f13.net

Here's the link (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3164355).

It's possible, but there is also a lot of "No-one would talk to us, so it must be true!".

EDIT - updating the title to reflect subsequent events.

EDIT 2: because "MUO officially dead; Cryptic picks up Champions Online" makes no sense when MUO is being resurrected.

EDIT 3: because September isn't Spring 2009.

They are on the right track but are looking at it from the wrong side. Think Microsoft and their history with MMOs. On the other hand Cryptic got a bunch of money from their sale of their part of CoH/CoV to NCsoft so they have opportunities to do things without needing a publisher to fund things like before.

If the rumour is true, hopefully Cryptic isn't facing a lot of bills in paying back to Marvel / Microsoft for the cancelled MUO development.

Again, if the rumour is true, the MUO license is a poisoned chalice that no MMO dev should pick up again. It's been through Vivendi and Sigil before, now Cryptic...

I wonder why MS, who apparently gets online strategy in almost every other area, can't comprehend why they should publish a MMO?

I actually think that answers itself. It's easy to think of MMOs as money-printing machines, until you're faced with the daunting task of actually building one, or hosting it. MS seems more appropriately structure to manage multifunctional systems that can deliver content and collect money from it a dozen different ways, for themselves and partners. MMOs are comparatively very vertical. It might just not be a good culture fit at all.

Still too insubstantial to say if MUO is really in trouble or not.  Just because the local 7-11 clerk and his manager don't feel obligated to give you the time of day (perhaps fearing it would invalidate their greencard) doesn't mean that they're moments away from closing the store.

Not that MUO isn't in trouble.  It's staring down the same barrel that ultimately pillaged Star Wars Galaxies: No game can be developed that will satisfy fan expectations of such a substantial intellectual property.  You might have a chance with a Spiderman game, a rare few of those turned out pretty good, but trying to tackle the entire Marvel Universe in one go is begging for serious compromise.

I think they do understand that they should it's just that they've been having a hard time finding a good project to support. AC1 was okay, AC2 was a disaster, Mythica got cancelled, Vanguard was another disaster that they wisely unloaded, and now it's very likely they'll back out of MUO as well leaving it up to Cryptic to renegotiate with Marvel if Cryptic still wants to do it.

Marvel signed the licensing deal with Microsoft Games Studios and then MSGS brought on Cryptic. I wonder (even if they wanted to) if Marvel could cut Microsoft out of the deal and go directly with Cryptic.

Of course, Cryptic wants to do more back-end stuff than they did with CoH/V, which this scenario would give them an opportunity to do.

The fact that everyone asked about MUO dodges or ignores the question is pretty telling in and of itself.

Didn't MS publish Asheron's Call 1?  I could've sworn I used to have to login through a Microsoft page, and click the "play" button on the browser window that popped up for Darktide.

Three posts up.

Whoops, missed that post.  I think the choice is clear though -  Asheron's Call 3, give us back AC1 skillsets, physics projectiles, and teh shiny, along with d2/HG:L randomized loot tables.  Oh, and naked pictures of natalie portman.

Best MMO -EVER-

Hard to get too worked up over this since they never really told us anything about the game.  By the time this thing got released, the 360 would have been nearing the end of its lifespan.

Maybe, but the target release for MUO was 2008 and it was also Vista OS-compatible. So not everything hung on the Xbox 360 and it would have been a slight draw towards getting Vista more accepted by gamers.

I'm with Nerf. But I want some sort of playable PvP that has no bearing on my character at all, via DotA style gameplay.

Oh, and if Natalie Portman is on the box, I'll buy a CE.

We're going to be in disagreement there then, in _MY_ game, when you die in PvP, we hire someone to show up to your house and kick you in the balls.  However, the first person to reach 10,000 kills gets to stick it in natalie portmans pooper.

I think it's a fair trade, really.

Yes, and we all know how likely MMO's are to hit their target release dates, especially ones that haven't released any screenshots or gameplay details.

I'd prefer it if MMOs shut the hell up until they actually had something to say. I'm sick of MMOs launching sites filled with nothing but fluff content years before they ever come close to beta / release.

Besides, we all know how reliable gameplay details are when devs are explaining something that's only been half-implemented and is completely untested.

1up's follow-up. (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3164400)

Still lots of unconfirmed sources, but the case against MUO seeing the light of day has grown stronger.

I for one would have loved to have seen the Virtua Fighter / 3D fighter combat mechanic implemented.

My opinion on this project is that, given this information, it looks like there was a lack of clear vision about how MUO should operate. Assuming the sources are accurate, I can only think that there are several very loud voices that have pulled this project in different directions.

How can you possibly fuck this one up? Jesus Christ.

You made a super-hero MMO that basically let you play as Marvel characters. That's why you GOT the license in the first place. Just take the same game, reskin it slightly, make Wolverine a quest NPC, fix the most glaring flaws and call it a day.

This is like blowing an open dunk.

The article makes it pretty clear how they screwed up this dish.  Start with too many cooks (Cryptic, Marvel, Microsoft), add a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance (Virtua Fighter combat versus a pushbutton combo system), and put it on the backburner made of insurmountable technical problems (following Spiderman around with 478 friends at 4 FPS) until it's burnt to an inedible crisp.

I'm not sure why management didn't step in and make some solid decisions, but I'm not impressed with their completely hands-off approach.  Maybe it's not too late and they'll do just that.  We can hope so, if we ever want to play in a MMO with Spidy.

(http://www.darniaq.com/Images/spidy.jpg)

Otherwise, anyone surprised given the history?

I was really hoping that they'd just do Crackdown-style gameplay + CoH's character creator and instance it to keep latency down to a dull roar.

I can imagine MS execs thinking along the same lines but coming to the conclusion:

Since CoX did XXX subscribers, how much more would a Marvel-skinned MMO actually do since anyone who is interested in a superhero MMO already tried CoX?

I don't agree with that logic, but it is certainly a conceivable train of thought for a corporate guy.

Well, frankly, it makes sense to me - at least as a reason why you wouldn't simply re-skin CoH.  But the real issue seems to be that fundamental design decisions weren't ironed out nearly as early as they should be.

(Crackdown (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=C&game_id=7417)?  Oh right, Crackdown (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/c/crackdown/).)

Yeah, that would be pretty cool if they had went in that direction.

Isn't that something you think about before you sign someone up and begin funding them?

A Marvel-skinned MMO is exactly what Marvel Online was going to be. If there is no money in that then don't start the project.  If you think that CoX defines the upper size of the market and that isn't good enough for you then don't greenlight the project in the first place.

Now I suppose it's possible they out-thought themselves and figured they needed some sort of amazing differentiators. But then, why sign up Cryptic if you don't want them to make something similar to CoX?

This appears to be total mismanagement. Sign up a team because they made a super-hero MMO already, then decide that they have to do something totally different because their first game wasn't popular enough?

Not to mention that, bringing the team over wholesale after their first MMO, you're essentially begging for the second-system effect to kick in.

I think ten years from now, this sort of mismanagement of the MMO-space by the suits will be rightly seen as clownshoes-level silly.  The market just hasn't produced execs yet who really bring 'veteran experience' to bear in this slice of the industry yet.

AFAIK, this didn't entirely happen. Jack Emmert, Creative Director went to MUO, as did some of the CoH/V people. However, a lot of established CoH/V people elected to stay / were left on CoH/V. Cryptic then hired a lot of new people, a number of which were those with Xbox360 development experience.

If MS does pull the plug on MUO, they would have done it just over 12 months into official development. That's a pretty short time for a MMO to be developed. Perhaps someone did thing that all Cryptic had to do was reskin CoH/V and throw in the Baxter Building somewhere.

You'd certainly think that. But this is the same genre in which a startup of three people secured the Star Trek rights and then hired the people to, like, design the game. This is why I was asking for (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11347.0) that old Sprite commercial in Gen Disc :) You don't need anything but a handshake to start a relationship and it's entirely believable for a suit to assume (people who made CoX) + (Marvel) > CoX, at least until they realize the latter was never all that huge at a time when Big Company Deep Pockets Success is measured in millions of subs.

Re: the team switch, I stand corrected.  In that case, it was only a bad idea for all those other reasons.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm surprised.  Cryptic is(was?) the most professional mmo developper I ever saw in action.  Their community management was AAA and COH was rock solid at release.  I played their game for 6 months, the patches made sense, the updates had good content.  I wish HG:L had bought their engine. The only thing that killed the game for me is that no one used the pvp arena 2 weeks after it came up and NO LOOT.

Anyway, I hope they will make an other game.

Hmmm... I have a different take.

This isn't on Cryptic I don't think. This is on Marvel.

"In City of Heroes, users were able to craft their favorite comic superheroes through the dynamic create-a-character system. Expectedly, our source tell us, you wouldn't have that option in Marvel Universe Online, and "there was bickering back and forth about how much the "real" Marvel heroes would play a part (you can't be Spider-Man, but you can be member #478 of his best friends club and follow him around all day), and scaling it for that many players at once was causing the Live team headaches."

Rule #1 of video games: The player is the star. Judging from that snippet (secondhand and skimpy, I know), it sounds like Marvel wants to  deviate from that central tenet. Instead of designing the game around the player, it seems like Marvel was forcing Cryptic to design the game around the IP. Follow Spider-man around in an MMO? Kee-rist.

This isn't about combat mechanics, or DIKU levels, or loot - that can all be hashed out. My guess is this is about Marvel Mary-Sueing their characters in the game and Stan Lee wanting them to be front and center, not the players, and both Cryptic and Microsoft know that such a project would be an epic fail.

If that's what Marvel wanted, then they should have just married the Marvel license to CoX in some way and add the MU characters officially into that game as NPCs.

No, my point is that I don't think Marvel/Stan Lee want the IP characters as just "NPC's" in the traditional MMO sense.

Unlike LOTRO, where you can meet up with Frodo, Pippin, Merry etc but they're only a small part of the story from the player's perspective, I think Marvel wants their heroes contingent to BE the story.

I.E. you spend your time running around helping the heroes out and you may even get to save their bacon once in a while, but the focus of the game remains on the Marvel characters. Wonder-twin powers, activate.

I can see Cryptic saying something along the lines of "Ok, we're going to have Spider-man being a quest-giver here and..." and Stan Lee frothing at the mouth that Spidey doesn't delegate assignments or give out quests. Might be true from an IP standpoint but it would make for a terrible MMO.

Might as well turn the major heroes into class.  "Full group LF lvl 30-34 Hulk to tank Magneto in danger room!!!"

I thought 1up was already dead… …probably confusing it with some other $game_company…

If Marvel did want it that way, I think it could have been workable. It just would have been a LOT of work, and probably far less profitable than CoX. Not being the main characters is something this genre has been dealing with forever. And not having those main characters as static world NPCs isn't necessary a fail. Considering that these were the weakest points of games that (http://www.starwarsgalaxies.com) weren't that successful (http://www.lotro.com) anyway, there's not a lot of player expectations to go by here.

Limited-canned-dialog non-interactve NPCs in a static space is not a win.

When Jack Emmert sat on a panel at Comicon (I think), he indicated that the plan was to let players play as the recognisable Marvel characters sometimes, such as in historic events in the Marvel universe (bad luck to the sap who gets to play Captain America during the Civil War missions). For the rest of the time, you'd be playing as your own character.

But this was a verbal discussion on a MMO with no set release date, so it would be very open to change. I have to think that Marvel would want a lot of control over their IP to the point that it could potentially be a sticking point.

Not to nitpick, because I agree with your general point, but by "games that weren't that successful", you mean "games that produced significant revenue for their owners, but were not WoW"?  Really, by what reasonable business-person's standard is LoTRO not a success?

My personal, basic thought about how you could make CoX into Marvel Universe Online:

A million and one random encounters around town.  Practically every other corner you turn down, you see a Marvel Super Hero doing something interesting.  Fighting someone, in an argument with another hero, or just zipping along - you look up and see Silver Surfer or the Human Torch zipping by in the sky.  Spend tons of time and energy literally coding thousands of these (as opposed to the maybe dozens that were in all CoH zones combined), such that running around the 'shared spaces', you get the sense of a living, breathing Marvel universe that you're a part of.

Make them each have multiple outcomes, so all but the most jaded don't experience a whole lot of "hmm, seen that one before".  Make them mutually exclusive, so you don't see two Wolverines fighting two different bad guys a few feet from each other.

Very basic example:  Jubilee is tangoing with some Sentinels.  She's a bit out-matched.

If the player comes:  Helps fight them off along with Jubilee.  Get some XP if successful.  If you don't overkill the Sentinel robot (i.e. get it down to less than 5% health without killing it entirely?), and you've got someone with tech knowledge with you, you can salvage the CPU core and perhaps get directions to a Secret Sentinel Base instance.

If the player doesn't come to the rescue:  Eventually Wolverine comes dashing in to save the day.  Someone who comes running by well after the battle's started would witness this happening.

If the player doesn't come and Wolverine is busy:  Jean Grey pops in, holds them off for Jubilee to escape, and continues fighting them.

Several thousand flow-charted minor encounters like this.  All going on with relative frequency, all going on whether the player is around or not.  And the odds of any given one happening is rare enough that even if there's a specific one the player's heard about that he wants to experience (say, he wants to check out the Secret Sentinel Base above), it makes zero sense for him to try and search it out, he just has to wait until he happens to be in the right place at the right time.

With more elaborate, in-depth scripts for Marvel heroes to participate alongside the players in CoH-style instanced missions.


With enough polish - the make or break on this design, to be sure, would be a metric fuckton of polish - you'd have a pretty impressive virtual world to offer.

The art and scripting assets involved would be immense, though.  You wouldn't just be re-skinning CoH, with Spidey as Statesman handing out quests - you'd be modeling, animating, and scripting virtually every character even remotely known in the Marvel Universe.

Then, just have the admins force anyone who comes along as XxWolverine2xX to change their name and costume a bit.

Are you on crack?

Same way SWG wasn't deemed one

The core games and even their deliveries were fine. As generic games they would be deemed successes no problem. But an MMO with the SW license not hitting the all-time record and keeping it? An MMO with the one license anyone who's ever even passed by a fan of fantasy not overtaking all of the predecessors that knocked it off?

These are the sort of promises made to first secure an IP and then to secure the funding. Neither game lived up to its promise. That, in business, is construed often as a failure.

Otherwise, I agree with your thinking on MUOizing CoX. It's a lot of work, but I don't think they need to go as deep as you've described at first. Just having Marvel characters you can help at whim within a CoX-setting (which anyone who's played CoX can see is eminently possible) would be enough of a different to be interesting.

Quality, fun factor and all that stuff TBD ;)

Eh, I'm not particularly interested to defend SWG or LotRO, but you make too much out of what they're "potential" was supposed to be. This is also the biggest reason why I'm glad that damn SWG thread is dead. It's all anyone kept saying, explicitly and otherwise. WAH! Star Wars. Woulda, coulda, shoulda..

Neither of those licenses guarantee stellar popularity. Whatever "promise" you're talking about barely exists. And whatever good Star Wars or LotR games that exist mostly stand on them being good "games" first, not necessarily good SW or LotR games. What's truly popular in the gaming world comes down to that. Take a look at the most popular games ever made, and the majority of them were brands/IP that popped out of nowhere.. The Sims, Halo, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Mario, C&C, Warcraft, quite a lot of Capcom shit, etc..

You're talking as a gamer. Nothing wrong with that of course :-) I lived both of these games right alongside everyone else, so know what they ended up like (trainwreck and meh, respectively). Oh, and I'm a big fan of both IPs as well, so I was their customer.

My point above has little to do with gamers and all to do with the business folks that concoct these strategies before there's even a design (same thing happened with STO). People justify an extension of an IP through precedence, project the success based on <precedence>+<megaomg_IP> and when the result is only the precedence (or worse), that can be considered a failure. Otherwise, what was the point of securing the IP, bringing in another fee to eat away the monthly take, and increase both the size of the team reviewing everything that happens, but also the schedule it takes to pull it off?

These people who concoct things before design probably resemble those corporate dudes in "Big". Which, really, hasn't done much good for gaming OR their pocketbooks. I'm sure it's a fine strategy for toys however.

Anyways, the games I listed are both popular to gamers, but they all make mad amounts of cash as well. If you just want to talk about bottom line, those are still it. No game based off of Star Wars comes close to any of them, even the good ones.

...

I'm sure I'm missing the point here though and not fully understanding you, but I might as well say what I did anyhow.

A piece of non-news: the Cryptic forums have been silent of redname posts of substance for about two weeks (at least), or since around the time 1up posted the story. Sure, some of the people have moved to NCsoft NorCal, but the ones who shouldn't have - Sporkfire aka Victor Watcher being the most notable - haven't said a thing in a few weeks after usually being pretty chatty.

 :tinfoil:

I don't think I'd be too talkative, either, if I had a green light to make a marvel MMOG and lost it.

... and as of yesterday, Cryptic is advertising for Online Community Relations Representatives (http://www.crypticstudios.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&Itemid=39). Despite their current ones being very silent.

Again, tinfoil hat time, but it's odd the Cryptic CMs can't even pop up to say "we're not dead".

Did Cryptic have an CMs? All the CoH/CoV ones were/are NCsoft people (even pre-acquisition).

It's my fault, really, yesterday's meltdown scared off their previous CMs which were a poor replacement for CuppaJo when she went AWOL over to Tabula Rasa.

They had Sporkfire (Victor Watcher), Kestrel (Christine Thompson) and Diamonds (their web tech guy) who have all been silent for more than two weeks after several months of active chatter. They were specifically hired by Cryptic for Cryptic, with Sporkfire being the MUO CM (at least as I understand it).

True.  If you're not constantly communicating with your "fan base" you're not doing anything.

<Insert pie reference>

Confirmed dead  :cry:

http://kotaku.com/354886/why-microsoft-murdered-the-marvel-mmo

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

Aren't they widely rumoured to be the recipients of the poison chalice ST:O franchise?

