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.
City of Heroes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:City of Heroes (Score:-1, Troll)
some people do things for their passion, not their money belt, as surprising as that is for an American to stomach.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2, Insightful)
Americans have no problem understanding that. If it weren't so we wouldn't have a land rich in poor artists.
What you are probably missing (I'm betting completely) is that this is a question about a *company*, not a person. Corporations don't have passions, whims, or an artistic sentiment. It's a 100% legit question about a company.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2)
What you are probably missing is that companies tend to be composed of and led by people.. at least all the ones I know of.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:1)
Re:City of Heroes (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, this is the successor for City of Heroes.
Successors must be made into successors before they become suitable heirs for the throne. The King doesn't promote the prince to king as soon as he is born. The prince must be educated and raised before the king will step down.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, this is the successor for City of Heroes.
Actually, no it's not. It's a competing product that just happens to be built on a newer version of the same engine.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2)
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2)
We know for sure that the current CoH team has nothing to do with Champions Online. This is the old team, the one that screwed up while managing the game in the first few years then abandoned it for cash. Some of the players of CoH still bear a grudge from those days, and will not be trying Champions.
CO is in no way a direct successor for CoH. It is a competitor, and one whose development team is starting out with a reputation for good programming but poor management.
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:City of Heroes (Score:4, Insightful)
City of Heroes isn't dying per se. However it is quite dated graphically, gameplay has stagnated for a long time, and the new content doesn't provide any particular difference from the old. Their subscription numbers are around 100,000 players with significant spikes briefly after each new update. This income is enough to cover their expenses but not really do much more than that. As well many choices made early in the development have hamstringed their ability to improve the engine and gameplay.
Currently City of Heroes is trucking with a slow loss of players but maintaining historical averages. Once Champions Online and DC Universe Online release it is up in the air what will happen to City of Heroes. While the game has many loyal players, they could easily lose half their population which may make it unviable for NCSoft to continue supporting the game. Likely it would keep running, but all development would be mothballed.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2)
Historically, CoX has a very low churn rate compare to other MMOs. Many of the players are "lifers" who started when the game came out and won't be leaving until the last server is shut down.
CoX has a very user friendly gameplay and excellent text-based chat, and those things are really appealing to some people.
Champions, on the other hand, looks far too much like a console game for me to take it seriously.
Re:City of Heroes - Dev Exodus? (Score:4, Insightful)
Regarding competition from Champions and DCUO, it's really hard to say. CoX is a traditional MMO-styled game in tights, but the other two are very much action-RPGs with a very stylized aesthetic. They're in the same theme, and arguably the same genre, but so were Ultima Online and Everquest. UO is still ticking along even now, because there is an intense sense of ownership among players of that game-- personal housing still magnetizes the player base, which is why the newer landmass expansions include space for it. Even if it's possible to duplicate a character's identity in another game, the psychological impact of virtual uprooting is a strong deterrent to making the move. For CoX, that sense of ownership is in the character avatars themselves, their Badges (analogous to Xbox Live Achievements) and Veteran Rewards, instanced Supergroup bases and to a lesser extent, the optional value-add costume packs. The added opportunity to purchase extra character slots (and free slots earned every year of subscription) indicates that NCsoft knows exactly where the strength of their City lies in the face of competition.
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.
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm one of the players that's currently involved in Closed Beta Testing for this on their European servers.
Without violating the Non-Disclosure agreement (I'm posting anon as we're not allowed to admit involvement of any given named accounts) I can say this:
The Mission Architect is part of "Issue 14" (one of the City Of Heroes free expansions).
Generally speaking they've done a terific job on this so far. There are still a number of bugs to be worked out, naturally, but it's really coming together in terms of all the customising you can do. At present, you can create a mission arc populated with virtually any kind of encounter in the game, on virtually any of the game's mission maps.
That's things like straight "Defeat X enemies", ambushes, rescues, boss fights, escort missions, "find the glowie", "destroy the object", timed fights, outdoor "brawls", etc. You can also set enemy alignment so two enemy types will fight each other as well as you, or just fight you, or help you.
Custom enemy factions are possible too, and can be created using City Of Heros' costume creator (the absurd levels of customisation allowed in this is still one of the game's biggest selling points). Currently you can assign "powersets" of your choosing to each enemy in a custom faction, set its rank (strength), AI type (prefer melee/range), etc.
As an example of what can be done: At the moment I have a mission in the creator which makes you rescue ten different "Elite Boss" level NPC allies - each with their own individual names, costumes, biographies and powersets. These are all exact copies of many of the playable characters in my supergroup ("guild"). In this mission, these characters all join up with you to help you fight against three similarly-customised Archvillain-level duplicates of three playable characters from my villaingroup. There are multiple triggers for different lines of custom dialogue during each rescue, as well as during each villain encounter.
