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.
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: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.