I thought they were picking up some of the ex-ST:O devs but whether it was for ST:O 0.20 or something else, who knows?

He could have just said "We pussied out" and he would have saved the reporter a lot of typing.

You have to wonder just how many still born MMOGs MS plan to litter the landscape with before they actually release one.

Take this with a grain of salt, but I frequent the same local game stores in the San Jose area as a certain former Red Name on the CoX forums, and the way that he could "neither confirm nor deny" them having that license was awfully smug and cheerful.

Quick, someone give this guy the speech about how all those post-WoW games with 100k subs or whatever aren't really failures!

It's Microsoft.  Less than 100% of the market is too little.

Speaking of CoX, resub dammit!  :angryfist:

I've been spotted!

:ye_gods:

If his definition of success is an income of no less than $100M per month than he's right. Beats me why anyone would build that business plan up front though.

Blizzard didn't, for instance.

This is rather like declaring you are abandoning your plan to make movies because someone already made Titanic.

There probably were a lot of factors involved in the decision to cancel. If MS / Marvel thinks that WoW is the only game in the market worth paying attention to, then they aren't ever going to release one. At the same time, if they looked at the Guild Wars model or any other Asian RMT-orientated MMO, then they are probably going to be disappointed there too.

However, what hasn't really been said yet (that I've seen) is that MUO was meant to give the Xbox 360 a MMO. I know that AoC has been announced as an Xbox 360 title, but according to the Technology FAQ on the AoC site (http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&template=content&func_id=1339&sort=PRIORITY,RELTIME%20desc&table=CONTENT), AoC isn't yet coming out on any consoles. Given that Xbox Live is one of the 360's crown jewels, a MMO seems like a natural fit. But even MS doesn't have confidence in console MMOs, apparently. Which leaves Sony in the driver's seat for console MMO development, with at least The Agency coming out on both PS3 and PC.

Alternatively, I've heard a lot of circumstancial evidence that the Xbox Live architecture doesn't scale well to MMO levels. If that's the case, the first Xbox MMO will probably be closer to Diablo or Hellgate London in terms of lots of instances for small teams. A 'traditional' world-format MMO wouldn't work.

On a separate note:

 - the announcement (not of the cancellation, but the fact it went public) probably surprised Cryptic, given that they haven't yet taken down the MUO trailer from their site

 - a rumour on the CoH/V forums is that Cryptic will be announcing a deal with the Champions license on Feb 18th; it's just a rumour

 - some people are grasping at straws and saying how it appears that Marvel and Microsoft appear to be walking away, which doesn't necessarily mean that Marvel and Cryptic have parted ways (but MS has the license rights, so that's not correct)

Don't forget that this isn't folks talking about the merits of launching a generic MMO. This is all about whether they think their IP with it's XX% awareness and YY% penetration would do any less than WoW, from someone not willing to invest the $100mil in development and probably that also in marketing to pull it off.

We going back to Titanic again?

My heart will go on...

If anything games have taught us, it's that IP's don't mean crap.

Sounds like MS is getting out of the MMORPG business entirely -- not that they were ever really in it in the first place.

You have to laugh at the time and effort they put into various MMOs with nothing to show for it.

Halo MMOG. Planetside blazed them a trail there.

MS bought Brad McQuaid a lot of drugs. They're obviously good for something. But yes, I see nothing MMO on their horizon for a long time to come. And I still blame Vanguard.

Let's play a game of making predictions for DC Online: Lack of details will continue for another 3 months until the first big group of screenshots come out. No good details about the game for another 3 months, then a bunch of cool sounding details all at once and a firm release date. Release date is pushed back due to a puzzling SWG-esque beta where all those cool sounding details don't quite work right, most of the kinks get ironed out and we see a decent but unremarkable game in about 12 months, at which point the internet promptly farts, rolls over and snuggles up to WoW again.

I'm actually happy MUO got shitcanned. We don't need another fucking Superhero Diku with a grindy grind leveling curve and 6,000 Wolverines per server.

But... but... I'm tired of CoX and want a new dress-up MMO! 

No, seriously. 

It's called a dresser.

Paper Dolls Online!

Does your dresser include pirate hats, medieval helmets, angel wings, and pasties? Actually.... don't answer that.

A well balanced Champions-esque character creation system would be MMO nirvana. The IP itself is derivative shit.

I thought that's what they tried to do originally with City of Heroes, failed, and then we ended up with the AT system.

Isn't Barbie making an MMOG?

Pretty much. Instead of power frameworks there were archetypes, and instead of advantages and limitations we just got enhancements.

In all honesty the complete freedom of the Champs system would be a balancing nightmare, but a system with the "illusion" of freedom and the liberal addition of non-grindy character points is a compelling concept. Doubt it will see the light of day though.

What's in it for Crytpic?  At least they would had a popular IP with Marvel.  There's no point doing an other game with a smaller IP.  They should switch for fantasy, science fiction or something original.

I wonder what Cryptic is actually doing.  I hope they have 1-2 years done on something already.

So, which MMO are you currently looking forward to - the medieval fantasy diku with 6000 xxxBloodforKhornexxxs and a grindy PvP gear curve or the medieval fantasy diku with 6000 ...Crom...s and a grindy PvP gear curve?  :awesome_for_real:

Kestrel, their Community Content Writer, has indicated that Cryptic will be announcing something "soon".

BTW, if anyone sees Victor Watcher aka Sporkfire pop up anywhere, I'd like to know.

Mild mannered Victor Wachter is secretly Lum's alter-ego.

Ironically, that would keep it in line with about how many Wolverines there seem to be in the comics.

Whichever one doesn't suck monkey ass. Which could easily be either, both or neither.

Confirmed: It's Champions Online (http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200802/N08.0213.1711.09335.htm)

My guy is going to have a 100D6 NND Killing Attack, I'm calling him "Rules Rapist".

That's hilarious.

For some reason I see Jack Emmert waving sadly goodbye to MS / Marvel as they drive off, only to walk into a meeting room to sign on the dotted line and pick up the Champions IP.

I'm not sure what they have to gain by licensing Champions.  They already have experience in creating a superhero rule set, and Champions doesn't exactly bring a rich world and well known characters to the table.  Is this just some way to avoid stepping on CoH's toes by saying "we aren't competing with CoH by doing a more or less unofficial sequel, we're doing a licensed game"?

To be honest though, my first thought when seeing that cover was that I wanted to hear more about the Aliens game.

The way I see it (and having no inside knowledge at all) is this:

1) Cryptic puts a lot of work into developing a superhero MMO that will be MUO. They get various builds up and working on Vista and the Xbox 360.

2) At some point, MS / Marvel decide to pull the project. Someone who is more familiar with the kind of contracts that dev studios and IP licensees hold can fill in the blanks, but Cryptic probably gets to keep their work where it doesn't obviously violate copyright / the contract they signed.

3) Cryptic gets left with a superhero MMO build but no license to hang it off. Do they release an original IP? Do they seek investment from another source?

4) At some point, Cryptic's pen-and-paper connections pay off - Hero Games would just love to get their Champions system online. Hell, maybe these discussions started before the MUO deal popped up. How the bills are being split is unknown.

5) Cryptic is back on track with a superhero MMO release backed up by a less well-known IP but one with more flexibility. Whatever can legally be salvaged from the MUO production is / will be salvaged. Taking a quick scan of the Champions ruleset, it's very close to the AT system CoH/V uses but powersets are more flexible in development. Actually, having the Champions ruleset behind them makes it harder to be sued by NCsoft for creating a similar game because Champions is at least 10 years older than CoH/V.

6) Hero Games gets to make the jump to online (and are announcing it on the 18th (http://www.herogames.com/home.htm;jsessionid=aVlFw_F24rba)). ChampO becomes a new source of income given the poor state of the PnP RPG industry.

I've got to say that Cryptic is run by a bunch of geniuses or a group of asylum residents. Taking on MUO while still developing CoH/V was a masterstroke imo, but a huge risk. Selling CoH/V and losing MUO only to take on ChampO... it's either inspired or insane.

WTF is Champions?  Meaningless IP as far as the general public goes.

My thoughts exactly. Never even heard of it.

If anything it has negative value. The IP (I hesitate to even call it that) is a rules-set. Does anyone give a shit about what rules-set a MMORPG uses? So they have to do some work to conform to the rules (which may suck in practice) and the upside is...a name nobody has even heard of?

I can't wait for the press releases and forum posts that spin this is a good thing. That will be awkward.

I don't get your enthusiam UnSub. What is the upside here? "Less well-known" is putting it nicely...

That's the good thing about it - no one has huge expectations (*cough* star trek, star wars, star gate *cough*).

From a dev's point of view though it provides a huuuge leap in terms of crap they don't have to design.  How'd supers come about? check.  What organisations are around? check.  Main villains? check.  Powers, abilities, mechanics? check.  A rules system that has been tested and works? kind of  (if you know the ruleset you know exactly why).

Now the can spend that time making it fun.

No, it pretty much just provides a ruleset, and that kind of thing needs to get heavily adapted to work as a computer game anyway.  Various supplements were released which allowed you to more or less mimic different comic eras or settings, which is great if you're an RPG gamer and feel like doing Golden Age comic heroes one week, and maybe something closer in tone to the Authority the next, but not so great for developers who are trying to make a setting for a persistant world.

Minor detail: There's a 360 port of FFXI live right now.  :grin:

That's a pretty good reason.  They probably don't want to get sued by Marvel again.  Now they can just say : you didn't sue Champion before, we use the same IP, you can't sue us anymore.  Combined with the very open nature of the IP, I'd call the idea genius.  Of course, corporate lawyers will find a bullshit reason to sue no mather what.

I learned that the other day  :oh_i_see:

Pretend I put the term 'next-gen' wherever it makes me appear less stupid.  :-)

SWG was reviled for failing to live up to expectations, but it's problem wasn't expectations, it was failure.  This Champions thing is an IP with minimal relevance to the market, period.  It being a legal ass-covering manuver is the most logical explanation I've seen thus far.

My ludicrously early prediction is that it ends up as just another post-Blizzard MMO that bumbles around with fewer subscriptions than prime EQ1, while a bunch of apologists with WoW inferiority complexes insist that it isn't a failure because 100k subs or whatever will turn some sort of profit eventually.

I don't get it either. I would love to see COH updated and redone as a high fantasy game. Do it on the cheap with the same engine, instance the entire thing and use a free to play with cash shop model, and it would be huge.

All I remember about Champions is a friend trying to get me to play it in high school, we never got to playing, but made characters up and they all turned out as some kind of refugee from the psycho ward by taking all these personality disorders in order to buy more powers. If there was a background I never knew about it.

I'd be interested to find out just how much of MUO actually existed for them to pick up and run with in this new form. Why make another PC game to compete with their home-brewed CoX? Why did they sell CoX anyway? I mean, could they really have thought MUO was going to see the light of day ever when the vast majority of outsiders assumed it be going away? Maybe talk of sales of the IP to NC predated public skepticism...

In any case, if it does come out ever, I'm going to be interested to see how much of the new Cryptic injects some new (ie, non-grindy) thinking into an MMO.

Been out for awhile (http://www.barbiegirls.com/home.html). Warning: colors.

Champions is an IP that means something to a certain nerd subset, but it's not so restrictive that it locks Cryptic into much in the way of community expectations. Or else we'll find out that Champions has some weird underground cult following ala Shadowrun where apparently everyone is an expert about what the IP should be. For the most part, you're right - no-one will care about the exact nature of the ruleset provided it is implemented in a fun way.

Taking on Champions gives Cryptic a base to work from that they can also mould. If Cryptic has a lot of established materials sitting around for MUO they've now got an IP to hang those things around. That saves a lot of thinking time. Plus Hero Games will want it to do well, so they are likely to throw their time behind it.

Besides all of that, I thought the general consensus on IPs in MMOs is that they are only good for getting your first few customers through the door. I'm happy to see how ChampO turns out because I'm a Cryptic fanboi. Past that point, be it MUO or ChampO, if the game sucks, people aren't going to play it.

Another question is how else Cryptic could have salvaged what happened with MUO. Walking this path seems to be about as good as it would get.

Plus, if Cryptic was going to be cuntish about it, they've cockblocked MUO with another superhero MMO. And while it may not have the same recognition as MUO, it's still more competition that whoever ends up restarting MUO will have to deal with.

My enthusiasm is that I find this announcement hilarious. As I said, it's either genius or it's insane.  :grin:

SWG managed to fail to live up to the expectations of being a space opera MMO as well as fail in a number of key areas.

Since the Champions IP isn't well known, Cryptic are open to treating it like a new IP provided they pay attention to a few key areas (yeah, I'm thinking about DDO here).

Your predication is a pretty safe one, since no post-WoW MMO has hit EQ1 prime numbers. As for final sub numbers... there's a chance that ChampO could do well on the Xbox 360 which is nearly virgin ground. We'll see.

They licensed it probably because it was a cheap way of not having to develop a whole knew background/mythos from scratch again.  Who cares if only a handful of people know the lore right now?  That doesn't seem to be the point of picking up the license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_%28role-playing_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Universe
http://www.herogames.com/get/HeroUniverse1.pdf

From what I can remember from ohgod years ago, it's pretty generic comic stuff & not different from the CoX stuff in any significant way. IIRC, the Big Bads include an Ultron ripoff and a Dr Doom ripoff.

The actual rules are crunchy and very abusable, though.

I think we should have an Internet v Scientology MMO. Make it shitty and flash based, but everyone gets to fight Tom Cruise, Issac Hayes, and John Travolta at the end.

Prepare to engage moneyhattery.

Champions was a good enough system.  As I recall it was very flexible, in that you could have pretty much any type of character and be in pretty much any type of setting.  I'm pretty sure it was extended into lots of different PNP games, or at least I recall seeing "Based on the Champions Role Playing system" on all kinds of boxes back in the day.

Kind of an antecedent to the current D20 system.

It's an obscure little RPG with a rules system that isn't very friendly to CRPGs. (IMO)

The liscence is crap for a MMOG. I hope they got it for cheap.

Champions is still around, and has more support than it did even in the heyday of the 80's.  The core book is just "The Hero System" now, and covers pretty much all mechanics with the sourcebooks being more background info, settings, characters and examples of how to  build different effects using the core system.  It's only of the few RPGs I know of where everything game related is completely contained in the core book.

Well to be fair, amongst Pencil and Paper RPGs, Champions is likely the most famous Superhero RPG ever.

I've never heard of Champions but I don't care.  Thanks for the Barbie suggestion (smart arse) but I'm not interested.  The models look like crap and I don't want to play an MMO that could land me in jail if I want to talk about my pussies.  I want a proper dress up superhero MMO complete with spandex and cameltoe.  Nothing else will do.

From the Wiki:

Hey look, Champions has Scrappers, Tankers, Blasters and Controllers. WHO WOULD HAVE THUNK?

Have you played Champions?  There are no classes in it, and while you CAN build all of those things, you can build just about any kind of character you can conceive of in it.

Rather then focus on what does or does come with the choice of IP (I think the legal angle + pre-existing source material is as likely a reason as any), I'm more interested in the "for PC and console" part.

If they manage to release a super hero game with control/combat similar to ONI I will be very excited.  Even if they have to intstance the shit out of everything and do a bunch of other tricks if they can get combat that is more like twitch based then turn based that would be something new and interesting.

And if the system is less restrictive then the CoX AT system, that's just gravy.

I'd aruge that Heroes Unlimited is probably better known, simply by virtue of the fact that it's published by Palladium and has a ruleset compatible with Rifts.

The HERO system.  Built a large fantasy campaign back in the day.  Good support for knockback, stun, bleeding, localized damage effects, that sort of thing.  Multiple 6-sided die system.  Basically each character starts with N points, where N is whatever you want with guidelines for the type of campaign.  150 for Epic/Godly, 100 for Superhero/Fantasy/Cyberpunk, 50 for Modern/Spy, etc.  "Classes" are pre-built archetypes that you buy with points to make it easier, but what fun is that?  Disadvantages were always the best part - you can increase your points by adding things like "Hunted by So and So" or "Extreme limp in cold temps hampers movement".

The ONLY draw that Champions Online is going to have is a freeform points-based system where you can have total character customization. Anything else and it is dead in the water, because nobody gives two shits about Mechanon, UNTIL and all the other crap they put in the books to give some semblance of story, and if people wanted to be straitjacketed into a DIKU grind they could play COX.

Supposedly it's going to have superhero-supervillain PVP ala COX. My PnP players were very adept at breaking Champions with creative limitations and advantages. I don't see how Cryptic can keep the openess of the Champs system as a draw without it being hopelessly broken by the masses of PVP MMOGtards.

In terms of how well-regarded the ruleset seems to be among the RPG rules wonks, Champions definitely has it hands down over HU.

Also: Pray that we never have an online Palladium game. It will make the worst MMO you can think of look like pure awesome.

Matrix Online? At least as far as dress up, spandex and cameltoes are concerned...

I would play solely for this. Class-based systems make baby Jesus cry.

Shit. Rifts was just Kevin Siembieda making up stats for Kevin Long's artwork.

I dunno, Jesus could mesh with class-based superhero MMO pretty well.

(http://sinfest.net/comikaze/comics/2007-12-09.gif)

There are a core group of Palladium fanatics, this is true, but amongst the superhero RPGs Champions is generally considered to be the best of the bunch.  I've found the new Mutants and Masterminds to be a somewhat worthy successor, however.

But Heroes Unlimited, like all Palladium RPGs, is pure garbage system-wise.

This would be about the only thing that would make me (and a few others apparently) take a look at Champions MMO. However, I doubt it'll survive transition into an actual playable game. This is just "skills-based" said another way and the last game to give that the ol' college try was canned.

