New Champions Online Details 43
Eurogamer sat down with Bill Roper of Cryptic Studios to discuss Champions Online, their superhero MMO due out in a few months. Roper mentioned that the PC version of the game will be coming out well ahead of any console versions, and he provided some insight into the game's Nemesis system. "When you get around the mid-game, you have the ability to create your Nemesis... Then you start going on these separate Nemesis missions — you'll start getting ambushed by the minions of your Nemesis, and eventually one of these minions will kind of break down, and say 'oh no please don't, I'll tell you I'll you,' and you get a clue off him. You go through a whole series of these very Nemesis-specific quests which revolve around the things you put in about your Nemesis, but it's not always the same path that you take, there's multiple story directions that you could be going through." Examiner also spoke briefly with Randy Mosiondz, lead designer for the game, about the questing and the game environment. IGN got a look at Lemuria itself, and Cryptic posted some of the concept art.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2, Informative)
Cryptic sold the CoH game and license to NCSoft. They are no longer involved in CoH, Champions is their new baby.
They will be in direct competition with a rivals game they happened to create.
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:5, Informative)
Well as someone who has played City of Heroes off and on since day 1, I can't say its dying at all. NCSoft is continuing to improve and expand the game - and all expansions are free of charge. The only expansion they charged for was City of Villains which was essentially a completely new game environment using similar mechanics. Both games are now merged into one.
There are still a ton of people playing new low level alts, and the game is going strong in my opinion. The game does have an extremely low churn rate as someone noted, and its evident by the fact that so many new characters are regularly being generated and played.
Mission Architect is coming out in the next expansion and it holds the promise to revolutionize the MMO industry in one regard: It allows players to create their own missions, their own NPC opponents, define their own story arcs and define a series of related missions, up to 5. It allows access to all of the existing NPC opponents and the modification of them to have their own powersets and appearances. Once created a mission can be uploaded so that the rest of the playerbase can try it out and rate it. The best rated missions/arcs will be examined by the devs and added to the canon of the game. There is a tremendous interest in this of course, and I think if it proves enjoyable, that this will raise the bar on MMO design considerably.
Although its filling the Superhero MMO niche and that is not to everyone's taste, the game is a fantastic design, and very effective in what its set out to achieve. MA is just another large step in improving the game and its due out soon I believe. Its in private beta at the moment, and usually NCSoft will bring that public for a few weeks to iron out any last bugs before it goes live.
The biggest advantage for NCSoft if they get MA working right is of course that the players will be adding to the content of the game, making it far easier to add other improvements to the game by taking off the pressure to add new missions and opponents (although of course someone will have to be fixing problems with MA in the meantime). I expect this will allow them to expand the game in other areas. They do not seem like they are slowing down at all.
COH probably seems like its a stagnant game to many players who are not familiar with it primarily because most of the expansions (COV aside) have been offered free to the players. Thus there are no new boxes showing up on the shelves at regular intervals.
They recently added a Mac OS/X client (well really its the Windows client with cedega back end support) that works *very well* at least in my experience. The client was available for download for free and still is. Yes, you can *buy* it and get some added in game bonuses (costume items, and a Teleport-straight-to-mission power), but you can also buy those bonuses separately for a nominal fee.
All in all I hope Champions Online does well, and I will certainly try it. It may indeed draw a lot of the playerbase away from COH, but for the moment COH is going quite strong actually and still has a bright future in my opinion.