Review: Champions Online 203
Champions Online is Cryptic Studios' latest entry into the Superhero MMORPG genre, representing several years of advancement in game design both for Cryptic and for MMOs as a whole. It's no longer a new field, and there are now certain expectations about what an MMO should contain, and how it should play. Two major factors to a new game's success or failure are the standards they embrace and do well, and the ones they reject and do differently. Champions Online succeeds at adapting many established concepts, while still setting themselves apart from the typical swords & sorcery backdrop. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.
- Title: Champions Online
- Developer: Cryptic Studios
- Publisher: Atari
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Soulskill
- Score: 8/10
First, a disclaimer — MMOs are unlike ordinary games because active development never really stops. Bugs and gameplay issues, once identified, are almost always fixed — indeed, one of the traits that distinguishes a good MMO from a bad one is how well and how quickly the development team solves such problems. Thus, this review will not focus on the minor, easily fixable problems other than to identify them and perhaps point out what Cryptic has said about fixing them, where applicable. On to the game itself.
Champions gets off on the right foot with an excellent character creator. The depth and level of detail for all of the customization options exceeds any game I've played, and it's pretty simple to find and select the look that you want. If you're the type who enjoys making your character picture-perfect, you'll love it; matching a costume to whatever vision you have for a character is surprisingly easy. There are enough options that I really don't see any player characters who look alike — or few enough that I don't notice. It also allows the irrepressible creation of characters from other intellectual properties. It's something I've seen less and less as time passes, so I assume Cryptic is clamping down on it (as they should; Marvel already sued them for the same thing in City of Heroes), but it's occasionally hilarious to see Duke Nukem, Dr. McCoy, or a WoW Paladin out killing bad guys.
The customization continues beyond the character creator, too. Throughout the game, you accumulate various powers — these are your skills/spells/abilities, everything from laser beams to giant fiery swords to huge explosions. There are a ton of powers to choose from, and each has its own graphical effect. The nice thing is that you can modify the colors of the effect and the location from which they originate. My character's first ability had him shooting red laser pulses from his fists, which I changed to be blue lasers shooting from his eyes. It's a nice touch that allows even characters with the exact same powers to look different. Beyond that, as you go through the game you can get items that unlock more costume options.
There's a tremendous variety to the powers you can use, to the point where it's almost better to figure out what you want your character to do — drop bombs, sling ice shards, Force-choke — than to look at the abilities and figure out which are the "best." They're divided up amongst 18 different "frameworks," which are collections of similarly-themed powers. For example, the Munitions framework contains powers that involve shooting various guns, dropping mines, throwing grenades, and shooting rockets. The "Unarmed" framework holds different punch and kick attacks, and the "Fire" framework has — you guessed it — fire spells. You're not restricted to a particular framework, which is nice. You can grab all your powers from a single one, or go into a different framework for each power.
It's fun to have so many options, but almost overwhelming if you're trying to min/max your character. My recommendation would be to not worry overmuch about picking the absolute best power. With a few exceptions, they're pretty well balanced — as well as can be expected for a new MMO — and Cryptic is already making refinements. More important is to select powers that have different effects. They're divided up and labeled such that you know which are for close/ranged attacks, area effect attacks, crowd control, healing, summoning, or buffs. In many cases, it's pointless to get two of a particular effect, so you want to diversify. You get a new power every few levels, and they really add to the depth of the combat.
Your character gets stronger in other ways, as well. You get "advantages," which increase the effectiveness of your powers, but you're limited into how much you can strengthen any one ability. It's another level of customization and utility, and they make interesting changes to your powers. You're also heavily dependent on stats. They're somewhat arcane and unintuitive (Strength is obvious enough, but what would you think "Presence" does?), but you'll do fine with the understanding that you should pick two and focus on them almost exclusively, as they'll determine your damage output.
The fighting is done against individual enemies or, more often, small groups. The non-player opponents you typically fight are classified as one of the following, from easiest to hardest: Henchman, Villain, Master Villain, and Super Villain. There are also Cosmic and Legendary Villains, but those are rare, and usually require a team to defeat. A more typical group will have a cluster of Henchmen, or a couple Henchmen and a Villain. The Henchmen die in a matter of seconds, but the Villains take a bit more work. As they get more powerful, you'll have to put some thought into how you want to handle them; there's a lot of content you can solo with some strategy and perseverance. Many of the powers you use complement each other in fun and interesting ways. A lot of them have short recharge periods (cooldowns), which you can fill by using a hold (crowd control) or knocking your opponent back, which delays them for several seconds.