In general, this feels sorta wierd. I guess we're supposed to care because a "veteran" MMO studio announced a new game. Except:

• The part that CoX got right continued to be the first 1/3 of the game (creation through new abilities). This is about the sum total of any credit "Cryptic" the company name would get.
  
• And yet, they sold off all of the rights, including the people (that were left), of everything that was CoX
  
• Champions IP has less relevance to modern MMOers than even Conan.

The only excited I have for this genre anymore is when someone completely divorced from the past comes to give it a try. Unfortunately, they're mostly going after a different audience.

Having a good point-based/non-level system would indeed be very nice.  I remain highly skeptical of that ever happening, though.

Heh. That reminds me of Champions sessions of yore. We would ask our GM approximately how many points it would take to make Superman  in the Champions ruleset. His answer was always the same: "All of them."

Yes. And I think that's the big reason I like this announcement. COH was originally supposed to be like an online version of Champions, only they went the class-based grindy way because of initial beta testing feedback. If they rip out the points-based character creation and class it up, it'll just be COH with a Champions storyline, which is what it may be anyway.

But for fuck's sake, whatever they do, please don't make it as grindy as COH.

I don't see how the same people that bailed on the points/skill/powers system for CoH because of balance issues are suddenly going to be able to implement it.  This game is bound to have some kind of class system, regardless of what they call it. Jack Emmert has no problem with putting exp grind in a game. He will do it again.

My College roommate will be all over this.. (or would be if he still games. No idea.)  Fucker had more "champions" and "Hero system" stories than he had War Games (the little hex maps w/ cardboard counters) stories.

His favorite was the guy who had, "Rex Bannon's ability to pilot any vehicle ever created."  It was just between him and the GM, but damn it sounded amusing.  "Oh fuck, we're trapped and they only way out is 20 stories overhead, accessible only by these weird spider-vehicles."  "That's OK, I know how to work these, get in!"

As flexible as the system was for P&P, it will suffer from CRPGs inherent need to have rules, limitations and structure.

Because it's not the same people, which is what makes this interesting. I believe the only Cryptic folks that didn't take the NC job offer are the folks removed from the function of game design and daily development activities. So it's a whole new game.

It seems more like a case of (and to pull a number out of the air) having a superhero MMO 40% done, so finishing the superhero MMO with a new coat of paint seems a better idea than scrapping the idea and starting again.

But seriously, MMO studios follow up genre work with genre work. Mythic follows up DAOC with WAR. Turbine has AC, DDO and LOTRO. Not all studios do it obviously and it's the execution that defines how a game turns out, but a lot of studios release same genre follow-ups (but then medieval fantasy is such a diverse genre).

As a side note, Champions did try to get a PC game out before (http://au.gamespot.com/features/pcgraveyard_champions/index.html).

Just curious as to why you would expect any non-grindy thinking from Cryptic at this point. Nothing in their history with CoX supports anything other than increasing the grind as a direction they like to go.

From the initial purple nerf to the relatively recent rebalancing of powers and augments or whatever they were called, every major patch they ever did pushed people more towards the grind and less towards the super hero smashing crowds of villains everyone loved about the game to begin with.

Jack Emmert is still at Cryptic and was working on the design of MUO so I would expect him to continue with that on Champions Online. In other words I don't expect things to change.

Geko, who was the 'powers guy' for all the early life of City of Heroes, is one of the devs who moved over to MUO when Cryptic started development on that (which is why Castle is the 'powers guy' in CoX now).  There were others as well, but Geko stands out because a lot of what's fucked up with game balance in CoX is his fault.  Sure all the devs working on CoX at the time took the NCsoft job, but a lot had already been moved over to the MUO project.  That's why I'm highly skeptical they'll be able to make a freeform/points system work when the same Statesman & Geko failed before.

Going to agree.

Also going to put into the pile of "They should have used", this:

(http://www.pen-paper.net/images/rpgdb/mfg350.jpg)


wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(role_playing_game)).

Going to agree.
[/quote]


That's a little like saying that Palladium fantasy is better known than D&D by virtue of it being published by the maker of Rifts.  Seriously, when it comes to Superhero PnP RPGs, Champions has stood out ahead of the pack since the 80's.  I can point you to a half dozen or so groups that play it TODAY at my friendly local gaming store, and while Palladium IS popular I've never once run across a group of people playing Heroes Unlimited.  That's not to say it doesn't get played, but the popularity of Rifts does NOT equate to an equal amount of popularity to the rest of the Palladium line.

Considering that the rest of the Palladium can be/is used in rifts...it kinda does. And you got the quotes wrong.

Rifts is popular?

I picked it up on the tail end of my PNP days and it was interesting but I couldn't get into it.  It pretty surprising to me to hear it's going strong.  I did like rail gun armed cyborgs vs. dragons and what-not though.

Yah. It's infamous as the shitty system game with the kitchen sink setting. I think it's 2nd up next to D&D in sales, but I just pulled that out of my ass and wouldn't be surprised to find I'm wrong.

I don't think Rifts has been 2nd for years, if it ever was. Palladium was almost driven out of business entirely last year due to an employee embezzelling over a million dollars - I think they only recovered something like $50k from him. Some of our local stores don't even carry Palladium stuff anymore. I don't have any official figures, but based on what I see on shelves, I suspect Exalted and GURPS both outsell Rifts at this point, and probably some other lines too.

They are about to release another robotech game.... There is also 60+ books for rifts alone, not including the rest of the Palladium games that can be mixed with it. I have no idea if rifts was ever #1, 2, 3, or what ever. It really doesn't matter.

So Ninjas and Superspies is the most popular "secret agent" type RPG, Palladium fantasy is the most popular fantasy RPG?  How about Splicers?  How's that doing?  This is just silly.  Palladium has a core of rabid followers, but the majority of Roleplayers out there are NOT Palladium-fanatics.  I'd be SHOCKED if Heroes Unlimited gets more play than Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, hell, even the Marvel Superhero RPGs probably have more players.

You seem to have forgotten what was said, and what i was responding to.

The rest of your rant is well, some form of anger and placing words in people’s mouths.

I don't expect change either, but one can always hope.

EDIT: Also, glad to see someone else has some Underground love. That game was fucking awesome. I played a William Burroughs-esque junkie who exploded things.

Underground was one of the best RPG settings ever. The system was rather hot too. Love that game.

I've heard of rifts and I haven't played P&P games since the early 1980's.  So yeah, I'd say it at least has a minor following. 

Not angry at all, and what I posted follows from your little comment there.

If Heroes Unlimited is supposed to be popular because Rifts was and the two are compatible, then following that logic every Palladium game world/supplement should have been popular to that degree.  That's just silly.  There's no reason to suspect that every person who owned Rifts owned Heroes Unlimited as well.

Heroes Unlimited was ace. My character was a special forces weasel (kind of a ferret thing for you yanks).

I think he's saying it's one way operation.  Any Palladium license can be used in Rifts, not that Rifts can be used in, for instance, Champions.  Thus the popularity of Rifts would then be the sum of all Palladium offerings.

It's still a dumb argument though, just because I can play my Champions character in Rifts doesn't mean I am going to or even want to or care at all for the setting.

Which was the point I was trying to make.  Rifts was popular, but that doesn't mean every other Palladium game was AS popular just because they were compatible. 

I understood your point about 5 postings ago.   :oh_i_see:

What sort of logic did you use to jump from 'Palladium products better known than Hero Games products', to 'Palladium products better known than TSR/WoTC products'?  And I'm not talking about which is the better system, or which one more people might actually play (although anecdotally, I know people who have blended in stuff from Heroes Unlimited with Rifts or TMNT), I'm saying Heroes Unlimited is likely the better known product by virtue of the fact that it's published by one of the biggest RPG publishers still running today.

You are, I think, gravely overestimating Palladium's current size and influence. They're very much held back by their production values, which are very low by today's standards (last I heard Kevin Siembieda still did all the layout by hand - it ends up looking something like a photocopied college reader with stuff in different fonts, sizes, etc) and by their refusal to participate in larger industry trends. If they had been willing to try a Rifts d20 book, they could have been printing money hats, I think, but as it is the industry is leaving them behind.

WotC, White Wolf, Green Ronin, Privateer Press, Goodman Games, Steve Jackson Games, these companies are probably all outperforming Palladium, and I'm sure I missed some others that are too.

If I had to hazard a guess as to what the most known/played superhero RPG is these days, I would say it is almost certainly Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds.

WotC and White Wolf, likely.  Green Ronin, probably.  Steve Jackson Games I somewhat doubt is outperfoming Palladium.  Likewise Privateer Press unless you're going to count all their miniature stuff also.  As for Goodman Games, I can't begin to guess.  Even halfway decent d20 product probably sell ok, but I'd be surprised if any of their products are as recognizable as some of Palladium's.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how I'm overestimating Palladium's size and influence by saying that their products are better known than Hero Games' products.

Which would be something resembling a valid point if someone were trying to argue that 100% of Rifts players owned and liked Heroes Unlimited.  Arguing that there aren't a lot of people who looked into Heroes Unlimited because it shared rules with, and could be tied into Rifts is like arguing that there aren't a lot of people who looked into various D&D settings (especially prior to d20) simply for the fact that they used the D&D rules and were made by the same publisher.


It means most of Palladium's settings are better known or more recognizable than stuff from publishers like Hero Games.  Trying to figure out which Superhero RPG actually gets played more is just about irrelevant.  It's a niche within a niche, and isn't going to make an ounce of difference in the MMO's success.

An ttrpg with a good setting would be a better canidate for an MMO than one with good mechinics.  The mechanics are going have to gutted to be a MMO.  No matter what.  But the majority of the setting can be kept.

There are only three tabletop RPG settings that matter outside of pen-and-paper enthusiast circles.  Dungeons & Dragons, Masquerade, and Battletech.  Most of everything else mentioned on this page is stuff I've never heard of, and I reside deeply enough in the general-purpose geek camp that this should worry you if you're thinking of trying to develop a game based on one of them.

I would add Shadowrun to that list, along with the other three it's had a couple of successful games based on it (and a couple not so successful).

There's only one PnP RPG system that has really crossed over into pop culture - Dungeons and Dragons. All the others - Vampire, Giant Robots Shooting Each Other, Warhammer - have their niche crowds, but the normals will never have heard of them and will only understand them in vague terms, should you manage to corner one and try to talk to them about it. Or maybe normals are just vague about it because being cornered by an obese, sweaty manchild wearing dandruff-covered black clothes who's trying to pretend he's actually a sexy, sophisticated creature of the night makes them nervous.

... but I digress. For the most part, PnP RPG settings have no market pull compared to huge pop culture IPs like Star Trek or Buffy. But PnP RPG IPs are cheap, have the lore written and have already taken a stab at letting people play in their world, which gives MMO devs a place to start.

That's like hoping Brad McQuaid ever finishes a game.

I'd say Warhammer might have a bit more awareness share just from the number of PC games shipped based on it. I've never heard of any of the other systems you guys have been mentioning but I know warhammer and to a smaller extent White Wolf based only on the  computer games I've played based on them.

Warhammer at least has a rich and reasonably consistent lore that can be re-used. I've actually played PnP champions (albeit many years ago) and I can't remember any lore at all. Meanwhile the rules are going to need a lot of changes to work in a MMORPG (so exploitable).

The Marvel RPG was superrior to both Heroes Unlimited and Champions.   :awesome_for_real:

FASERIP amirite?

Bingo!

I would say most gamers know what BattleTech is as soon as you tell them "It's Mechwarrior". Then they start swearing allegiance to their respective Clan/House/MercUnit etc...  :wink:

I started rattling off what FASERIP stands for, and it came out in my head like what SHAZAM stands for. FIGHTING! AGILITY! STRENGTH! ATLAS! ZEUS! ACHILLES! MERCURY! Then I remembered how I remembered Thieves' skills; PeePee Ol' FaRT Miss'd HiS DindiN; Claw ReaL. Holy fuck everybody shutup you're making me want my 80's back!!! Gonna watch old episodes of You Can't Do That On Television now, and reminisce how we bought every Palladium book just in case we wanted to put ninja cyborg elven Veritech-piloting sorceresses in our Rifts campaign.

I don't know what anyone is talking about anymore.  As far as I'm concerned, you are all babbling incoherently.

I made a Wing Commander game for the Mekton 2 ruleset using the hella kool blueprints with stats that came with the game.

Good times.

Sadly I do know what they are talking about.

... also goes to show that a lot of MMO players cut their teeth playing PnP RPGs.

 :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

'Normal' and 'RPG' don't go together. You're just one of us Schild. Don't deny your true self.

ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

In other news, Hero Games' first big announcement is that the 6th edition of the Champions PnP  (http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63462) ruleset is due out in mid-2009.

Also, apparently Hero Games will be uploading the presentation to their website of their second big announcement scheduled for 10am PST on the 18th. This is the expected ChampO announcement.

I played 3 hours of D&D total in my life, mostly in 10 minute sessions I couldn't wait to get away from. And forget the rest of the PnP stuff people are talking about. The moment someone uses the local comic book store as an example of market penetration, the reference is way too small to be considered AAA MMO viable insofar as IP equity is concerned.

"Champions" feels like an excuse. To get any numbers that exceed CoX, they need to not make the same mistakes (grind, all customization before you launch the game only, etc), and do a heck of a lot of marketing. Otherwise they'll just cannabalize CoX, which isn't a huge market to begin with. They'll get some attention for being on a console at all, if that happens. But they need to hoof it to launch or lose even that edge.

What do Cryptic care if they eat into CoH/V's population? They sold that IP to NCsoft. If the talk about the MMO dev watercooler is true, WoW brought a lot of new players into the MMO genre, some of whom will at least check out what a new MMO has to offer. So, weak IP or not, I think ChampO has a better shot at a bigger audience than CoH had on launch.

Apparently the following appeared up on the Hero Games website when they changed to a new homepage, but got scrubbed from the FAQ shortly after:


It fits the timeline that MUO was rumoured to be cancelled and Cryptic got left with a superhero MMO but no IP to work with.

Also, it would seem to fit that if the 6th ed rules of Champions are to be launched mid-next year, they'd try to time the MMO launch with that.

Seems like a big waste.

Is that what we're going to call it? Sounds like a brand of dog food.

[/quote]

DOA. Nothing to see here, move along.

Two quotes in a row. I need to get to work.  :ye_gods:

This has been my "big" question. No doubt the MMOG players will be inclined to check out a new MMORPG, but will the bulk of WoW players give a shit, if it isn't WoW?

Then what the fuck is the point? Geez, we bought an IP and the only thing worth a shit out of it, we can't use. That's the kind of announcement that could ruin a wet dream.

They needed characters and they needed them fast, that's the only reason they bought the IP.  That's the way I read it at least. 

If this new game doesn't have a very comprehensive character generation and customization, it's going to tank hard.  If it has levels and grind, it's going to have a very hard time but could still maybe do ok if it scores big on the first point and the grind isn't too horrible.  Since they state up front that they won't be using the Hero system mechanics, it seems highly unlikely we'll see a good free-form character builder with no levels and no grind.  How then is it going to be any better than CoX?

"A dynamic, ever-changing world of adventure where you can heroically fight evildoers with your friends!"

*grind grind grind*

I agree. City of Heroes/Villains is about all the comic book MMO's the marketplace is likely to support. They hover around 150k subs, its a good casual game, and a new comic book MMO is going to have to offer radically different gameplay to make people move from COH.

Offer a slightly improved costume generator, a smoothed treadmill, and more variety.  You'll win the majority of their subscribers over.  Add balanced pvp and an endgame and it's a sealed deal.

I knew people who played Champians.  They never mentioned the setting once.  I thought it was like Heroes Unlimited and had no specified setting.

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63478

Also:

Goddammit. I knew Cryptic would throw something up there to give us hope. Somebody must be reading the board.

Must resist fanboying out on this...

Edit - megaprops to Steve for not pulling a WOTC on 6th edition. No talent trees in my Champions, kthx.

Tasmia beat me to it.

Apparently the screenshots et al won't be released until Wednesday when they appear on the Cryptic site.


Like DAOC and WoW offered radically different content from EQ? :-)

A lot of people here seem confused by the Champions IP. In reality, it's pretty unimportant. If it helps, think of this MMO as CoH 2.0, where the dream is Cryptic take everything they learned from CoH and refine that into a new game.

Power customisation and full character customisation will be huge selling points for this MMO. If costume customisation was CoH's killer app, then full customisation will be even more so for ChampO. I'll be interested to see how the 'classes but with full access to powers' system works out.

EDIT - And apparently Cryptic plans to self-publish all their MMOs from now on (which I've known they've been moving to for a long time). As I said before: either inspired or insane.

WHY??????

Jesus fucking christ, will anyone ever make a skills-based MMOG ever again? Is it really that hard to create some skills, take a whack at balancing them, then release them to the wolves in alpha/early beta to find the unbalancing bits?

Trust your players. They don't need to have their fucking hands held. Let them create something with their imagination, not some archetype.

There are a couple of different ways to do it- EVE style (everyone can get any and all skills eventually, it just takes a lot of time and ingame currency), or UO style- large list of skills, but only a subset are being used/improved (IIRC, Guild Wars was like that too).

Don't make me gimp my character because I want him to have abilities that are 'outside his class'. All we will get is ANOTHER game full of cookie cutter clones.


MEH.

Hmm...there *are* classes. Lame.

Different costs for different powers means the following: tank classes will have cheap tanking powers and expensive blasting powers, which means the optimal build will be a straight tank.

So you can be creative as long as you are willing to gimp yourself. Otherwise you follow the intended template. Awesome.

Edit: Beaten to the punch! I don't get it, it seems like the power customization feature is the main benefit of the IP and they are dumping it? So what's left?

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Should a character with long range energy blasting powers be able to buy high defenses at the same cost  and same extent as a melee character? I would say not. A Champions GM would nix that, I don't see why the MMO should be any different.

Letting everyone make tank-mages isn't the answer to class-itis.

