Exploring the Marvel Universe Online

In the wake of yesterday's formal announcement of the Marvel Online title, Gamespot has an interview with 'Cryptic Studios' creative director, Jack Emmert, and Marvel Entertainment's vice president of Interactive, Ames Kirshen — as well as Microsoft Game Studios' senior director of business development, Frank Pape. They discuss the details of a game on Windows and the 360 (both will play in the same world), how the game will reflect the comics, and why Cryptic is involved. From the article: "Cryptic with their great pedigree, their great track record on the City of Heroes franchise — it was the perfect partner. We have access to all the characters in the history and lore of the Marvel universe to put into this game. So we're super excited. I mean this is, for an MMO player and for folks on the console that want to play an MMO and bringing in a new audience, it's as compelling a statement as we can make." And here I thought they were going to talk about that little multi-year lawsuit between Cryptic and Marvel.

Re:I never got the "men in tights" thing...

[justaj]

I remember Stan Lee saying the reason he went for the spandex look was because a) superheroes had to be able to move around comfortably and without constriction and they couldnt do it in normal clothes and b) he wanted to show off the muscles in the guys and the curves in the girls.

Which makes more sense to me. Superman wouldnt be quite as cool if he was lifting a truck in a suit and tie.

Re:Competing Against yourself?

[Jarnis]

It's exactly the same thing as DAOC.

DAOC claimed that 'no this won't affect DAOC, Warhammer Online has whole different dev team on another floor of the same building'.

While this may be mostly true, any real dev investment to DAOC went downhill fast after that. Yes, they still have people fixing exploits and they are releasing a small expansion later this year, but there has been no real development after Catacombs was launched to the core game systems. DAOC has been broken as far as gameplay is concerned since bit after TOA launch, and Catacombs just broke it a bit more. No real effort has gone towards fixing it. Many of the original dev team have moved on to other companies.

See Cryptic Studios - many gone from there too. Part may be NCsoft-mandated downsizing (they took a huge blow when Auto Assault was a massive flop) of the CoV/CoH devteam, but either way the end result is the same.

CoH/CoV had a nice combat system. However, the character development curve was badly designed - you get fewer and fewer new abilities as you go up in levels, while levelling gets slower and slower - most players gave up well before maximum level, as there was nothing new to gain, and while rolling alts was fun for a while, they shot their own foot in the most spectacular way by introducing 'storyline' in CoV newbie zones - essentially forcing EVERY SINGLE ALT of yours to level thru EXACT SAME BORING MISSIONS during the first 20 levels or so.

CoH at least had several starting zones and several starting mission lines. No such luck with the Villains side - so nobody could be bothered with more than one or two Villains alts before the initial grind thru the on-rails noob zones caused the players to basically slit their wrists and hit /cancel.

Plus neither game had no endgame what so ever. Kinda critical flaw in a MMO.

WoW would've flopped like a dead duck had they left out every 10+ man instance in the game. CoH/CoV is a bit like that.