Combat is fairly fast-paced, and it can involve a lot of movement. It feels like a hybrid between an MMO and an action RPG. Most powers can be used while on the move, giving you the opportunity to close with your attacker or maintain range, or perhaps duck out of line-of-sight just after your ability fires. You can also Block attacks. In fact, it's crucial to block some of them. Enemies will sometimes charge up big attacks, advertised by a growing symbol over their heads. When you see this happening, stop what you're doing and block it, or expect to take some serious damage. Blocking adds more depth to the combat, but is slightly hampered by the controls.
Cryptic clearly put a lot of effort into building a good system for game controls and the UI. There are a ton of different options for movement, targeting, and camera styles; you can play it like a typical MMO, or a first-person shooter, or Cryptic's own superhero MMO concoction, and it's well implemented. Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of UI lag. Server lag has been almost non-existent — amazing as that is to say during the launch period of an MMO — but the responsiveness of the controls is probably the game's biggest technical fault right now. It can be frustrating at times to have your abilities not work as you expect because of this. There's enough of a delay after hitting the button that you won't be sure if it actually triggered the ability. Many abilities require a button to be held down, so if you press it again and then the original trigger goes through, you've wasted a cooldown. Pressing Block right after charging up a power will also sometimes clip the end of it, and cause it not to fire. I would attribute the majority of my deaths so far to the UI lag. That said, it's not game-breaking.
Quests in Champions Online are called missions. A lot of it is typical MMO fare, but not all, and the mission system is streamlined and unobtrusive. The game world has several large zones, with quest hubs scattered about them. You'll get your standard "Kill N of X" and "Collect Y of Z" missions. You'll also get quest lines that tell cool stories, if you care to read them. Cryptic has stepped up the convenience factor in a few ways. First, your map is always marked with the area you need to visit to finish the missions. In other words, no more "Head past the Valley of Ambivalence and to the northeast corner of the Forest of Mild Discomfort to slay Ted the Impaler." It's simply displayed on your map (and minimap). Finding new missions is easier, too. You can open the "Crime Computer," which will tell you where various emergencies (i.e. missions) are located, and mark those for you on the map as well.
City of Heroes veterans can rest easy; the missions are a lot better in Champions. Most of them are out in the world. Some are instanced, but there are varying objectives, and I've never been sent into the same building twice, except when it makes sense for the story. Another nice feature is that you'll occasionally stumble across a civilian being accosted by villains out in the street. If you save them, they sometimes give you a mission. You can also find missions just by moving around — as you pass by a bank that's being robbed, you'll be given a quest to stop it, without having to even talk to an NPC. There are several Open Missions in each zone, too. These are missions everybody nearby can participate in, and you get rewarded based on your level of contribution. Cryptic is still working the bugs out in a few of these, but they're fun, and they have an epic feel. You'll see even more impressive missions in dungeons and "crisis zones" — one multi-part mission has you join a team of prison guards attempting to lock down a jailbreak led by a boss with paranormal powers. You fight through levels of the dungeon, struggling to reach him, and it almost feels like playing through a section of F.E.A.R.
The open world zones are few, but large, and they contain content for multiple ranges of levels. They're divided loosely into neighborhoods, which you'll typically explore until you've exhausted all the missions (gaining a couple levels in the process), and move on to a neighborhood in a different zone. The neighborhoods all tend to tell a story, or a few related stories, which tie in to the overarching plot of the game. There are a couple smallish content gaps — early into level 31, I exhausted all available quests and had to grind out the rest of the level — but Cryptic has already acknowledged that they're pinpointing those gaps and working to fill them. My advice would be to take any mission given to you by a random citizen or object; the experience from these adds up quickly, and I probably wouldn't have been stuck if I'd spent a bit more time doing those.
The zones would take a long time to traverse on foot, but early on you're given your choice of travel powers, which make getting from one place to another much faster. The travel powers are actually a lot of fun, in and of themselves. You can get your standard flying power, or ride a sheet of ice, or use rocket boots, but there are more entertaining options as well. You can get Superjump, which lets you literally leap tall buildings in a single bound, or Swing, which lets you shoot a grapple upwards and swing as if from vine to vine. Oftentimes you're just shooting it into the open air, so it doesn't make much sense, but that's more than made up by how fun it is.