I appreciate their position. They had a suddenly huge gaping hole and needed to be in a position to recoup for 2009 fy it sounds like. But nothing written or leaked so far points to anything but the game they already did. In 2009, an MMO for Xbox 360 will still be unique. But given that history, I wouldn't be surprised if that single point of differentiation went away too.

What I think really odd is that they're even going so far as licensing enough rights from the HERO engine to talk about it, without actually, like, using the engine itself. Where's the sense in that?

Classes that can be customized sounds a bit like Ryzom, but there's another game I'm thinking of. Can't divine the name though, not even sure if it was MMO. But you effectively could make any character anything, it was just a question of stat expense.

If this game has any sort of PvP at all, that won't make a difference.

In any char development system cookie cutter builds exist. UO, grand-daddy of freeform charcter development, had the best known cookie-cutter build of all in the tank mage.

I'll wait to actually play the system before deciding if it works or not.

Huh? Why would a blaster want high defenses? The reason glass cannons might exist in a game is natural: they fight from far away so they put points into offense.

There is no need to enforce it if you design the game right. it's a natural outgrowth of the rules. But besides, why would a GM nix defense on a blaster? I thought the whole point is that you can choose powers freely. Superman has laser vision and he's practically invincible; same with Silver Surfur.

Now I'm even more confused about what the point is. It's a flexible system that lets you choose powers except GMs won't let you actually do that and neither will Cryptic? Well then...

Because they don't want the HERO system, they want the Champions / Dark Champions IP.

... having just seen some scans of the Game Informer article, it looks like Dual Lightsabers will be an available power choice.  :drill:

What IS the IP?

Characters? Setting? Name a famous Champions character.

Going way back, this form of power customisation was the original design for CoH. You pick an origin which determines the width and depth of your powers. In later refinements of the system, Cryptic also toyed around with setting 'roles' for the character (i.e. What is the character best at? What are they second best at? etc) but eventually went with ATs because it was a system that stopped players gimping and tank-maging themselves within the same system (or at least made it harder).

The ChampO system seems to be a mix of these - you pick a 'class' which determines overall what you are best at, but then you can pick powers to complement or build out of that shell. If you want to be a pure Blaster, you can, but if you want to have some defence, maybe some hand-to-hand combat, you can also build that in while sacrificing your long-range offensive power.

The point is that any system that offers complete freedom also opens the door to lots of abuses. Champions is a system where a low-point character can be designed who will destroy the universe if they ever use their powers (destroying the universe has a huge negative point cost) unless the GM stops them from being so stupid. Cryptic have had a lot of time to think about how to get such a powers system in place - it'll be interesting to actually design a character under those rules and see how well it works.

Well, there's Seeker, the Australian Ninja... (I wish I was joking about that  :uhrr:)

It's not the IP that's being used to draw players in. The IP is being used as a framework to get the game launched which will then be hopefully good enough to get players involved.

Given the timeline, it's my assumption that when Cryptic lost MUO, they had a superhero game engine with no IP to hang it off. Since they sold off CoH/V, that ship had sailed, and they wanted to self-publish. But it would take time to come up with a whole new universe and characters. A quicker path would be for them to buy an existing IP. Given the PnP RPG history of some of Cryptic's staff, Champions was known to them and they'd already talked to Hero Games before about doing a CoH PnP RPG (that went to Eden Studios in the end, for a net result of one free online pamphlet being released). Champions gave Cryptic what they needed - a world with an established background and characters with designs they could copy that would get their MMO back on track.

So Cryptic bought the Champions / Dark Champions IP from Hero Games so they had complete control over the IP (perhaps the Marvel / Microsoft experience left a nasty taste in the mouth) and now can re-build a world around that.

Someone else can correct me, but I think this is the first time a MMO is going to be based on an IP with minimal player pull due to its name, but that wasn't the point of the purchase anyway.

Why not? The Champions system (and games like that in general) can circumvent high defense with unusual attacks. Gas or radiation. Specific or unusual vulnerabilities. Wouldn't that be more interesting than HPs vs. DPS?

Sure would. Up until the point you cancel because PVP combat has devolved into special effect Russian roulette.

So...PvP is best if there's just one attack and one defense type?

The Hero system gets around the problem by simply charging more build points for the armor piercing and resistance circumventing powers.  So you could have a regular high damage attack that may or may not be resisted or lower damage unusual attacks that pretty much guarantee damage but it's always going to be for less damage even when it hits a soft target.  It's a trade-off.

Disagree.  There's a lot of people who'd be willing to play a comic book MMO (myself included) who don't play CoH because it's repetitive as hell.

I think the main point of the IP is what it isn't rather than what it is.

it isn't Marvel or DC or random_litigious_comics_publisher_01. They could invent their own IP with minimal effort but they'd risk sailing through the reefs of plagiarism suits. Or they can pick an existing IP no-one's ever heard of* and safely hang their game off that without being any more creatively limited than if they were making it up from scratch.



*People who played obscure PnP RPGs 20 years ago aren't exactly a core demographic. And I say that as someone who played a lot of obscure PnP RPGs 20 years ago.

It's talk like that that means Tunnels and Trolls Online, Paranoia Online and Macho Women with Guns Online will never be a reality.  :grin:

Not if Statesman put's in his usual grind.

Hey, if I had any programming skills whatsoever, then Bunnies and Burrows Online would already be paying for my villa in the sun.

Can you include goat shepherding? I also want to put in my Belgian shepherd, Link.

 :drill:

You know, all these complaints of balance could be alleviated in a comic book setting, IMO, by making powers cause weaknesses when in use? Want to be a rad fire blaster? Cool, but for 5 seconds you have less resistance to water, ice, and wind (for the sake of an example). Make all toggles active use for similar reasons.

Does anyone think this would increase the likelihood of character variety? Or would people just complain anyway?

People want to pwn with impunity.  Anything that allows them to die 50% of the time will result in immediate complaints.  While people clammor for balanced gameplay, very few really want it.  This is evident in games with class disparity.  You'll always see more people playing the classes perceived as being overpowered. 

I personally don't think that a character should be punished for developing the ability to pwn with impunity. Shit, if you invest 600 hours in a character, he/she better be at least marginally better than Random_Player_01 who only has 30 hours. It's called retention, damnit.

That being said, there's no reason why Player_02_600_Hours_Played should be necessarily "broken." I agree with sublevels and the AA system. I'm fine with giving a player +10hp every time he levels up after he has 10khp.

Then again, I think we've made too many mistakes since we've gone away from MUDs. I still think there should be tiers divided by sublevels so everyone can play together without this shit business of grinding up characters. (Every time I make this argument I think of DotA and how much fun it is/was.)

Marginally better.  That's fine with me.  Sadly, it's not the case in the more popular MMO's.  Time = power being the current paradigm that has turned the MMO genre into the shitty catass grindfest we all know it to be. 

If this game has the Champions IP but doesn't use any part of the Hero System, then I'm considerably less interested.  Champions has always been about the system and never really about the IP.

FFS, QFT.

Seriously, if you can buy any power, just make it a goddamn skill system. Do something fucking different. This is World of Heroes, i.e. City of Heroes the Sequel. They just didn't want to call it a sequel and couldn't because they sold the IP to NCSoft.

All the power customization will mean fuckall if they don't remove the problems COH/V had in the first place, i.e. the only thing to do was fun but got entirely too repetitive and required too much time to level up. If they don't fix THAT issue, it doesn't matter what kind of character system they create.

Can you really call it his "usual" grind if he's only done it once? Was he ever even involved with an MMO before CoX?

There were also the frequent and excessive nerfs. Since you're going down the "but he only made one mistake in one MMO!" road.

That's actually not what I said at all, but OK. Alleged nerf mistakes and the grind mistake are not related in any particular way.

It could be argued that it was poor initial design that was the mistake, not the generally necessary nerfs.

I think by usual, it's meant that Statesman doesn't know how to leave things alone. Whenever he talked, it'd always be about balance. Seemed obsessive about it. And he has a habit of chipping away rather than building upon things.

"Nerfs" Equating to "Mistakes" is a very subjective thing. Players my not like them sometimes, but many times, its the best thing for the Game/Project.

Players are the game.

Changes are necessary.

Fair enough. But when a "superhero game" changes into "not really a superhero game", it's a detrimental change.

[edit] Yes, I'm still bitter.

My comment wasn't really trying to apply to any one instance. That would create endless debates for years to come.

But, with out tying it to any one instance, "Nerfs and buffs" are necessary things, and are not bad things.

The only exception to that, IMO, was the NGE. That was just a mistake in every way, (lol)  But also a completely different magnitude of "Change".

In the case of CoH I'd argue we've had enough time to determine that many of the nerfs were mistakes. You can be as fair and open minded as you like but I am certainly not playing another game Statesman has charge of unless the word of mouth is overwhelmingly good on it and even then I'll give it a year to see how badly it gets nerfed first.

The combat special effects system is borked beyond belief.  That they never learned the concept of diminisioning returns (e.g. you can stun/be stunned permanently) is just fucked up.  I hope he gets it right this time around.  I also hope that he makes knock down a fun mechanism this time around, rather then a way to annoy melee fighters (hint: giving melee fighters a quick way to close the distance to a nearby target makes knockback less annoying, using knock back to juggle enemies is an interesting way to fight multiple opentents at the same time).  I also hope that he does something creative with AOE and fighting multiple enemies at the same time that does not including the number of enemies that can be effected at the same time.

I'm just full of hope!  Storm-calling damage dealer here I come!  I believe!

2009?  Hmph, fucking vaporware!

I want an MMO that's an exact replica of the Hero System. That would be the most hilariously broken game in existence.

Of course it wouldn't. It would be the greatest game ever because there would be no classes.

Also, players would balance themselves in order to best meet their character RP concept.

Not having an aggro cap was a design mistake. ED, among other things, was a global nerf, pure and simple, because people were killing too many enemies per unit time -- i.e. they were having too much fun. And no, the IO system (which came well after) does not make up for ED unless you happen to have a billion or so influence/infamy lying around (the amount needed to perma things that were perma-able before ED).

A GM wouldn't nix defense on a blaster unless of course the blaster was piling on the attacks and/or STR and was piling on the disadvantages to make a true tank-mage -- i.e. Superman. Under the Champions/Hero System points system for a "normal" Hero (i.e. not a total munchkin) if you go for high defense you would have to give up something. In the case of the blaster that would probably mean your blast attacks are weaker.

The easy way to balance ranged attacks with melee attacks in a game like CoH with no character stats like STR, DEX, etc. is to make ranged attacks cost more per unit damage. By attacking at range you gain all sorts of advantages such as being out of range of PBAoE attacks so the ranged attacks should cost more. So a melee attacker with the same DPS as a ranged attacker would have more points left over for defenses or HP boosts or whatever.

As for having "classes" (i.e. archetypes) with power discounts I don't have a problem with that in general. The problem with *not* having some sort of "bundle" discount system is that people gravitate towards "generalist" templates where nobody specializes or is particular good at any one thing and the game become City of Soloing Generalists, which is fine if it's a single-player game, not so good if it's an MMORPG. Cryptic already "messed up", in some ways, the design of CoV where they made all the archetype solo-friendly (though obviously a lot of people like it that way). As a consequence grouping is much less common Villain-side than it is Hero-side.

Not having classes also can make forming groups incredibly time-consuming since you have to go through everybody's powers and figure out what you may need. That's assuming people actually do group regularly in a classless system.

It seems likely that the official Champions Online site will be http://www.champions-online.com, registered on December 19 2007.

The first major materials should be released tomorrow.

Of course, the AT system in CoH/V still suffers from the problem of Defenders being widely regarded as Healers, yet not all Defender sets having healing powers. I'm sure that an even less class orientated system is going to confuse people even more.


FIFY.

ED / GDN was caused by initial design mistakes, but it was necessary to reduce the gap between the top and bottom percentiles of AT power.

The herding nerfs were separate from ED. ED was because Statesman was unhappy people were taking on more than 3 minion-equivalents at one time.

Edit: to put it another way, ED nerfed *everybody*, not just Tankers.

They're up right now, including a number of screenshots.

Edit:  It's got sort of a cel-shaded look which I like, but the character designs themselves seem a bit awkward.

Eh, I can't imagine that it's any worse than people at Bungie having to work on three Halo games in a row, and at least Crytic is sticking with a niche nobody else is really doing (we've just seen more screenshots of Champions Online than we have of DC Online).  Would you rather be working on a dev team's second Superhero MMO, or random dev team's Yet Another Fantasy MMO?

I'm not sure why that would make it a better or worse place to work at or how it's really much different at the end of the day.  If you're working on a sequel (or spiritual successor to a game or whatever) I imagine you'd generally want to it be a decent improvment over the previous one.  I would think the same goes for the team here.  That it's going to be direct competition to a game they no longer own, that will be at least five years old and showing its age by the time Champions comes out, shouldn't be all that discouraging to the team.

Statesman being at the helm is probably the biggest reservation I have about this game (although there are several other potential issues as well).  Regardless, given a choice between Cryptic doing an incremental improvement on CoH, or moving on to something else and leaving CoH as likely the only Superhero MMO to ever see release (as you can seem I'm pretty sceptical that the DC game will ever make it past the vaporware stage), I'd rather go with the incremental improvement.

I don't really get the Okami comparison as far as cel-shading goes.  It's a completely different art style.  My biggest problem with the screenshots right now, is every single background looks like a rehash of CoH.  We have the cave background, the lab background, the warehouse background, the industrial background..., fuck, mix it up a little bit here guys.

I'd almost perfer it if they reskinned the character models.  I'm so sick of seeing those backgrounds though after seeing them probably over a hundred times each in the short amount of time I played.

Their first article on combat (http://www.champions-online.com/articles/superheroic_combat_in_champions_online):


That's a whole lotta words to not say much of anything.

Doesn't matter. The boredom must be setting in on a portion of the team.

At least Cryptic sold off their other game before they had to directly compete with it. Heh.

The Cryptic team working on this only has a few members who worked on CoH/V - most of the people on that went to NC^2. It'll be the case of competing on their former product for very few of them.

Having had a close look at the screenshots, they're nice and all, but the cel shading leaves it looking flat. I'll have to see what it looks like in motion.

This bit interests me:


I've often thought that a Dynasty Warriors-esque battle system would be fun in a MMO. We'll see, of course.

No mention if you can queue up attacks ahead of time, or if some attacks can only be used as counters to opponents attacks.

Beware Anklysaur, destroyer of ankles!

First impression after looking at the site:  Total customization is the reason I remain curious about the game.  The blurb on attacking is too vague to form an opinion yet beyond that it sounds very console-ish.  I don't like the cell shading effect they're using based on those screenshots, but seeing it in motion might change my mind (the old Fear Effect looked like ass in screenshots but wasn't too bad in motion).

Actually, that sounds EXACTLY like City of Heroes combat system.

Uh... I'm not saying CoH combat is all that terrible, but it sure isn't "instant action" or Dynasty Warriors like by any means. Not sure what game you were playing.

The description listed sounds exactly like City of Heroes, not the Dynasty Warrior hope.

In COH, there is no auto attack. You hit a button, the animation plays out as the attack goes on, and you can't trigger another attack until the animation is done. The only difference is he said there were no recharge times, which I guess means no cooldown on certain powers. I'm sure if that's the case, it'll get nerfed as people do nothing but spam the same power over and over again.

But really, that describes the COH combat system (minus cooldown timers) to a tee. They can claim it's like a fighting game or an action game, and it may be, because COH wasn't that far from it.

Another feature of the CoH combat system- fighting the same 5 enemies on the same 5 maps until the sun goes cold. Or you manage to slit your wrists with your CoH DVD.



Yes, I realize they have added stuff since I quit, but the grind is still there in full force. Grindy, class-based system and no economy? Be still my heart.

I'm not worried about the cell-shading, that stuff always looks better in motion than in screenshots.  However, the reskinned CoH environments seem very, very, meh.

The underground one?  Yeaah, I did that in CoH, 32000 times.

I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do to make "modern world city" backgrounds all that different from each other. One alleyway looks very much like another in the US. I guess they could set it in Europe or something.

When I went back last year one of the things that basically drove me away again was how little had changed about missions. I think I might have seen one or two new tile sets and partly I suspected they were already in the game, only showing up in the mid 40's.

CoH is the best mmorpg I played.

I have zero interest for that game.  Been there done that. 
The differences I saw between the two games from the official page :

- No recharge timer skill - replaced by combo.  Now you have to press hotkey 1 + hotkey 2 to get your big attack instead of having it on hotkey 3 with a long recharge timer. No real difference there.
- More customization - good but could have been achieved by an CoH expansion.
- A loot system that let you get new costume pieces has you grind missions - good I guess, still doable in a CoH expansion.
- Suckier lore.  Defender and Doctor Destroyer? Please.  The artwork for Defender is terrible.  He looks like a generic sidekick.

Hard to imagine someone writing this with a straight face. A few months ago it was Doctor Doom and Magneto, now it's Doctor Destroyer and Mechanon.

Rich lore? I've never heard of any of these guys. It smacks of utter desperation.

I think Mr. Furious, the Spleen, and Casanova Frankenstein could actually be taken more seriously than any of that.

What about Ms Indestructible, Deadly Girl and The Weevil?

Or The Evil Midnight Bomber, Barry and The Hotel Manager?

Peter Griffin?  :awesome_for_real:

I never played CoX so I'm kind of looking forward to this. Also I like cell-shaded graphics and these look pretty nice even in stills. I'm not sure how well a Marvel-based game would work anyway. "Professor X wants you to collect ten wolf hides!"

I think the IP is terrible but whatever, makes no difference to me, Marvel was never a draw for me personally anyway.

So despite all my mean words I'm kind of excited.

Didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Another bullet point.