This is going to be HUGE. A Superhero/Supervillain game where all the roleplayers are able to make their own missions, including encounters with their own personal customised nemesis, etc? Pure Dynamite.
Players are able to rate and comment on each other's arcs, so there's also a level of "fame" to be won. You get "rewards" for playing other people's arcs and having them play and rate yours.
The biggest problem we're currently seeing at the moment during testing is that the Mission Arcs are rather restricted in terms of file size. Creating custom characters uses up rather a lot of space since a copy of all the costume data used for custom NPCs is stored seperately for each mission arc - stored as a stream of uncompressed text in a format that's very similar to XML. This is something that they're hopefully going to rectify during the final stages of Beta before Issue 14 makes it onto the live servers.
I'm not going to give details on the rewards or exactly what maps, factions, powersets etc. are allowed as that would likely breach the NDA. It is however going to be a *lot* of fun, and will likely eclipse the "regular" content for a while.
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:2)
CoH has a mac client....hmmm I may have to renew my subscription. I quit when I switched to mac.
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:2)
It has a few minor texture display problems for me, mostly involving textures on items in the very far distance etc. Other than that its been running better than the windows client did when I was booted into XP under Bootcamp
The client is free for download, all you need to do is get it and sign up your account.
Here's a guide to the Mac version:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12899365&an=0&page=0#Post12899365 [cityofheroes.com]
You can then visit:
ftp://client.coh.com/US/ [coh.com]
and download the client dmg and the updater
there should be some instructions near the end of this thread I think:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12897870&an=0&page=0#Post12897870 [cityofheroes.com]
Or you can just buy it for $20 and download it online, just make sure to apply the code you get to your original account so the benefits apply to your old account and not some new account :P
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:2)
I downloaded it for 20.00 to support mac gaming. It's not as fun as I remember, but it's still a good time vampire.
Re:Mission Architect - Revolutionary improvement. (Score:2)
I came back because of the mac client, and thus far it has performed fine on my old mackbook pro (ati x1600, 2gb ram). The graphics aren't stellar, the fps dies in some of the notoriously bad areas (eg vanguard hq), there's a few glitches that force me to restart the game from time-to-time, but overall it's a pretty good experience. Most of the time it just works fine.
Regarding the mission architect, I can't imagine that it will help much. Perhaps someone will start cranking out interesting tactical puzzles for groups, but otherwise who needs more random walls of text surrounding the same mission types? A kill-all is a kill-all, regardless if the evil Dr X is threatening the electrical grid, the rikti are re-invading for the umpteenth time, or whatever.
What the game needs desperately are more features of a persistant universe, where your choices affect the gameplay of others and change the world.
-Jeff
Re:City of Heroes (Score:2)
I disagree that 'gameplay has stagnated'. There are major expansions two or three times a year, and gameplay has changed radically several times with the introduction of inventions and flashbacks. Soon we'll have the Mission Architect, which will be a revolution for the industry, let alone the game.
There's no disputing that CoH is dated and showing its age. But there's a lot of life in the old girl, yet.
Re:City of Heroes (Score:1)
Re:City of Heroes (Score:1)
Using Warhammer as an example, Warhammer itself generated new interest in the MMO market that spawned NEW players, not just "stolen" players from another game [WoW].
People need to stop thinking that the amount of MMO players is already an established limit. The pool of potential MMO gamers is continually growing and new games like this will flourish from the fresh blood of new games. Not to mention, it may jump start interest in CoH by their old players much like Warhammer did for WoW.
Seriously, what would YOU consider a smarter move.. creating a new MMO in another genre of the MMO market that they have to compete against and know nothing about? Or stick with the superhero MMO genre of which they already control and try out new ideas that simply don't fit in their current game, but would make a great new one?
Re:City of Heroes (Score:0)
CoH/CoV is a very atypical MMO. There's no grind and no real loot, no trophies / achievements / lore book / tome. Very incidental and kinda lame PvP. Did I mention there's no loot? As in a gear system. No pieces to wear, no weapons to wield, just you and your powers. And the non-PvP gameplay suffers from a great lack of variety.
So they need a new game, with a grind, gear, and good PvP.
Whenever I see Roper involved (Score:4, Interesting)
"I should really go into the video game market. I mean, what other market can you go in to, quit a good job, form a company and be one of the biggest contributing reasons why 100 people lose their jobs, a foreign company has to sell itself to another, and over 200,000 customers are left with $50 coasters, have to liquidate most of your assests, and STILL get a job - one that the employer is even ENTHUSIASIC about wanting you to work with them."
Re:Whenever I see Roper involved (Score:3, Interesting)
What this quote totally ignores is that the man is VERY good at one job... And useless at another.