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers — the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
Now, that's definitely a poor decision on Cryptic's part, but it's not as bad as it sounds. First, they've already held a post-launch dev chat, in which they said they're going to revise upward the amount of money you receive from monsters and quests. They also indicated that retcon costs would probably be lowered. What's more, they've already issued one free retcon to all characters, and said they'll likely do that whenever they make significant changes to powers in a patch. One phrase they used was "targeted retcon," which would let players freely change a power that has been modified. While I was initially displeased that I couldn't fix mistakes I made when I didn't know how the game worked, it's good to see that Cryptic is already addressing it, and on multiple fronts. That speaks well toward the long-term health of the game.
An important aspect of the game starts at level 25 when you get to create your Nemesis. This is a super villain whose plans you constantly try to thwart, and who routinely sends his minions to destroy you. It's basically an epic series of missions that happens gradually as you level up. After you tangle with him for the first time, you'll occasionally be ambushed by his henchmen when you're off doing normal missions. Sometimes when you kill the henchmen, they'll drop notes that contain information about your Nemesis' plans, which you go on a mission to disrupt. Other times, the police or NPC superheroes will call on you to stop his latest scheme. It's nicely done, and it really adds to the feel that you're doing heroic deeds and fighting complex battles.
There is less focus on gear in Champions than in most other MMOs. You have nine gear slots, and your typical item will increase your stats and and your defenses. You generally want to focus on the two "Super Stats" you select early in the leveling process, since raising those increases your damage output. There are also items with other effects; some will replace or modify your powers, adding an ancillary effect and perhaps a new graphic. Equip-able items are categorized as Arms, Mysticism, and Science — these are the three professions. Each of them has crafting and gathering aspects. Unlike most MMOs, your profession skill doesn't increase much by making things or harvesting nodes out in the wilderness. Instead, you take items you find and "research" them, breaking them down into their components. This is cool because it gives you a ton of materials to work with, and makes it easy to catch up to where your skill level is supposed to be. You don't have to make two dozen Shoulderpads of the Useless that you immediately vendor. There is virtually no "grind" to the process, which is quite nice, and you can build yourself some basic gear and useful consumables.
There's still work to be done on the game, as with any MMO launch. Pet AI isn't working right, so summoned creatures will frequently run off and attack whatever the heck they want. Several buggy missions have already been fixed, but others are still broken. PvP is dominated by a few annoying abilities; nothing you can't work around with a semi-coordinated team, but a lot of people can't rely on that. There are a few places in the game that look like they're just waiting to be populated with villains and quests; hopefully that'll happen soon to fill out the leveling process. The downside right now is that you'll frequently end up doing quests a couple levels higher than you, which give you rewards you can't use yet. Endgame doesn't have a ton of variety; that's something they'll have to address fairly soon, once a significant number of players reach the level cap.
As it stands, I think Champions Online's success will be determined by where Cryptic takes it from here. The launch is solid, there's a reasonable amount of content, and the combat is a fun break from typical MMOs. When Cryptic actively developed for City of Heroes, they released 10 expansions and City of Villains in a three-and-a-half year period. If they can roll out content on a similar scale for Champions, while staying on top of balance issues and bug fixes, it will certainly find success. As it is, it's piqued my interest. It's no WoW-killer, but it's a fun, distinct game that will carve out a niche for itself.
Re:Monthly fee? (Score:4, Informative)
There is. 15 bucks a month. They offered early 6 month and lifetime (bill roper) subscriptions as well.
Character customization: incredible. Getting to see all the crazy costumes other people have is really need. Oh an you can both buy more costumes and change your own (and you use basically the same creator for your nemesis, unfortunately I cannot figure out how to alter my nemesis, who I accidentally made as a big hulking demon, the size of a gnome).
Soloing: fun - but only if you picked half decent powers. Having played a character similar to my current on in beta I knew what skills to get and what to avoid. This is somewhat problematic.
Grouping: remarkably more difficult than you'd expect while leveling (I'm only 30), since people don't have clearly defined rolls cooperating is a bit harder. You do have 'builds' which are kinda like stances you can set yourself to defence - offence - support styles, which help, but if you've taken all healy skills and go defence build you're screwed.
Quests/leveling. Mostly fun, but somewhat repetitive. Granted there's no easy way around that. There are only so many types of bad guys, and you basically kill one group in one place, go somewhere else, kill another group there. Unfortunately there aren't quite enough quests, and you can end up having to grind to level up a bit. I hit this a couple of times already, most recently about half way through 29 I ran out of soloable quests I could do, and had to grind until I got a nemesis mission.
