation. Upgrades are pieces of equipment, imbuements, special training, etc., that players use to make their character more powerful. Every upgrade has a condition associated with it. Whenever a player is defeated any upgrades the player has slotted degrade. If the condition of an upgrade is reduced to 0, it stops providing a benefit. Upgrades can be restored to full effectiveness for a resource cost at most hero safe areas throughout the game. This represents items being repaired, re-exposure to experimental rays, combat technique montages, etc.

Very positive editorial on Champoins Online at TTH.

Let me be the first to tell you: Champions Online is going to be one of the best games of 2009.  I should add some caveats.  Release could be delayed, or many of the features now envisioned by the development may not make it to release.  But keeping in mind the quality products that Cryptic Studios has put out, and the very smooth releases they have had, I have a lot of faith in the quality that Champions Online will have when it is released next year.

Cryptic Studios have licensed "the Champions intellectual property (IP) from Hero Games. First published in 1981" obviously to replace the now cancelled Marvel Universe project. The offical site can be found here.