The job he held at Blizzard suited him. He was A list. He was the best of the best. His job at Flagship (CEO) didn't suit him. He was useless at it.
If the top chef in the world went off to try to set up a huge chain of restaurants and failed, wouldn't you still hire him to cook meals / oversee the kitchen in your fancy up market restaurant?
If a fantastic actor tries his hand at writing, directing and starring in a movie and flops, wouldn't you still hire him to play the lead role in your own next production?
Roper didn't fail as a design director, executive director or studio director. As "The boss, but with his own bosses overseeing things" he's an outstanding success.
What he failed at was being CEO. Owner. Big boss. #1. Therefore, it'd only be silly for someone to hire him in that role, not the one he's been a success in.
Re:Whenever I see Roper involved (Score:2)
Actually, what he said is probably correct - in most cases, CEOs are very separated from day-to-day operations and have to rely on managers to relay that information. He probably didn't have a lot of control over initial quality because that wasn't his job - his job was negotiating contracts, keeping all managers on track, setting deadlines, etc.
It's a hard call on whether he was useless as a CEO - I'd have to have a much better insider picture and also know whether Namco/Bandai forced the release date rather than letting them release it "when it's done" like Blizzard, and also which managers gave it a go.
I know forced releases all too well from a contract job I had with an indie studio - when the CEO of that studio (who had several previous hit games) insisted they have 3-4 months to fix some major bugs and polish the game instead of the two months the publisher demanded, the publisher fired the studio and gave the game code to an internal studio. That studio pretty much released the bug ridden game as-is, and it got low to mediocre reviews (mostly due to bugs we knew about). Fortunately for them (the studio), the game had been commissioned, and they were able to disassociate themselves from the game. Unfortunately for me, I lost a fun contract job where I got to write GLIDE (the old 3dfx API) code (hey, it beats business software, which I work on now in my day job).
Re:Whenever I see Roper involved (Score:2)
That tired old line. (Score:5, Insightful)
Prove it.
If you look at the actual numbers [mmogchart.com] , you'll see that City of Heroes had its highest subscriber numbers while Jack was in charge. In fact, the thing that he's criticized most for, Enhancement Diversification [slashdot.org], is widely regarded now as a necessary step for the game's gameplay systems to evolve as they have, and the game actually gained subscribers—that's right, gained subscribers—when it was released.
Jack-bashing is very popular with City of Heroes fans, but the truth of the matter is that City of Heroes was his baby and that the game's best years financially so far have been under his reign.
I don't mean to take away from Matt Miller's competence, because he's doing a fine job, and City of Heroes continues to be a great game. I also don't mean to imply that Jack was perfect, because I disagreed with him on one or two fundamental points. But this whole "Jack was destroying the company" line is so tired and really, it's always been nothing but a bunch of nonproductive BS propagated by fanboy forumites who don't know what they're talking about.
As for the whole "he didn't listen to the subscribers" crap, if developers listened to everything the subscribers whined about, we'd undoubtedly have a "make me level 50" button by now, complete with purple IOs, infinite influence, the ability to take all powersets on a single character, and a power that recharges instantly that immediately defeats all enemies. PvP matches would be won based on who could hit the button first. There's a reason that developers don't jump through hoops to do everything players ask for, why all games, even City of Heroes as it exists today, are the visions of their developers (duh...). If everyone got what everyone wanted, it would effectively destroy any game.
The funny thing is that I see plenty of posts on the City of Heroes forums making the same tired old claims that you're making about Jack about the current developers. Waaah.
Tired and true (Score:0)
I played the first 6 "issues" of CoH.
The first few were mostly improvements but by the time 4,5,6 hit the servers, it was very clearly headed down hill. I stuck around paying but mostly not playing for the last few months hoping issue 6 would finally be the point where they figured it out and turned the game around. I dropped my subscription shortly after that because they killed the fun.
You can post whatever charts and red herrings about "level 50 buttons" you want but Jack Emmert killed the game for me and several of my friends with his "we're dumbing it down for the casual players" noise.
He's getting to do it all over again with Champions. CO is not Champions in any real way and he's taken the IP for a game that asks for some smarts from the players and turning it into a run n jump console game. Sigh... you won't see me there.
I have vague hope for the DC game but only because I don't know enough about it yet. Remains to be seen if that gets screwed up, Jack-style.
I remember the RPG (Score:2)
It was (quite) a while back but I remember it being very dice heavy with an insanely complex ruleset. I think we spent more time on character creation than we did actually playing the game because no one could figure out exactly how the damned combat system worked.
I also don't remember it being popular enough to merit its own MMO, but superhero is in these days, so why not? Between this, Marvel's MMO, DC's MMO and City of Heroes there will be plenty of competition. It will be interesting to see how it competes against one well-established community (CoH/CoV) and two up-and-coming games with big brands backing them up.