Server: Single server architecture is wonderful. None of this 'which sever are you on, oh you aren't on my sever' crap when you meet people also playing. I don't mean to criticize people who use a sharded system (basically everything but Eve and champions), but being able to connect with everyone is really nice, it does mean there are 100 copies of popular zones though.
Bugs and missing features. There are a lot of little things. The retcon thing seems like the cost is just not scaling as you level up (so the price you see are about what you should be seeing at level 40, even though you're level 1). Searching and sorting the AH isn't great, and the UI scaling is kinda broken. Compared to something like Aion the graphics don't look stunning, but they are pretty good. It's fun, and worth playing overall.
First true MMO innovation I've seen in a long time (Score:3, Informative)
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers -- the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
This is huge. I remember playing Diablo 2 early on, and everyone was making a sorceress and loading her up with Blizzard, a level 24 spell. It was ridiculously powerful, and poorly balanced, and the first patch which came out a month later nerfed this skill into the stone age. In other words, not only was it less powerful, it was now less useful, because the skill above it, Ice Sphere, became the more powerful and useful spell. So now everyone with Blizzard was not the best Sorceress. this pissed off thousands of players who spent their time building a character they liked. Blizzard called this skill "broken" and passing it off as a a bug fix, trying to contain the outcry, but that of course didn't help. Gamers see thru BS like this, a nerf is a nerf.
Now, You can actually test and work with a power and get to know it and understand it before you commit it to your character. And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
Re:Monthly fee? (Score:3, Informative)
BS (Score:5, Informative)
There's not even enough content to cover leveling, as you pointed out earlier in the review. Want to make a new character? Forget a different starting area... you're going to be doing all the exact same quests over again just to make your levels. This is not even mentioning the fact the quests are nothing but "go X kill Y collect Z", where the only variation is whether the "kill" or "collect" steps are included. There is no other gameplay. There's nothing else to do. Even the "large" areas are deceptive... maps appear huge, but you quickly find the screen going black and white long before you reach the edges, leaving only about 2/3 of the actual visible area open. Crafting is a joke, PvP is pointless, and the writing is bland. I don't think I'd qualify this as "reasonable" in the content department.
Re:My own review (Score:2, Informative)
Uh, this poster has a lot of information wrong:
STR does not mean more melee damage. In fact there is no distinction between melee damage and ranged damage. It's just power/ability damage.
Here's the summary:
STR: Lifting (for throwing cars if you have a lot, park benches if not so much), Knockback resist, Physical root resitss (snare gernates, example). Some defenses scale with it.
DEX: Crit chance. Some defenses scale with it.
CON: Hitpoints. Defenses scale (invuln)
INT: Adjusts power costs of abilities, steath powers, perception of stealthed things
END: Total energy pool
REC: your 'balanced' power level. Higher Recovery will let you 'rest' at 80% of your full energy bar, where lower recover will let you 'rest' at 30 or 40% of your full energy bar. This means that you still need energy boosting attacks
EGO: Used to break non-phsical holds, and is your crit damage multiplier
PRE: Presnce effects heal power, pet health, and threat generation (aggro and de-aggro)
That's a summary, but the astute reader may notice that there's NO damage bonus in any of these stats..which brings me to....
CHARACTER FOCUS:
The character focus stat determines where your damage is comming from. So if you want to be a type of character where you can use powers continuously then you could make your focus REC and END (you get your 1st focus at 5th lvl, 2nd at 13). Each stat will give you a damage bonus. Maybe you want to be a burst damage type of person, so you go DEX/EGO...Or if you want to be a tough dps type of tank guy that throws cars, go with STR/CON....the beauty of the system is that the SAME power framework could pick these different focuses and play COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY.
yes, it's unintuitive, and comming from a WoW/EQ/Every other D&D type of game is that you have a mindset of 'Oh, i'm a range guy, let be pump dex' or 'oh i'm a caster, le tme pump int' or 'oh, i'm a tank, let me pump str'...doing this but then focusing like on CON for all 3 cases will give NONE of the above 3 cases a damage bonus! That's what I think a lot of players early mistakes are which makes the game feel un-heroic (why can't I beat guys below my level?) Once they understand the system and understand the difference between a stat and a focus, things suddenly become better.