# Fat Lewt. With the ability to turn the graphics on or off.

Personally I'm stoked. The Marvel IP was meh for me. And with the DC MMO being total vapor :heartbreak: having something on the horizon in tights is nice.

Isn't that why people pay artists and shit? Style, Flair, Flavour? Maybe not have the game revolve around Caves, Alleyways and Warehouses?


Having to look at generic city scene 42 again will suck the life out of me incredibly fast.

I would be your most loyal customer ever.

No it's not. The cooldown timers are what make it different. In CoH you spend a significant amount of time in your early levels standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for your powers to refresh. Even Brawl the most basic attack that everybody gets has a 2 second refresh time. Eventually as you get enough powers to fill out an attack chain you can chain one attack after another without having to wait in between but even then you still have to wait on individual powers to refresh. The system that's described above is like the one used in the X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance games where you can keep spamming the same button over and over if you wanted to. In CoH if you tried that you would drive yourself insane listening to the "refresh" alert sound.

Right now I'm kind of "meh" on the whole cel-shaded look. While I do like the look when done well the style they are showing in the screenshots is seriously conflicting with all the eye-candy they are layering on top of it -- e.g. the bloom effects on Defender and the reflections on Doctor Whatshisname. When covered with all teh shiney the cel-shaded textures just look like somebody didn't spend a lot of time on the textures to make them look nice.

Everything they've talked about so far has been mildly interesting but you know the one thing that might actually get me to really take notice of the game?  If they vastly improve the npc AI so missions don't consist of repeatedly seeing a big group of retarded crash test dummies all standing around waiting for you to blow them up.

Meh, when City of Heros went to City of Slightly Better than Normal People is when I lost interest.  Since it's the same people with the same concepts of balance and thoughts on what constitutes a 'fun' play session I doubt if this game will do anything I'm interested in.

I think I figured out that one of the things I like about Eve, at least for the moment, is that I can take my lone ship in and battle 40 or 50 baddies and with some prior planning and, admittedly, a bit of gameyness come out on top.  It's one of the things that endeared me to CoH at first and then completely sucked the life out of me when they changed it.

Actually in LOTROL which I just played in late beta and 'friend key' mode for a month or so, I got so tired of staring at the little special attack icons to reactivate, I just stopped looking at them, instead just 'drummed' the 1-2-3 keys and let them take care of themself.  I was a warrior so they helped, but the specific timing was not that critical, at the low levels I was at.

Oddly, I didn't have that problem in CoH.  I played a fire-ice blaster until getting bored in the late 30s.  In combat, I mostly looked at the 3D display, not having to watch special attack icons nor scrolling damage screens to see what was happening.  I only had a couple of 'long timer' skills which I checked before starting the next fight.

My dream MMOG does not have icons that light up or with timers, and does not have the scrolling damage log windows, but you can play actually looking at the damn 3D graphics.  If there are game elements related to that, they should be reflected in a more 3D / Natural way, somehow...

You need to read what I wrote more carefully.

Interesting read. (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17549)  Now the question is: Will he learn from his mistakes?

I guess superhero games aren't for you on some level. The City (...my "The City") is a central theme in the genre, it isn't really abandonable.

For all of the complaining about CoH's lack of maps, there are actually quite a bit more than 5:

office building (couple different wall types)
ruined office building
warehouse
ruined warehouse
sewer
rocky/wet cave
sandy cave
science lab
council base
oranbega
freight ship
arachnos base
rikti base
bank

There are also a bunch of 'special' villain group related updates to some of these, like the Freakshow warehouse, the Tsoo tattoo parlor warehouse, etc. I'm sure I left some other maps out as well. And that's not including all the 'outdoor' maps from train missions, mayhem/safeguard missions and the like. There are probably at least another 20+ of those. And then the newer zone TFs have special maps, like that giant robot council base one. And they've probably added more since I canceled like a year ago.

Maybe it's the fact that you have to grind the selection of maps so many times to get anywhere that makes the selection appear more limited.  I also think that CoH is hurt by the fact that there are few different encounter types beyond: run to an instance, kill x/find x/escort x/clear.  Having to do these missions many many times to level after 35 makes the game seem a lot less varied than it may actually be. 

My guess would be that's a negative.

Blizzard disagrees. 

So would Sony, I bet, with EQ2.

Or wouldn't, with SWG.

Some change is okay, and over years the playerbase will transform, but major changes for the sake of chasing new players will fail.

Fucking interwebs ate my post.

Anyway I was going to make one about the lack of backdrops for missions, but when it comes down to it no one really gives a fuck. The problem is NOTHING fun or interesting happens in missions. There are a couple exceptions, but we're talking a bit of dialog here, nothing ground breaking.
"Arrest" everyone. "Arrest" everyone. Click the box and  "Arrest" everyone. Click the NPC. are about all the variety you get. 
They need to spend a big fucking portion of their dev time making missions fun. They can take the easy way out and throw more dialog in and some cutscenes. Which from the article in GI sounds like what they are going to be doing. Or they can go the hard way and put some truly fun, dynamic shit in that makes you make decisions.

Arriving at the warehouse you got a tip on from one of your more reliable informants you survey the scene. Several startled and rather unpleasant looking thugs are pointing some high tech weaponry at you. Maybe crashing in on the party through the skylight was not the wisest of plans... The rest of the thugs - who are  less impressively armed - are making a run for the unmarked vans they were loading the equipment into. If they get out of sight and split up it's unlikely you will catch more then one or two of them, if that. And lastly, aww crap. Hostages...
Just as you begin to formulate a plan the wall next to you explodes into a shower of bricks and a large angry man steps into the room through the newly made door. Fantastic, they brought muscle. Whatever is in these crates must be worth a fortune to someone with all the effort put into this heist.

At this point you would have to prioritize between saving the hostages, catching the thieves, avoiding being shot, and dealing with the guy trying to rearrange your face.

Lastly they could put in some truly groundbreaking PvP with people playing heroes fighting other people playing villains in missions for rewards and XP as it SHOULD be in a superhero game. But that would be far to epic if done right.

Basically combat is fun. Be it watching the awesome particle effects as you blast your enemies into dust, sending your zombie horde to rip them limb from limb, or wading your skinny ass into a mob of a dozen guys (ED can suck my ass, but we are not talking about that here) and beating them all down with your bare hands is fucking fun.
Doing the same mission for the entire game is not.

(It's late I'm tired, forgive me now and I'll edit this into something coherent tomorrow.)

Wow has barely changed at all since release. The main thing I gather is that world PvP got shafted in favor of arena-type stuff. But there haven't been any major system changes. And PvP was in at release, they just changed the focus. A lot of the growth has been new markets.

EQ is probably the best example of building an audience but that was done more with incremental improvements. I think the point he was trying to make is that adding new systems or dramatically altering old ones is typically going to do little to increase subs.

He's talking about that game with Dark Helmet.  :drill:

Here's another article on that Jack Emmert talk. (http://www.massively.com/2008/02/22/gdc08-jack-emmert-on-cryptics-success-and-failure/)  The Q&A at the end wasn't mentioned in the other article.  This quote boggles my mind.


Which RPGs is he playing that don't have items with stats?  If he clings to that 'players don't need to see the numbers' crap in Champoins, it's going to suck.

Edit:

They have their first trailer already. (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/854/854285p1.html#)  The bits and pieces of the actual game looks pretty.  That cell shading in motion does look better than the stills, which seems par for the course with cell shading.

He might be talking about games like Zelda, where your bow and boomerang don't have "+100 versus Dodongos" on it.

I'll take a Mass Effect over a Zelda any day of the week, personally.  Of course, I also think items in a superhero game is stupid.  But I damn well want to see the numbers on my powers.

FPSes are feeling more like role playing games than RPGs these days. (I'd love to play an Ultima that uses Half-Life 2's engine....)

Maybe if all those maps didn't look like something I could make out of a NWN tileset editor, I might agree. It's like those non-instanced caves in WoW. Sure they might have a different colour, an extra tunnel or a few added stalagmites, but they are the same damn cave. CoH always felt like the same cave, over and over again. and again.

Warehouse = Cave
Ruined Warehouse = Ice Cave

Here we go again...  :oh_i_see:

Ironically, the Tick did abandon The City in the comic.

But while you obviously can't do a Superhero game without cities, that doesn't mean that's what the genre limits you to, and that Cryptic couldn't have come up with more screenshots to show off that weren't reminiscent of CoH (especially when they've said the game won't take place in just a city).  Look at the Marvel Universe for example and you could do the Negative Zone, Asgard, Latveria, various alien planets (or even Ego the living planet), Deviant Lemuria, etc.., and show off different areas that fit within the genre but don't look quite so familiar.

If you weren't limited to one city, you could use the archectectural style of Rome, Paris, NY, Hong Kong, etc, etc, etc, to help you create different city maps.

I'd agree that, without a fantastic imagination, a warehouse is a warehouse is a warehouse, but a city street need not and should not be just a city street.  And to give CoX some props, I think they figured this out when they started introducing missions that used parts of the zones as instance maps.  Hopefully they take this concept a but further in CO.

In terms of numbers Blizzard disagrees. But in terms of type of player, type of game, Emmert is 100% correct.

See: SWG.

If you accidentally launch a game with a different focus to what you intended, you can't change it later.


EQ2 changed after launch, but it changed from shit to not shit. It is still fundamentally about grouping, levels & loot.

EQ2 changed to try and make a better game for their fans. SWG changed to try and get new ones.

And Blizzard doesn't disprove based on raw numbers. They distribute on the growth curve, as does any game that grows after launch. CoH did not. It was one of the first to launch big and start a decline almost right away.

I hated the caves almost as much as I hated Orange Bagel. I think there was more variety than you're giving them credit for, but seeing as how you barely even got a travel power during your time in CoX, I'm not real surprised.  :heart:

An interesting take on in-game balance: (http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=36719#post36719)

Heretic (aka Geoff Tuffli)

Translation: we aren't going to be able to balance this, so we're not going to try. Gimp and min/max away!

It's an interesting position to take.

I like it, because I think it implies that their will be a large number of power combinations and that they will not be spending massive development cycles screwing with balance.  A couple of (obvious) things:

1) They definitely need a way to respec that doesn't invovle cutting off testicles
2) They probably shouldn't put alot of effort into making 1v1 PvP mean anything (if they include PvP at all)
3) People, including myself, that fall in love with sub-nominal builds need to accept that they are playing on 'hard mode', or move on
4) People, including everyone but myself, should get over the 'omg flavor of the month!' crying.  There is a significant portion of the player base that wants to play a powerful build.  they don't enjoy min/maxing, they don't enjoy playing sub-nominal builds and they don't enjoy waiting for the developers to fix their first choice of power selections.  [Note: I dont ever create a character based upon buzz that it's 'uber', but I also don't get all the hate for the folks that gravitate to builds that are powerful]

This is a Jack Emmert game we're talking about here.

 :oh_i_see:

Stll, I like the genre (MMO super hero), and CO is the only new game in town right now.  So if I'm not going to be optimistic in this honeymoon-anythings-possible early stage... well, that just seems broken to me.  Granted, I'm not rocking back and forth in front of my computer dreaming big dreams, but it's more pleasant to imagine that Jack will cherry pick the stuff that was good about CoX (character creation/customization + engaging combat) and learn from the stuff that wasn't so good about CoX (archtypes, nerfage, lack of depth, repitition).

Edit: added "new", because we obviously already have CoX

I approve. If the focus is on fun stuff to do, instead of spending tons of time fiddling with 0.005 dps differences in character builds... We'll see if this concept survives beta... (assuming they get to beta.)

This article is mostly a rehash of what we already know (http://www.massively.com/2008/02/22/champions-online-and-cryptic-studios-information-bonanza/), but there are some interesting tidbits.


That whole blue bar endurance/power thing sounds like what Guild Wars did with Warriors and their adrenaline-based attacks.

 :uhrr:

Nah, makes sense from a "world" standpoint.  Some people are just better at things than others.  One of the fundamental gripes I have about games these days is the P.C. position of "everyone can be equally good at everything!"   Really?  Ok, explain to that 5'-2" woman how she's going to lift that 300# crate unassisted, and then tell that 6'-4" 325# guy he's got to clean out the fuel tanks on a cargo jet.

Yeah.

I always liked games where your size and race determined your ability to do things.  It made you make choices that were cost/benefit later in the game.  I can see how this would be problemmatic though... people make a choice early and then lament that choice later.  The evolution of game mechanics through nerfs and fixes can effect this as well. 

Um, she's a superhero?  :drill:

Making people choose a class at the beginning of their character's life that affects everything they do from then on is bullshit when you are preaching customization to the high heavens. If a class MUST be assigned, it should be done by the game system automatically, and well into the character's career. Take a look at what skills the character has, and how often they use them. Then maybe assign a class to them that allows them to discount future skills/upgrades that fit.

Pigeonholing characters is crap, but if it must be done, let players test drive the varied skills first and then imprison them in a class. Just a horrible artificial game mechanic that is a crutch for people that don't want to do the heavy lifting of balancing skills.

Respecs are good mmkay? Systems with a massive amount of skills and a cap are good, too.

Making a grindy and/or raid-style respec is FUCKING BAD, MMKAY, JACK? (So are class-based systems when you have access to all the skills  :uhrr: )

If they use the hero system rules at all the archtypes will be a very lose thing. Its more to help give a guideline for newer players than anything really hard coded. I am guessing one of the archetypes will be more generalist type who gets no big negatives for point costs on powers but no big pluses either so you could make him whatever you wanted.

It really depends on how big of a difference point wise it makes for picking something not "ideal" for your archetype. If its minor then only the uber min maxers will really care. If its sever then that could really gimp somebody who does not follow their class but I do not expect that. The hero system really does not go much for the hard class type their archetypes were more a visualization aid more than anything to focus new players.

Well, ideally you should be able to have a rough concept of what your characters is like in your head, based on the game. (A big guy who smashes things!, a ninja with a chainsaw!, rocket charlie from outer space!) and have some basic choices at character creation to set you on your path to smashing/sneaking/rocketing around.

Bait and switch (or 'gimping' if you prefer) should'nt happen to the extent that it does in some games. (Stat allocation at character creation is ridiculous. I put fucking points into charisma on my Ranger in DAOC for gob's sake!  :tantrum:)

To summarise other dev comments from ChampO (I won't link each one by one, unless there's clamouring demand for it):

 - The idea with the powers system is to make each power have a point so you'd consider taking it, rather than balancing them to uber-flatness

 - The classes are meant to be templates that suggest where a character's strength lies, but if you want to be a high damage dealing meatshield, you can, regardless of class

 - It looks like points will be allocated as part of a lvl based system, with every lvl you receive some more points to spend on powers

 - Emmert keeps promising that he's learned from past mistakes

 - PvP is meant to be an included part of the game at launch, with the guy behind it being a fan of Shadowbane and EVE

Of course, it's early days and talk is cheap. We'll see.

I wanna see that one. If that's true everybody will be tank-mages.

ED is Emmert learning from past mistakes.

Not everybody in UO were tank-mages.  :oh_i_see:

With no refresh timers and a blue bar to worry about (again) it sounds like you'll be spamming your basic attack until your blue bar fills up and then unleashing a big attack, and then it's back to spamming the basic attack. Otherwise if the big attacks had a net positive blue bar gain (or at least had a net gain of zero) you would just spam those all day.

Yes, that's right. Apparently there will be ranged and melee basic attacks that add to the endurance bar.

It reminds me of the Fury system, which had some value (obviously however, Fury overall sucked, but it had some good ideas mixed in) in that it rewarded you for playing, not for hiding for a while.

Classes AND levels? What will these crazy innovators think of next?

 :sad_panda: :sad_panda: :sad_panda: :sad_panda: :sad_panda:

It occurs to me that if you're making an online version of Champions, you should use the rules of the game Champions, since they have been play-tested for 17 years. And that would be Champions, not CoX2. Someone needs to tuck in their ego and do the job they were hired to do imo.

I never played Champions, I was more of a V&V guy back then.

I can understand the archetype (class) restrictions for balance issues. Levels is just sheer laziness.

Instead of ChampO we should be calling it CINO.

When I said as much on the forums over there the reaction I got from the peanut gallery was similar to what I would expect if I had stapled baby Jesus to Santa Claus and set them both on fire.  So yeah, not likely the devs will change their minds on levels.

There must be a book of MMOG blueprints that are floating around among MMOG developers that reads like a checklist for boring, unoriginal gameplay.

Everything changed in this post-11/23/04 world.

To clarify: Cryptic bought the IP rights to Champions, not the Hero System. So they're able to use all the characters, settings and terms of the Champions world, but aren't actually bound to the Hero System rules.

And, as was said elsewhere, the Hero System can be wonderfully abused by rules rapists everywhere. A direct port wouldn't work. However, exactly what kind of port it's going to be remains to be seen.

Didn't they license the rights to talk about the Hero system though, and could license the system for use if they wanted to?

I think this is more a case of bootstrapping an IP on the MUO system they already had. Ripping apart class/archetypes to give everyone access to everything with some qualifiers isn't the same thing as going from a class based game to a total-customized UO-style skills-based one. So I suspect they either intended this all along with MUO, or had built MUO on this foundation and just loosened the restrictions as a mere homage to the Hero system.

And all of that is because they want to launch a game this year rather than build a brand new one.

In theory.

Yep, that's how I see it. They apparently can change the name to "Hero Online", but then that'd be called HO and no-one wants that.

And yes, this is more than likely retrofitting a lot of the development work done for MUO. Apparently after CoV didn't set the world on fire and NCsoft helped to cut the CoH/V dev team by 75%, Cryptic set on updating their internal game engine / toolset for next-gen. They've used some internal projects to help refine these improved tools / engines (or: worked on internal projects while this updating process was going on) but then MUO came along and seemed like a great license to work on.

History happened, so Cryptic probably now has to remove all the MUO aspects, develop the Champions apects, redo all the graphical content that could be seen as Marvel-esque and extend the PC compabitibilty to XP and Vista (because MUO was going to be Vista-only).