Re:I remember the RPG (Score:0)
This is Marvel's MMO, only with a new IP tied to it. Marvel no longer have an MMO in the pipeline.
Re:I remember the RPG (Score:2)
Re:I remember the RPG (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind that in WOW.
Re:I remember the RPG (Score:2)
I thought that Wolverine is mandated to appear anytime any other Marvel superhero is... that's certainly the impression I get from Marvel's covers.
Re:I remember the RPG (Score:2)
It's all perspective. I remember Champions becoming 'the game' for nearly everyone around me. Of course, at the time I was a serious RPG nerd. I worked as a games salesguy, I went home and gamed, or went to a friends house and ran huge game nights with him.
That's the geek perspective though.
So Lemuria instead of Mu this time? (Score:0)
Crying out loud Jack, are you going to reuse every single idea you had when you made City of Heroes?
A word to the ignorant... (Score:2)
One would suggest that you actually go look into the canon for the Champions setting before making asinine comments like this.
Will It Run On Linux? (Score:2)
I mean that seriously, as opposed to in the meme-fashion. I want to find a MMO my wife and I can play together, and she only has Linux on her laptop. I dual-boot for gaming, but if she can't run it under Linux, then I'm not interested.
At least WoW worked with Wine devs a bit to help it work under Wine, and Eve Online used to ship a Wine-wrapped client for Linux.
We may just end up looking at something like Planeshift because it has a native Linux client.
Re:Will It Run On Linux? (Score:0)
There is definitely not a linux specific client.
Even if it does, performance is already slow enough on a Windows machine, so it might not be worth it. There is also OpenGL support, though the main focus of the engine is DirectX
COH = worst gring ever? (Score:2)
I had to quit about a year ago - 'cause it was soooo grindy - basically 2 types of missions.
of courser this was before the Evil villian expansion was available. Did that change it much?
Re:COH = worst gring ever? (Score:2)
heh... at the risk of starting a war, i will say it's very different now, since it sounds like you stopped playing before CoV came out? you basically had a closed-beta experience, sorry.
Now, there's still a LOT of repetition. Oh look, we're in Building Map X again. Doing the same thing. Again. Only with higher-level baddies. Ergh...
If they can solve that, IMNSHO, they're set. Not coincidentally, Mission Architect might go a long way towards it. It might being in the modding community, as well, with the opportunity to get your missions spotlighted and a whispered chance that the very best of the best may become canon.
Add a 'premium' graphics content option the way eve-online upgraded their graphics, and they will be ahead of the game. The success path i envision is MA brings in enough subbers / returning players / recruit-a-friend drive perks to fund devs to address some of the longstanding issues like lack of variety in basic missions and their art.
The failpath is MA is too nerfed or doesn't give people the tools to get creative or, tbh, they pick missions that too many other players feel is lame. Yeah, it's dev choice, do what you want, but it's naive to think that it won't polarize the playerbase. This isn't just an innovative move, it's really rather brave.
hm. i have to break this off, at work, but hello Infinity server and split-infinity radio :)
Re:COH = worst gring ever? (Score:2)
Re:COH = worst gring ever? (Score:2)
Second paragraph i typed :). Trying to level solo or thru standard mish chains is still a grindfest, i fear. The major changes are in the new T/SFs at the higher levels.
Posi TF, i think, is an absolute nightmare. You basically run the same mission 10 times 'gainst the same enemies in the same awful cave map. I don't know what they were thinking on that. I can't think of a better way to kill off a new player's interest in the game :(. It needs to go.
By contrast, the newer stuff is shorter, has some variety in location and appearance and mission flow, and are just FUN. Faster paced, they let you go there with even a PUG and do what you came to do - cut loose with all your powers. There isn't [flamewar-spark alert] just "one good way" to do some of the bosses, too; i've seen a couple of strats work well by different groups / leaders. Compare to WoW where the raid leader stereotypically turns into a raving lunatic if anyone deviates from The Plan, because it's follow preprogrammed actions perfectly or wipe the team. Bah.
Try Cimerora and the Rikti War Zone on your 42 scrap, you might find it's what you've been looking for. The new player experience still needs work, however. Around level 10-15 or so when the new-shiny wears off a bit, lots of players i see in chat start getting suspicious of the "what, this again?" There are improvements being made there too with how missions and contacts, work; I am thinking that Champions looming around the corner and the penetration of some reasonable customer feedback is starting to galvanize the devs. Maybe they secured more funding for dev hours, who knows. I hope so.
They were willing to delay the MA by *a lot* - came right out and said, oh my, we've been following your discussions and expectations for the system, and it can't do none of that. We are scrapping and redoing and releasing when it's what you want. This, to me, is the best sign.