The other wrong piece of information is the comment that this is a single attack game. I completely dissagree. At lvl 20, I have 2 melee attacks, a hold, 2 defense powers (one active/one passive) and a range attack (nevermind travel power which you get at lvl 5..that's a freebie) and a smokebomb escape from harm ability. There's plenty of choices in combat, and in some cases your travel power becomes a critical form of how you play. yes, you could play with a gamepad (they have force feedback options in the menus) but I would not say it's required...
The OTHER thing wrong with the OP is the comment about 'never having more than 1 passive power' That's not true, and the poster obviously never found the different roles (guardian, protector, avenger...another)...these roles can grant 1 or 2 passive slots, but usually in the case of the 2 slots, you have to slot a specific type of passive (there are utility/offensive/defensive types) so you really have to think about how you are going to play and what stances you will be using.
Anyways, this wall of text critting you has come to an end. I was really really disappointed in the game at frist (game play issues, performance issues) but after upgrading to a 4850, the perf is better, and now that I understand the game mechanics I am having FUN slicing my foes in twain up close or if they fly away, whipping out dual barettas and blasting them at range...so good.
-Jato
Re:FIST SPORT (Score:3, Informative)
Oddly enough, my copy arrived today, so I've just played through the tutorial. It was slightly less smooth for me.
The first problem was due to billing; after feeding the serial number into the registration form it asked me what subscription type I wanted: credit card or gamecard. There was no option for 'my copy came with a month's worth of time and I want to see whether I like it before giving you my credit card number'. I eventually had to make a transatlantic phone call to tech support in the USA to get that sorted out. Poor, Cryptic. Very poor.
The second problem was the 10-minute load time. No, not kidding, it sat there at the loading screen for ten minutes. I've only played it once so far, so I don't know if it's going to do that every time or whether it's just the first time. Either way it's not a good first impression.
The third problem was getting the graphics set up. I have a 2GB Celeron D 3.2GHz with a 1GB GeForce 9500GT graphics card. Not the latest hardware, sure, but still perfectly reasonable, and it'll run WoW at 1440x900 with all the settings on max. Even with the resolution cranked down and all the settings on minimum, Champions would still chug periodically, and the graphics quality is comparable to World of Warcraft. In particular, loading geometry would cause it to slide-show for a few seconds. Getting out of the starting zone improved things a lot, but it still feels very sluggish. What's more, there wasn't any attempt to autodetect a sane set of, er, settings --- out of the box I was getting a 1fps slideshow.
Once into the actual tutorial --- yes, the tutorial is indeed very cool. There are some sections where you're obviously being led around by the hand. Fighting through the Champions HQ was more like following Defender around through the pitch black corridors (level design tip: always provide enough light to see the walls by) until he led me to the next plot coupon. But there's a lot of very nice touches; such as the instanced victory parade for you, just you, where all the people you rescued are in the audience making apropos comments (and the guy who's supposed to be going on holiday is dashing off in the distance, late for his plane). That's cool.
In general I like the idea of the action-packed tutorial. It was certainly fun. OTOH it was also overwhelmingly busy. The WoW tutorial starts you out with an almost completely blank screen which gradually fills with elements one by one as you learn about them. In Champions, on exiting the tutorial at level 5 there's still lots of stuff on the screen which I don't recognise (and the tooltips don't help). I think on the whole I prefer the WoW approach where you at least get a quiet area where you can practice walking before having to take on the alien horde.
After a couple of hours the gameplay is still unfamiliar, but my first impression is that it's much less smooth than WoW. Little things like when you rotate the viewpoint with the camera and then press 'walk', your character takes a couple of paces in the wrong direction before turning --- I fell off a couple of things because of that. The autotargeting is a good idea; if you press the 'punch' button and nothing's targeted, it will autotarget the closest item. OTOH if you've been using a ranged power on one target and another one jumps you in melee and you start hammering the 'punch' button, nothing happens other than 'target out of range' appearing in tiny letters until you reach for the mouse. All this stuff needs polish.
The actual UI is clunky and unintuitive and can be largely summed up with the phrase 'Comic Sans'. Everything has a tooltip, but they're uninformative and take far too long to appear. At one point one of the NPCs tells me to press 'i' to bring up my inventory. Well, 'i' doesn't work because I picked the Fantasy keybinding set rather than the Champions keybinding set. Having different keybindings available is a very nice feature --- but it would be nicer if the docs got updated to match. I still hav
Champions online... How to make a mediocre MMO (Score:2, Informative)
That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).
This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.
The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:
1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.
In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance). These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution later.
The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...
2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.
It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working. When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken, and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.
However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence. Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process. Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may have been that there was deep design work