In theory - that's just what I've pieced together.

Power customisation would have been in MUO. If there was one request that started up on day 1 on the CoH/V forums and still hasn't stopped it was being able to customise your superhero's powers.

Most ridiculous rumour currently on the ChampO forums: that Marvel is speaking / has spoken to SOE about doing a joint Marvel / DC MMO. I can see Microsoft / Marvel getting together with SOE / DC to happily create one game together, can't you?  Even is MS was cut out of the picture, I doubt DC and Marvel would get into bed together on this.

Slightly more believable rumour from the same poster: DCO will have a major announcement in April. It'll probably be "we're not dead, really".

Yeah, that would be pretty rediculous.  Right now I think they still aren't even doing comic book crossovers with each other since Didio apparently can't stand Quesada.

Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa didn't exactly pan out either.  Is it me, or is NC basically just using Lineage profits to fund failure after failure?

Why don't they stay true to comic books, and drop all this levels / classes / picking skills stuff?

You log on and are given a normal human character.  As you wander the game world, you get:

     zapped by radiation, bit by a spider, find / are given alien tech, research and produce super tech, etc, and pick up a random super-power.

You have to figure out by trial and error what that power is, and you have to decide what to do with that power.

Isn't that how super hero comics are for the most part?

Wouldn't it be fun to join a world and start playing without pre-planning all kinds of 'progression paths' and 'optimal skill sets' and correct stats?

And, and, you have to make yourself a costume!

That goes without saying.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm pretty sure you've argued this before so I won't ask you to write it up again, but do you have a link where you argued for and explained a better system for an MMOG?  I'd like to read it.

(http://www.georgehernandez.com/h/aaBlog/2004/media/04-21_TronCostumeByJayMaynard.jpg)

Jesus christ. That dude's camel toe haunts my nightmares.

Classic.

That's moose knuckle.

We shouldn't even be having this conversation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_belt)

I guess we shouldn't ask how you know those exist?

An internet thread where someone posted Tronman, and another guy mentioned the dance belts, which were a part of the original Tron costumes.

What did you expect?  :grin:

I'm not sure, and I'd rather not contemplate it.  :uhrr:

New Q&A (http://www.champions-online.com/node/36)

Some highlights:

• The power creation system might actually resemble the Hero System somewhat, but it won't be identical.
• There will be a skill system.
• The 'death penalty' was stolen straight from WoW.  In other news, having superheroes that dependent on 'gear' sounds like ass.
• The game will have standard MMO auto-targeting, so no dodging fireballs by strafing to the side.  Apparently there are 'charged' and 'maintained' attacks that a character can block or break line of sight with, though.
  

There's some other stuff in the article as well.

Gear? Hero doesn't have gear. D:

Prediction: they license CoX back from NC to create an Xbox 360 comic-based MMO.

You heard it hear first!  :grin:

I like the idea of having separate gear to pontentially make up for gaps in your powers. Gear should never be as good as having actual powers, but there's no reason a melee based character can't carry an M60 in battle when the need arises.

Jack Emmert wrote up a day in the life at Cryptic (http://www.champions-online.com/node/39).

Of note:

 - ChampO seems to be in playable alpha

 - Cryptic has two other MMO projects on the boil, both in pre-production but no real further details exist

Begin obligatory ED rant.
(random font size changes mine)

Dunno Jack, not sure if fighting more then 2 mobs at once is balanced.
/EDrantoff

I was a long-time watcher and player of CoH, but havent until recently looked at Champions Online because I  didnt want to be disappointed from my tabletop days.

I havent read a stitch about this, but the pics look a lot like CoH to me. Perhaps thats just the intern-made coffee talking.

It's CoH meets The Incredibles.

You know, that's an even better description. Someone found the code (they've got it for Torque too) that surrounds a 3d character with a cartoony, black line to make it look like line art...and went nuts with it.

Grrrrr.

He never said he was :awesome_for_real:

I like Villains and Vigilantes, but Champions was simply the best superhero system there was.  Hell, I still think the Hero System was better than GURPS when it came to baseline RPG rules.

There was one caveat, though, and that was that you had to lay down the "No!  Redo it!" stick whenever someone wanted to min-max the system.  If you were creative with disadvantages you could really make those character points go a long damn way and come up with a Galactus killer.  Without a fairly stern GM willing to call players on their bullshit during character creation that game system was way abusable.

As long as the GM made the player justify his min-maxing with a plausible backstory, you were usually safe. Not being laughed out of the room is important even to munchkins.

The problem with that, though, is that with so many disadvantages piled on, all the adventures become about that player. In a group setting that's a problem.

Well, in an online setting a few things can happen.  One, limit the number of disadvantages allowed to take.  Two, randomize the enemies for those disadvantages.  The baddies on the map happen to target six of your two dozen weaknesses?  Sucks to be you, but at least you're on a first name basis with that cute nurse at City General.

I think this is one of the reasons that customisation is being built on several different versions of a similar power (e.g. ice blast, dark blast, fire blast, etc) rather than the Champion default 'energy blast'. That way the devs can tweak which blasts get access to which tweaks and how much they effect the power rather than having a much more abuseable open door policy.

I find it interesting that one stated tweak will be related to the time of day (e.g. night or day) that you use the power.

Morbius, anyone?

In general news, ChampO's new community relations manager is Razor, best known from Razorwire on Warcry.

Good? Bad? Should I care?

Hey...

leave Ashen Temper out of this.  :grin:

You can see his work on http://razorwire.warcry.com.

At the very least, you can chart the progress of someone who goes from fansite to official community guy.

(Full disclosure - I've written some things for Warcry in the past, but appear to have lost article privileges)

 ... apparently I'm the ChampO stalker. Oh well.

1up Preview (http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3167585)

Highlights:

*MUO described as "debacle" by Cryptic CEO Michael Lewis

*ChampO is going to be more Marvel: Ultimate Alliance / X-Men Legends in combat style

*ChampO is going to have a lot more complex systems than CoH/V at launch - loot, nemesis system (which could be a excellent mini-game or a huge waste of time) and so on

*Emmert is trying to put all the stuff he learned from CoH/V into ChampO

Too bad he never learned that fast leveling = gud.

Even better.

The latest update (http://www.champions-online.com/dev_blog/Ask_Cryptic_05-02-08) to the website answers a question about choosing powers from outside your archtype.

Basically what it says is that if you choose a power outside of your archtype it functions without a bonus.  Example is with a ranged blast.  Everyone gets the same basic blast power, except the "blaster" archtype which gets a bonus.

I think it sounds like a reasonable tradeoff between flexibility and balance.  They also mention that they are continuing to tweak what the archtypes will be.  Given this system, I'm not all torqued up about archtypes being restrictive, because I think that they are decently within the genre and that they likely make it a bit easier for them to have something that isn't totally out of balance.

A bit more clarification on ChampO char design aims: (http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=132247#post132247)

Go go tank mages!

OK, I wasn't paying attention during the CoH beta, but I've read tales and rumors of the original power selection system. Didn't they originally start off letting players pick whatever powers they want? And after players rolled tank mages and started scything through the content, they decided to put in the Archetypes that we now know and love?

I wonder if they can really pull this off. I mean, if players can pick any powers they want, they'll figure out the most effective way to spend their points. We did it back in Asheron's Call, and it will happen again here.

I'm not advocating that they go with rigid archetypes. Far from it. I am predicting a caterwauling on the official Champions Online boards from players who built gimpy characters, and are jealous of being out-performed by min-maxers. I am predicting that the dev team will do some datamining and learn that, yes, letting a Blaster Energy Projector pick whatever defensive powers he wants does break the game.

The question is, can they handle it. Can they turn this system loose, and resist the urge to nerf the tank mages? Can they design content that's challenging for the role-players and the min-maxers alike?

Will they let you respec your character out of the box? I'd like to think that this will be one of the "lessons" that they learned from CoH.

I applaud this. If they can get rid of the aggro, tank spank'n heal gameplay that would be awesome.

I'm still skeptical though that they'll be able to do it to the degree that he says.

The first 6 months of ChampO will be based in Nerf City.

I think they got rid of it fairly early, maybe alpha or the design stages, but yes.  SWG did the same.

I wish games would let us make those choices, but I fall pretty far on the "Sandbox.  Yay!" side of the spectrum.

Interesting system. As long as it can properly direct players towards roles (for those who want such direction) while also giving maximum choice to players, could be cool.

If it survives to launch.

The free form character creation system didn't outlast CoH's friends and family beta testing. The issue wasn't just tank mages - the other end of things were players who put all their points into Flight, so could fly very well but not do anything else. There are some articles (http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/434/434111p1.html) that go into the reasons behind the change. Not stated is that CoH was running over-schedule and probably over budget, so they had to move quickly and get things playable in order to avoid becoming vapourware.

As for nerfs: yeah, possibly. Hopefully beta is largely devoted to seeing what kind of power combos skew the game, but I also believe that achieving perfect balance isn't one of Cryptic's aims for ChampO. They appear to be aiming more for an 'everything is unbalanced' style of power development.

Guide to the original CoH trailer (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=7059002&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1)

Download site for trailer (http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/3dgamers/games/cityofheroes/) (it's no longer available on the CoH site)

"Let things be unbalanced" is a great attitude to have. I had a nice long incoherent screed written about devs and nerfing and betas and retail, but I will summarize: I remain skeptical. I think no one yet has figured out how to have a skill-based no-archetype mmog without the character base devolving into a handful of tank-mage builds. And these guys aren't Blizzard. I predict that the official beta, as well as the unoffical paid beta (aka early retail) will be a period marked by profound nerfing, and a great gnashing of teeth.

It really doesn't have to be that way. I've played MUDs for years that have struck a balance between tank mages, tank warriors, and tank rogues. It all works, just MMOG designers haven't found the balance yet.

I would remind everyone that this is not Fantasy Diku. This is a SUPERHERO DIKU! Why do we fucking need the Tank-Healer-Mage setup?

Let EVERYONE be super.  :ye_gods:

It really shouldn't be THAT hard to make reasonably balanced.  :grin:

Sure there will be a "best" build, there always is. But as long as you give your average player some direction. Or better yet, the inability to screw themselves over. You're Golden.

I want there to be tank mages, don't get me wrong. I just have my doubts whether the devs can handle the idea. I envision thus: a few months after retail, they will nerf a fun but unbalancing aspect of gameplay, and utter an apology along the lines of "we never thought players would build characters to be as powerful and weakness-free as the game will let them, even though some of us have had some experience in the design and post-launch support of mmog's in the past."

If they're going in with the mindset that unrestricted skill selection will lead to players rolling up tank mages, and that's ok, then great. Perfect. Now test the hell out of it, and create gobs and gobs of content that can stand up to the tank mages, without simultaneously crushing the role-playing gimps.

This is where the true challenge lies for the dev team, and I think it's a huge, paradigm-breaking challenge. Thus my hefty skepticism.

As far as letting the players screw themselves over, that's why there should be respecs available.

It shouldn't be that hard to figure out a character's rough DPS and damage soaking capabilities and adjust enemies accordingly.  We've been stuck in staticly designed enemy land for far too long.

CoX does it with their giant monsters and a couple of other things based on levels.  Now figure it out based on the actual abilities of the character.

I think that would be a nightmare to try and balance. And the players would exploit the system, as always.

Lastly you would have the Oblivion effect. You would never feel like you were getting stronger. And worse case if it was poorly designed like the system in oblivion, you might actually get weaker as you gained levels.

Edit: I know personally in oblivion towards the middle of the story I nearly gave up as I had basic skills in everything, which inflated my level, meaning my meager skills in any given field could not best them.

Here's a topical analogy: who'd win in an unplanned fight: Superman vs Batman, Spiderman vs Wolverine, Iron Man vs the Thing. Fantasy has already had clear roles and responsibilities for classes. Comics have always had specific roles per comic IP. Crossing over them in a generic lateral experience is asking for trouble. As a result: CoX.

It's not impossible. It's just hard, with no guarantee it'll work, which is just what money folks like hearing.

I'm with those predicting something similar to CoX.

But then, I also don't think ChampO will ever launch.

Oblivion was a very poorly done version of this.  It just counted your total skill points and it didn't matter if they were in axe swinging or flower picking.

My suggestion would be to figure out the player's actual capabilities.  It's not hard to calculate DPS or resistances.  If they want to get more accurate the game can even track power usage.  WoW and other games have plug-ins that do this for entire raid groups, so it's not that complicated.

That gives a baseline.  Now randomize from there.  Enemies could still be weak or crushingly overpowered.  Then resistances and weaknesses kick in.  The power adjustment doesn't have to be linear either.

Since it's based on each character a truly gimpy one will have a fighting chance and can contribute a little.  The point isn't to completely flatten the difficulty, just to keep the extremes able to function.  (I'm thinking the low end of things, although it could place a soft cap on abilities, too.)

That actually sounds very much like Diablo 2. Semi-randomized content in instances based on your personal or group makeup. And it did result (for me anyway) in the problem Ragnoros raised: that you never feel like you're getting stronger because the challenges in front of you always scale to your current level. D2 did put upper and lower limits on just how much a zone could be scaled, the same way CoX instances do.

It's harder to balance because you're working more in formula/procedural land, but it's also less taxing on the content-creation side of the equation. I prefer static content that is properly utilized to convey your strength. For example, I like games with critical social/commerce junctures. High levels return and can periodically toy with the stuff around such places that used to give them headaches during the formative levels. But of course, the games I like are also the most expensive to make  :grin:

I'd prefer scaling that threw different types and numbers at you - similar to CoX's minion/leutenant/boss structure.  And while we're wishing, I wish the leutenants and bosses actually started to use thier minions in a clever way as the encounters scaled up higher.

So, when you are "level appropriate" you get a minion.  You face off against multiple minions if you are above the "level appropriate" level.  And so on.  In this way, nearly every level is "level appropriate".  This would (theoretically) make it more natuaral to have characters of diverse levels fighting in one area, - they'd just need to adapt their tactics.  (In this "only in my head" game there aren't tanks/healer/dps'rs, players need to use abilities to seperate, incapacitate and brute-force mobs.  Retreat should always be a possible necessity).

If you're going for a level-based system (*gag*) then that could certainly be an additional weighting factor.  There are plenty of ways to balance it if you want players to be able to return to previous areas and kick some bad-guy around.  Those are design issues though.  CoX has scaling, but it also lets players adjust their difficulty.  There's no reason not to give such an option in a system that can dynamically adjust mob capabilities on a per-character basis.

I'm simply saying it is possible to adjust every mob to match the player in an intelligent way if that is what is desired.  It can take the edge off poorly made and min/max builds and let players play the game without worrying so much about their capabilities.

For difficulty I would really like to see improvements in AI.  I always hear about devs scaling it back because it's too smart for players.  Let's get some of that in games for those who want a challenge.

Yea, that's come up before actually. Mob AI certainly could be smarter. But as this genre has devolved from choice to planned acquisition along linear paths, the mobs are merely content gates. And I think that's ok.

To actually make an immersive world where choices matter, you need to do a lot more than just smarter AI. You need to change the entire concept of XP generation to unlock skills, most of what passes for "quests" nowadays to move away from Kill X/Trigger Y stuff, and in general provide more relevant use of combat in the total game world.

Right now, 99% of what players actually do in a game is combat. And that's driven by the need to personalize a character. And that's limited by the choices we can make. And that's limited by the convention of designing against Time and Stats rather than by Skill and Choice. All of this leads to a game solely about NPC genocide, with the negative connotation mitigated by respawn.

So for what the popular games are today in the West, dumb AI is the more appropriate choice.

Lead dev says "We might take archetypes / classes out altogether... but we haven't decided yet". (http://www.champions-online.com/dev_blog/evolution_of_game_design_rethinking_archetypes)

I don't care either way, but not having ATs / classes probably makes the char development system more flexible. On the other hand, having a class / AT forces a choice and arguably reduces cookie cutter designs (or, in reality, creates a cookie cutter design or two for each class to line up on).

If they follow through I might actually play. Is there any PvP? PvE + classes = dead to me.

Yep, PvP is being taken into full consideration - the dev behind that side of things is a big PvP fan from Shadowbane and Eve.

Other notes:

1) Those people going to Gencon or PAX (http://www.champions-online.com/node/71) will get to see the first live playable demos of ChampO. If someone is going, I'd like to get a report back.

2) Cryptic picked up at least one person from Perpetual Entertainment (http://www.champions-online.com/articles/meet_dennis_associate_producer_of_champions_online). If they picked up one, they probably picked up more. Still doesn't answer the question if they have the STO licence or not.

Meh, not really about ChampO so I'll just start a new thread.

The ChampO website has a counter on it with about 45 days on the clock. This (apparently) takes us to about July 28, which is after the San Diego Comic Conference.

So, something important to be announced in 45 days for ChampO. Hopefully beta, but we'll see.

Bwa?

EDIT: Got over my temporary retardation - the counter is up on the Cryptic site under 'Games' and is listed as separate from ChampO. Yeah, it probably isn't a beta countdown for ChampO, but a countdown for STO.

Unofficial ChampO PC specs have been posted... kinda (http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=161204#post161204). Katalyst, a community rep, has posted her new PC specs that will / does allow her to play ChampO on it.

Okay, that was really not helpful. She should nix her own post.

I agree - posting system specs that haven't been officially vetted can / will create a lot of problems.

I posted them here as a point of interest and in case they disappear from the official forums.

ROTFL what game won't that computer play.

Why does she have 4 GB of RAM to run XP 32?

Why not? It's easier to order 2 2x1 GB kits than to go with 2x1 GB and 2x512 MB (I'm not even sure places like Dell offer a 3 GB RAM option).

Emmert posts one new way Cryptic is trying to keep ChampO polished for launch. (http://www.champions-online.com/dev_blog/something_new_at_Cryptic) According to another dev post, the Champions team spent over 800 hours collectively playtesting the zone over two weeks.

Continuing in my quest to post about MMOs no-one else cares about:

Gamespot gets an exclusive video to show off (http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/championsonline/news.html?sid=6193627&tag=topslot;title;5&om_act=convert&om_clk=topslot) - looks like CoH/V, if a bit faster paced and with more enemies.

2K to publish ChampO (http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/championsonline/news.html?sid=6193627&tag=topslot;title;5&om_act=convert&om_clk=topslot) - an interesting choice, after they made a big song and dance about self-publishing. No official comment as to why this decision was made, but the forums are thinking that ex-SOE now-Cryptic CEO John Needham has decided against the risk of self-publishing. Also interesting is that ChampO on the Xbox 360 isn't yet MS approved - I don't think I've ever seen such a disclaimer before.

Interesting, in that if 2K is bought by EA, ChampO gets WAR as a stablemate.

EDIT - Interesting point was made that 2K could give ChampO an easy entry onto Steam.

Yeah, well, it is Gamespot...

They must be losing people left and right.

Gamespot, Cryptic or 2K?

If you were talking about Cryptic: maybe. The forum mods for ChampO have gone dead silent. They are / were online, merging threads and such, but have said nothing. They didn't even create an official link for a forum discussion about the 2K announcement, which is the first time they've neglected such a thing. Katalyst, a mod / CM who has a thread devoted to what she is doing at the moment - twitter-like, I guess - hasn't said a word.

I meant GameSpot.

That looks nothing like City of Heroes/Villains.

I'll be at GenCon in Indy, hopefully we can get to see some stuff.  Looks cool, but then again I love CoX.

As an update, there's a huge press push (http://www.champions-online.com/node/95) covered on the ChampO site. From one of those articles (http://www.gamearena.com.au/news/read.php/4739814), 2K's and Cryptic's relationship is meant to reflect that of Blizzard / Vivendi - Cryptic is full service, 2K handles marketing and distribution.

 :hello_thar:

Fan videos of ChampO at GenCon (http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=8175) in a thread.

Now, I've only watched the YouTube versions, but combat looked a lot slower than for DCUO, there are some obvious bugs (e.g. picking up a box left a copy of the box on the ground and another box in the hands of the character) and super speed really needed to be accompanied by Yakkity Sax.

I must admit I was expecting something ... quicker.

PC Gamer this issue had a hands-on, and they said the combat felt more like Diablo 2 than CoX, both for the instantaneous response of actions and the ability to spam them. They also said the customization exceeds even that of CoX. Otherwise, everything else was a bunch of typical MMO stuff being quasi-marketed.

Maybe the play experience is better than the videos show - we've had that discussion before on f13 - but I have to say that DCUO looks a lot prettier. The only way ChampO 'wins' in that regard is if it can play on PCs with lower specs than DCUO.

Quick stuff,
I spoke to two of the designers and got to play it a couple of times, really nice guys:

1.  Played more like Diablo II then click and attack/turn based.  You could miss if you didn't get close as you were swinging, more like X-men or Marvel Ultimate Alliance in how it played.

2.  No arch types or classes.  You can generalize and do a lot of everything, or go down one area and specialize, I suck at names but the two gentlemen I talked to said they have stuff for solo or groups, and that if you want to make it a healer, ranged, melee, go for it.  Specialization helps, but isn't needed.

3.  Loot, it will help but not be an end all, plus you can equip diffrent loot to do diffrent jobs.

4.  They want to make it for the xbox 360 and the PC and have that at release.  It is up to the xbox people on getting it a go, as they allready have it easy to play on an xbox360 controller.  I forgot to ask about voice over internet...

5.  The world will be that if you kill enough of one type, a boss will be triggered and come out to you.  The arch bosses didn't seem that hard, but we were set up on solo mode.

6.  They have a wide range of powers, with a lot of diffrent ranged, buffs, heals, melee, AoE, and Cone attacks.

7.  Group size is set at 5 now, not sure if they will make it bigger for grouping or if plans were in for raiding and how large groups would work.

8.  Super Groups and Bases are in, but they couldn't show us that.

9.  Customization of everything is supposedly in on your hero, but they couldn't show us that either.

10.  Travel powers for now are super speed, super jump, flying, and teleport.

11.  You will have cut scene loading between the areas, but the zones were pretty big.

I wish I had written down a lot of people's name, GenCon was fun and the playtest was pretty fun too.  We missed the meetings with Jack too...instead we were beating each other up with foam weapons we  made or playing some of the new card games (Call of Duty TCG was fun!).

A better video at 10TonHammer. (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/41258) Obvious auto targeting has issues if the dev can't hit what he is aiming for reliably.


According to other info I've seen, bases aren't in at launch.

Hmmm. What a surprise, it looks like City of Heroes with different skins.  I think I could only be less enthused if we were talking about Star Trek Online.

Make a spaceship tile set and put little A's on the uniforms in the character creation system... DONE!  They even have pointy ears for you vulcan lovers.

This covers so much unspecified ground that it might as well be the 'Miracle occurs here' box in the flowchart. :|

I found a glove that did 10% chance of root when landing a hit.  I took it off and killed baddies, I put it on and killed baddies, I guess it helped if I wanted to keep something at range, but I noticed I was pretty strong with ranged and melee attacks.  Basically they wanted another area you could customize your powerset, since you can build up with powers however you want, they wanted the gear to help customize in ways you would like to use them.

Has anyone mentioned the fact that when you make a character you also create your arch-nemesis? Sounds pretty cool to me, especially because character creation is the most fun part of CoX.

They were talking about the arch nemesis, at level 30 (game will release with 40 levels--subject to change though) you get to set up the arch nemesis for you.  You will get to decide what he or she will do to you, from ambushes, trying to screw up your missions, breaking into your base, stealing your gear, etc...

Sounds like an auto-creating endgame mechanic produced by the players.  Interesting concept (if they get it right).  Conceivably you could have near infinite amounts of different group endgame oriented battles with peoples' nemesis's's's... er nemesi... wtf is the plural of nemesis?

Okay, I can see that...I just hope they successfully walk teh fine line of 'interesting but not mandatory'.

The arch-nemesis sounds like it has potential.

This sounds very cool, but the first thing that ran through my mind was D.E.B.S.

Viewing this purely as 'CoX2', this mechanic has a lot of potential.

The elder game of CoX is raidiing ArchVillian missions with different heroes and groups. If it works this would be the closest anyone has ever come to 'design your own raids' ie. true player generated content. Perhaps the crucial reason this might work is that in the CoX concept, the reason you fight ATs is because it is fun, you don't do it for loot.

Rawr.  Back to life.

Anyway, Cryptic is taking beta apps (http://www.champions-online.com/).

Thanks for the link. One of the app questions was how many hours a week you spend playing MMOGs. Pretty easy for me to estimate atm since I am not playing any  :drill:

For those keeping score, beta at this point would make it appear that Cryptic is determined to get this title out in Q2 2009, as previously indicated.

I like the fact there are more varied zones now, but downer its still zones and not a 'seamless' world, I guess tech has not reached 1999 levels yet...

Also I don't like the move and click fest in combat in online games, the #1 reason I never bought DDO.  Unless you have very low ping, no packet loss, and a super machine, its just too irritating guessing where the mob is, where your char is, when to swing, etc with all the shifting and jumping around accounting for latency and server - client sync up.

If my command is:  select mob, attack mob, queue specials, the client - server can sort it all out for me, even with client lag, low ping, packet loss, etc.

ChampO is using auto-targeting to pick up the target closest to you - you can see it in the previously released videos.

However, it is meant to be a more action orientated game, so we'll see how it plays out on lower-end machines.

I can see the potential for this mechanic becoming very, VERY annoying.

:awesome_for_real:

Immensely disappointing.  I was hoping they'd use a mechanic similar to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (or Diablo) where everything is directional.  Combine the DIKU method in with some actual situational awareness, ala Tabula Rasa or AoC and allow the ranged folks to exhibit some targeting skill and the melee folks to showoff their footwork and blocking.  (sigh)

another lost opportunity...

So, what we've got here is just another version of CoH right?  Just has the fancy PnP created Champions system lying underneath.

So I'll be holding out for JE and KOTORO.

Am I the only one incredibly underwhelmed by the TenTon Hammer video?

Bill Roper joins the Champions dev team. (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20923)

I guess he needed the work.

Like Hutch said he needs a job. Also he probably wants to stay in the Bay Area.

I was wondering about that too. If they needed a "design director", at this stage in the game's development, why didn't they already have one?

I think they just needed a warm body, another pair of hands, if you will. And hey, he's got industry experience. In fact, he's got both the best and the second best kinds of industry experience!

:awesome_for_real:

Frak, who WOULDNT want to work for Cryptic right now?  I mean cmon, we all know what types of personalities generallly make up this industry (both dev and player).  Give them the chance to work for a company that's producing both Champions Online AND Star Trek Online and corduroy pants are immediately jizzed in.

Hopefully Roper can lead them back more towards the realm of real-time combat rather than the direction they seem to be going. 

It's this. Cryptic needs experienced people to pull off the kind of plan that gets ChampO out early 2009 and STO later on. I've go no idea what the status of their funding must be, given that they are an independent studio who sold off their major revenue stream (although CoH/V still licenses the Cryptic Engine from Cryptic, so they'd be getting some cash in from that).

Roper failed in the management of HGL, but a lot of the design worked. ChampO is meant to be an action RPG, so he can add a lot there (potentially) in enhancing that experience. If he's learned his lessons, he won't be building things from scratch (and probably wouldn't have to, given the alleged systems in place within the Cryptic Engine Mk II).

(sarcasm detector has gone off)

Alrighty, well... besides Blizz which studio (if any) would you like to be a part of?
I'm just saying dork nirvana's capital will be Cryptic in '09.  They've got IPs that represent the bookends of that market; comic-oriented superheroes (via tabletop gaming) and Star Trek.  You cant tell me it wouldnt be at least mildly entertaining to work for them.   Shyt, I'd have a field day in that place.

Apparently those in ChampO alpha / beta can say they've been in the ChampO alpha / beta, but nothing more (http://forums.champions-online.com/showpost.php?p=292378&postcount=708).

I've been in the ChampO alpha / beta for several months now.

And now, my opinions:  :nda:

Don't do that.

Until they drop the NDA, I'm not saying anything else. If you are interested, sign up for beta.

I signed up for beta the first day.  I've yet to hear anything from them.

This.

ChampO wishes everyone a Happy New Year (http://www.champions-online.com/node/179)

*sigh*

1997 called and wants its website design back.

So does CoX.

1997 called again, and wants its meme back along with that website design. The whole year is starting to sound pissed at us.

Guys, I keep trying to maintain hope that this title will be awesome.

You're ruining it.

Speaking of blowing open dunks, I'm still waiting for my basketball MMO that lets me play in a league with my "team" (guild), or pickup games (random pking), build my mansion and pimp out my ride (house/vehicle customization), or design my own shoes (guild crest).  Seems pretty fun, simple, and way easier than trying to do the same thing for football, baseball, or hockey, since basketball only has 5 players.

Motor City Online, eat my ass, NBA Online could definitely make a profit.

It'll be exactly as awesome as CoX in its day.

Which is to say, moderately awesome, and will have sidekicking. Plus they seem to be including some other stuff that wasn't in EQ.

If more than a couple of mmogs in the last five years had been even moderately awesome, and had sidekicking, and had at least one other feature missing from EQ, the genre wouldn't be such a fucking farce. So... reasons to be hopeful.


I'm looking forward to this - but not expecting it to be anything more than a place to take vacations from EVE.

Umm, how about something much cooler?  Why not select a REAL arch-nemesis from a lineup?  Computer opponents are just plain retarded.

Why do you need a game mechanic to do that?

Just pick someone and agree to fight them a lot.


The point of nemesis system is to add flavour to co-op pve missions. Which I suspect is the core of this game. If pve is 'retarded' don't buy games focussed on co-op pve.

Yeah, I think the point is that at any given time your Arch-Nemesis could show up and you'll have to fight him/her. It would be very annoying to have to show up randomly to be someones Arch-Nemesis. Plus, NPCs aren't douchebags and won't grief me "for teh lulz."

Some in-game footage from an msnbc story on the game:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28627999#28627999

Seems rougher than the DCUO vid from CES.

Huh.  Some of those scenes looked very rough, a couple were decent.  Not sure what to think. 

It really does look just like CoX 2.0, only with that crappy cell shading.  There was that one shot of someone picking up some object and throwing it, but it was hard to tell if there was really interaction with the environment like with DCUO.

CoX with more interesting environments. 

Should be like the original: First month with the costume creator. Second Month finding a build I like.  Third month getting bored with the leveling grind and quitting.   

That's a bit of an old video, since Sporkfire (Victor W.) has moved on to another company.

Here's a newer one. (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/61545) Both use some of the same footage. Run and gun is the term being used for the ability to attack and move at the same time with most powers.

Everyone else just calls them "instants"  :grin:

I think he actually means you can move during cast time, not cast time = 0.

That's it - run and attack at the same time. No stopping for the most part if you want to keep moving while attacking, much like Tomb Raider or God of War.

Yea, I was just being snarky ;-) Honestly, it's something I've wanted more of in these games. To date though we mostly only get run and gun when it involves an actual gun in that type of setting. More spells-while-moving please.

Any other F13ers in yet? If enough have, it might be worth having a separate sekret beta board. We can make a request for one, apparently.

Not worth a separate board :oh_i_see:

Ah, I hadn't caught that you could say you were in beta, the NDA itself is kind of unclear. I just got in last week.

Applied, but no answer as of yet.

Maybe some day.  :heartbreak:

I keep getting these messages telling me that I'm invited to do some preview days, but I'm not in beta or have a key.

For a game supposedly so close to release, there is very little info out about this.  Is it not possible to play a villain?  That gives DCUO a huge advantage right from the get-go. 

You know... you could cast spells while moving in Vanguard.  :awesome_for_real:

Email them, and they'll get you a key.

No villains at launch for ChampO afaik.

Microsoft can neither make nor distribute an MMO, and it'll all turn out to be complete and utter horseshit. DC will release, however, no matter tight lipped they are about it.

I was never able to move without crashing.

Take-Two is publishing Champions Online. Microsoft dropped out a long time ago (back when it was still Marvel Online).

Doh. Well, good thing then.

Atari is publishing ChampO, since Infogrammes bought Cryptic. Take-Two was dropped. Keep up!  :grin:

Oh yeah, heh.

I applied on the first day of beta signups, but I have yet to be invited.  :sad_panda:

There must be someone from Cryptic lurking here and they're sick of me bitching about how awful the cell shading looks.

Especially when they can read that kind of message continually on their own official boards.  :grin:

I can point to this pic that appears to lack the comic shading effects of some of the other shots:

(http://www.comicbookresources.com/images/games/champions/CO-Screenshot-3.jpg)

If you are interested in seeing how much costume customisation is in ChampO, check out Rate My Champion (http://www.champions-online.com/rate_my_champion?champ=2123) which is made up of existing beta characters.

If someone had told me that was rate my (city of) Hero, I wouldn't have blinked.

Not that this is a problem.


As for the cel shading, till I see it animated and full resolution, I can't judge.

I went through twenty.  The highest any of those outfits deserved was a 2, and that is being very, very generous.  That's only because a few were better than most, which deserved a 1.  All of them should be normalized to lose a star because most weren't even worth 1.

I was underwhelmed.

Of course, I can't be sure that the system is to blame. Maybe they just don't have any testers with creativity.

Some of those either deserved negative stars, or should have the age or IQ of the tester as explanation for why they deserved even one star.

Wow, those are the kind of heroes you see in crowd hero shots in poorly drawn 1960s-era comics. 

They look like the same Heroes that populate 95% of CoH currently.

Apparently this is the effect the designers have been trying to achieve.


The only reason this game is even on my radar at all is because I know cel shading usually looks much better in motion.  On the other hand, I've been underwhelmed by the videos released so far.

ChampO given just enough Rope(r) to hang itself

http://www.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=16753

 :ye_gods:

He's not the problem.

In the immortal words of George Costanza, it doesn't help.

That's true.

Who would you say is? No points for originality if you say "Jack Emmert" or mention "because I didn't like some of the changes to CoH/V".

Did Bill Roper just became a disgrace to the videogame world in your books thanks to the failure of HG:L, or do you hold personal previous grudges?

That said, from the interview:


In this sentence, what I hate about recent MMOs. This is exactly the kind of cool innovative feature (on paper) that won't make it in at launch, will be delayed indefinitely, and ultimately dumbed down and slapped in with the evacuation patch that comes with the server merger, right before terminal shutdown. Bets?

Did you just want to use a funny analogy or was there something Roper said that I missed where he threw Cyrptic under the bus? Seemed like the usual tame interview stuff to me. Even the statement that "it would be almost impossible for any MMO to compete with WoW" is basically conventional wisdom for anyone whose got a business interest in this specific segment of the genre.

The sentence I was referring to in the interview as terrible was the sentence where it said Bill Roper works on Champions Online.

I mean sure, Hellgate: London flubbed it up big time, but I don't actually think the game was THAT bad. The game in its final version before it died was actually fairly entertaining to play (at least mechanics wise, the levels were repetitive and there wasn't enough to do, but I though the mechanics were quite solid myself).

Anyway, whether Roper is involved in this project or not, I'm not sure if I'll be interested.  Super hero MMOs are interesting because in my opinion they are one of the few MMO settings where its actually appropriate for everyone to be silly powerful and well, heroic.  In fantasy and sci fi settings, i like to be able to play an "average" person, but in a super hero MMO, i don't feel that pulling at me.

If it is fun, I will play it.

They aren't using him as a business manager. As a developer, he could be exactly what ChampO needs given his action RPG background.

Not if he has a gypsy curse on him when it comes to online games.  Which I think is very likely.

I still give Roper a helluvah lot of credit for knowing how the minds of action gamers work. As a business manager of any kind, not so much.

Short opinion, good pickup for Cryptic and a chance at redemption for a guy who's done quite a bit for (and in) this industry.

His total failure with Hellgate seems like a square peg / round hole problem. He's probably one of those guys who needs a couple of more pessimistic, grounded in reality types who can slap him around when he proposes making a game with no revenue model and then creating an entirely separate game just to test the networking layer.

Something you see a lot is that one member of a collaboration spins off on their own and without boundaries strays off into crazy land. As long as they keep him doing what he's good at it's probably a good pickup. Then again, who the hell really knows how integral he was to the success of Blizzard products? Perhaps he's a guy that was a good public face and talked a good game.

In the same vein as the DCUO stuff coming out of NYCC, ChampO has a new if brief (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn3wqYjzBkk) video showing some in-city fighting. Also, some new demo footage (http://au.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/championsonline/video/6204324) from NYCC

Also, a few new images of Millennium City at the top of the screenshot page (http://www.champions-online.com/screenshots). If you look, it appears that they've toned down the comic shading / black outlines in these pictures to make them a little less cartoony.

Gamestop has ChampO pre-orders for a launch on June 2. It hasn't been confirmed, so I'm guessing someone just wants some pre-order money.

Overall, it looks like DCUO is certainly more the fan favourite title thus far, but that might be because 1) the IP and 2) they've got longer until launch so can promise more.

Thanks for posting. ChampO definitely feels more like the throwback of the two. Targetlock/stand-in-place/slower-paced. For fans who don't want console-y action. this is probably the better option. But I am beginning to suspect that the vast majority of players will go for DCUO instead. Unless something gets really screwed up, like they add in punitive death penalties or the leveling speed gets nuked.

:ye_gods:

To me, both look exactly like they are trying to be CoH2, with DC dumbed down somewhat for consoletards.

DC is certainly being marketed better, because 'SOE marketing vs Atari marketing  lol'.

The shading effects look fine to me.

The real problem is keyboard controls for something like DCUO, since all the gameplay is currently being done on PS3 controllers. ChampO is at least showing off mouse and keyboard controls at this point.

The other thing is that DCUO (at this point) seems a lot less customisable than ChampO in terms of powers.

It'll be interesting to compare them side by side when they launch. The area being demoed by DCUO is the same area they've demoed for about 6 months, while ChampO has shown off a few more areas. DCUO will have 6 - 12 months post-ChampO's launch to see what works and what doesn't.

You appear to be under the illusion that MMOG developers are capable of learning from the experience of others.

If only it were so.

No, no - they don't learn from their own experience at all. But other titles are a rich bounty of education (EQ for WoW) even if you learn the wrong lessons (WoW for WAR).  :grin:

I played this game today.   :ye_gods:  Don't get your hopes up.

Ever notice the worse a game is, the more NDA breaks you have?

He played it at New York Comic Con.

What was wrong with it?

(http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040726/images/2004-07-26ptech_emmert.jpg)

Well, I like the idea of things being classless. CoX is fun and all, but at the end of the day, you're pigeon-holed into certain bulds and abilities. If I understand that ChampO is pretty much open to all possibilities, then I'm there. I don't mind CoX 2.0. Though I doubt I"m going to jump right in like I did with CoH. Can lightening strike twice? Nature and history say the odds are against it.

I wouldn't mind a CoX 2.0, either, but I'd still like to know what's wrong with it.

Bad controls, animations were jerky in some parts, it plays exactly like WOW without loot.  At least that's what I got from playing it a few minutes and talking to the neckbeard at the booth.

Here's a video I took before I got yelled at.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thjoUP0CCdk

That person jumping around is just like that WOW pvper that constantly jump in combat, it's totally not necessary.

Oh dear.   :ye_gods:  And I was hoping for some sort of loot!  I love loot.  Maybe there will be a miracle build. 

MMOs, even superhero MMOs, must have loot.  Especially if it's in a crate or a box or something that you have to open.

From what I've seen of the game so far, why would a person play this instead of CoX?

I agree.  I don't know why, but CoH would be so much better if there was something available as loot beyond just the invention enhancements.  Even stupid things like more costume pieces, trinkets for your stronghold, or trophies would help.

(The invention costume stuff is a nice start, but I want more!)

Eh, some like their Wire-Fu. ;) If it makes you feel more heroic, then jump brother, jump!

There are items (ergo: loot) in ChampO.

Champions is supposedly getting a June release (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3172872).

GameStop have had ChampO available on pre-order (http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=13541) for June 2 for a while.

However, I'll await for official word from Cryptic, not Atari.

Video of ChampO's underwater zone, Lemuria. (http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/959/959164p1.html)

Never, in the history of the genre, has there ever been a good underwater zone.

Oh great, Murlocs.  :oh_i_see:

This game just keeps looking worse and worse  :ye_gods: And to think, I was excited about this a couple months ago.

I don't care.  I'm going to play it anyway.  If it's crap, I'll quit in a huff.  As usual. 

I agree with eldaec. Underwater zones so far have been ground zones with bubbles. Nothing has ever given the sense that it being in water matters. Fireballs and grenades still work. Fights are still planar. The breathing thing is just a bit of gear or potion away from being solved.

I'm not looking for some sim action here or anything. But I lump "water zone" into the same category as weather effects: I don't give a crap unless it affects the game somehow, and so far none of them have. I think the last game I had to care about the weather and environment conditions from freakin' Myth: The Fallen Lords. Flaming molotov cocktails landing in water or thrown in rain will go out.

Man I miss that game sometimes.

I am biased here though. I couldn't care any less about ChampO, and wouldn't even if it was a faithful depiction of the original game system, which I never played nor care to either. I just don't get any sense that ChampO is bringing anything new to the table.

Kedge Keep was definitely 3D. As for fireballs working underwater: it's magic, duh!

Kedge Keep was ok as far as being underwater goes.  It sucked as a zone because the pathing was atrocious and the loot was mediocre but it was the only place where battles could happen below your feet or over your head and you did have to pay attention to your air spells or whatever.

Has there even been a good underwater zone in the history of gaming?

Daggerfall. Maybe my favorite moment in dungeon crawling, when I fell like 40 stories down a well in the middle of a dungeon. Well, fell maybe 20 stories and had to swim 20 more to find the outlet into the bottom (?) of the dungeon, work my way back up through 20 submerged levels to get to the aerated portion of the dungeon, then explore like mad to find a way out.

I disagree a huge amount.  They make you move slowly and awkwardly, they are disorienting, and generally have you facing off against enemies that are about 100 times more suited for their environment than you are.  So, in fact, if effects the game a lot, just very negatively.

Jesus I remember doing something similar. I spent most of a day practicing swimming so I could get swim through a totally submerged tunnel without blacking out/dying.

As hard as it was, I thought Kedge was fucking awesome. It required actual thought and effort from the players to do anything right, and not just because the pathing was dick even for EQ1. Unfortunately, most MMOG players are completely retarded pussies who can't accept challenge, so I only got to raid there a few times, and I had to make special guild events just to get people to go.

Ditto on Kedge. Despite the shitball pathing, it was a cool zone and interesting experience.

And I feel the same way about pussified mmo players, but to be fair, that was back when dying was a kick in the fucking junk, with losing levels and whatnot.

Hrm, obviously don't remember Kedge the way you guys do. Wonder if I skipped that? I do remember the bitching about the pathing though, something on the order of Unrest iirc :-) Only "underwater zone" I remember from EQ1 was The Grey, that outdoor vacuum. Looking over at EQAtlas I think I must have missed The Deep too or something.

We're not playing in the same underwater zones maybe. The only difference I've seen with enemies are those that naturally breath underwater as opposed to I who needed to bring waterbreathing pots. The disorientation I can see if you're playing in first-person, but I haven't done that since, actually, EQ1 :-)

Unless you were working on epics for yourself or your guildmates you probably didn't bother with the zone. It was a lot of work to get people equipped to go down there (e.g. camping Hadden for the Fishbone Earring).

I remember Kedge and I don't remember much good about it. It did have some interesting dynamics, but mostly it was just a pain in the ass.

The Grey was sorta similar, but lacked the pathing problems and the extra axis to worry about (the interesting part). By Luclin, water/no-breathing wasn't so much of an issue as it was back before Kunark.

Can't accept heavy punishment for their failures, not the challenge itself.

Ah ok that makes sense. I didn't join EQ1 until Velious launched.

Both, really, considering they bitch and give up after a few failures in WoW, and there's effectively no punishment for failure there.

Curiously, I found people were more stubborn and less willing to give up after a few wipes, back in EQ, where the penalty was significant.

That said, EQ was home to all manner of death-avoiding tactics as well. No-one wanted to lose several hours work to an unfortunate death.

I'm all for a light death penalty provided the game experience is packaged well. Ultimately it is up to the game to convince me to spend what I have to in order to make that lost time back up.

I think games need a wider variety of risk reward.  There's something about the tension that EQ created during a dungeon crawl that made it an exciting experience that I haven't felt since.  I'm not saying that entire games should be filled with the soul crushing time sinks that EQ had.  I'm just saying that there should be some VERY difficult encounters that cater to player skill rather than gear. 

The players of EVE just started screaming blue murder because a tiny subset of mobs got given an AI that assesses threat rather than just blindly locking the nearest player. Oh, and because they now use remote repair modules on each other. Apparently a standard fit Raven can't solo any number of the things without having to modify tactics in any way.

This is the players of EVE. Do you really think any element of uncertainty or challenge is going to be accepted in diku-land any time soon?

For players who actually want a challenge or at least some general level of breathing room, they general hate heavy punishments for failure, though how "heavy" the punishment is kind relative to each players individual sense of "it's not that bad". However most mmo players don't play mmo for the sake of a challenge. Because mmo's are far removed from the incentives that drive most games. Hence, they will scream bloody murder if you raise the difficulty. There is also alot of deep seeded reasons why even players who are normally inclined for a challenge turn off their brains come mmo time. For one mmo traditional don't reward the best players. Your goal isn't getting better at the game, your goal is to reach the next loot/reward. Two considering what is generally accepted as great gameplay in mmo land I have more fun playing snes megaman on hard mode, than doing anything remotely difficult using the crapstic skills and classes mmo's make you use.

I was always surpised that COH did not do any underwater zones. The whole game is setup for people who can fly/levitate/jump far so the game/AI and movement is designed with z axis movement in mind. Kedge keep was fun but it also showed why they did not do many underwater dungeons. The AI pathing the way eqlive did pathing really really really DID NOT LIKE Z AXIS movement. They had a hell of a time after it was first implemented and populated with mobs just suiciding like crazy due to pathing issues.

COH and champions online both already have to deal with those issues due to all the flying and alternative movements and if you can do that fine and have the AI handle it may as well do underwater.

Back then I was a lot more hardcore and had Hadden perma-camped on our server. I gave out fishbones to my friends and was selling them on ebay because I was only working part-time as a DJ. I was one of only a couple high-level wizards, and he was an easy farm. It made me feel dirty.

Then I started playing a necro later on, and the Kedge rule was to evac when I FD'd. At the time my rl buddy was the evac wizard, and we usually played in the same room. We seldom died down there.

I will grant that EQ1 had some SERIOUS issues wth over punishment for death. I was and am one of the most vocal assholes about having light death penalties. But Kedge wasn't even about the death penalty - most of the higher level raids in the game were in places that a raid wipeout would make corpse retrieval a fucking chore. Planes raids, both of the old world dragon raids, shit just regular dungeon crawling in places like Lower Guk or Mistmoore or Unrest or Solusek A or B were set up so that recovering from a wipe was tought.

No, Kedge was mostly just pussy MMOG players who didn't want a challenge of any kind. Bad enough you needed to be on your toes with water-breathing spells and potions if you couldn't get Hadden's earring (and as Sky said, most servers it was permacamped anyway). But then you had to worry about things coming at you from all angles, you had to move differently, and some fish would explode upon death, meaning you had to watch your adds, AOE spells and such. It took more effort than just pull, mez, assist and med. The gear that dropped was decent, but until you went deeper in, there was better gear in easier to deal with dungeons like Sol B, and easier experience to camp for in those dungeons as well. Combine that with the fact that it was well away from most population centers AND a pain in the ass to find without a map and people just wouldn't go there without someone leading an expedition. Most of those pain in the ass factors, I can understand, but I always felt that the experience (not the Xp bar kind, but the actual fun and strategy of the place) was worth the effort, more so than most MMOG dungeons.

Even if a game offered zones with tougher death penalties itemized with better loot, players would still avoid them for the most part. Those kind of zones also make itemization harder overall. EQ2 kind of does this by offering X2 encounters that a good single group can potentially beat.

Hur, again...I was a necro by the time we were doing Kedge :P My wiz buddy and I never had a problem!

The things you list about Kedge are the reasons I liked it. It was interesting, most people avoided it and it was off the beaten path. Because seriously, fuck most mmotards, ignoring them makes the genre palatable.

Shiz, notice me deftly avoiding a rant about itemization progression.

Xbox 360 version delayed. (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/champions-onlines-bill-roper-interview?page=2)

Interest in playing diminishing.

Perhaps.

However, I'm annoyed that 1) Cryptic was all over an Xbox 360 launch until what is three months until launch and 2) it's yet another PC MMO in a market full of existing and upcoming MMOs, whereas on the Xbox 360 the competition is FFXI, which is the equivalent of a overweight mall guard with heavy asthma.

So they'll "streamline" the shit out of the game to get it to run on a console, then release as pc exclusive?

LAWL WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Starting to get that ol' familiar preparation for let down feeling once again.  I'd say huge let down, but really I don't care that much already.

I have one buddy key to give away for the Preview if anyone is interested.  Feel free to fight amongst yourselves for this incredible honor.   :awesome_for_real:

Edit: Given away

I've also got a buddy key. PM me if interested.

Gone baby gone.

If we are that close to release, is there a non-NDA-breaking power or skill list anywhere?  I've heard surprisingly little on that front. 

I wouldn't mind a preview key if possible!
But I'm from Europe is it okay or won't it work?

Development cycles for MMO's are still too long to really work on consoles.  With no certainty that the next generation of systems will have BC, that gives developers only a small window of time to release an MMO while a console is still in its prime.  The Agency for example, was announced just over 2 years ago, and has presumably been in development since before the PS3 was released.  There hasn't been any news on it in half a year, not even a vague idea of a release date, and by the time it gets released, the PS3 might well be more than halfway through its lifespan.  That's a pretty shitty proposistion, when a decent MMO on the PC can last for years.

For a 3rd party developer it's even harder.  If you want to get the game out there early in the generation, you've either got to go multiplatform, or you've got to try to predict early on which console is going to take the lead.

I'd check it out, not sure I have the time for it, though. I did love CoH.

The best option for consoles would be a pseudo-mmo like DDO where its all instanced so you can keep things under control to match the console needs.

Take COH, remove the city other than Atlas and make everything instanced. Run it as cash shop/rmt. I think it would be moneyhats.

I always thought Guild Wars or a Guild Wars type game could work on console, because of the way they did the skill loadout.  CoH has way too many powers to work well on a console, imo.

It's not the tech that makes MMOs on consoles a challenge. It's the business model. Consoles rely on title churn from different developers and publishers paying separate residuals. And the X360 specifically has a tiered subscription structure already. So putting an MMO on that not only brings obsessive behavior that doesn't compel users to buy further titles, it also asks them to pay for XBL and a monthly fee, or additional into microtransacations.

Plus, there's the other problem that most people in the west who have a console probably have a computer capable of running MMOs anyway.

"Someday" it'll happen. Maybe DCUO will actually be hugely successful on PS3. But it's not really as straightforward as some think it is. And tech is merely a secondary problem.

I hope it's good, I certainly didn't mind the gameplay or environment of champions. Just disliked the lack of progression and repetition. Maybe this time with more experience and a larger budget they can make something even better. Of course more likely it will be another example of second-system effect. The fact they're actually focusing on the PC version first is another very encouraging sign.

I'm signed up for the beta, but if someone has a buddy key I certainly wouldn't say no.

Well for NDA, all we can say is that we are in the beta, and that is it.  So me, UnSub, and Cadaverine are in it, any one else?  I have a buddy key available too, so someone pm that is willing to try it out too.

I'm glad for the PC version, too.  I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty certain I want to play it on the PC.  I keep resubbing to CoH when I get bored with WoW or whatever else I'm playing.  It's always good fun for at least a month or so at a stretch, but then I wander off.  I'm definitely hoping one of these superhero games will endure a bit longer.  I really do enjoy the whole superhero thing.  It's much cooler than wandering around with pointy ears and giant sword named Johnson.  Happy it's coming out in June, too.  (allegedly).  I'm sure CoH won't last me even that long.  My times in the game get shorter and shorter - I know it too well, I think.

I find that interesting too. Betaleaks did have some stuff up on it, but I've go no idea what Betaleaks and MMOHell are currently up to given that both sites redirect to each other with no additional content that I can see.

I'm in the beta too.

Are they giving them out frequently...actually you probably can't answer that.

I'm in it also, but no buddy key as far as I know.

I have a key up for grabs too claimed

Hey Stark, if it's still available and you've got nothing better to do with it. I'd appreciate it!

If anyone has a spare key, let me know.

This is no different to PCs.

PC manufacturers rely on churn through steadily higher spec games to sell upgrades. Even without residuals, the effect is the same.

And just like PCs, the game publisher doesn't give a rat's ass if the hardware OEM gets enough cash (or at least, he shrugs his shoulders and views OEM hardship as a tragedy of the commons).

I'd love to have a buddy key if anyone has. There does feel like some uniqueness here.

@eldaec: wuh? PCs don't turnover as quickly as console software. How much money from a RAM or hard drive upgrade goes back to the original label on the PC (assuming it's not a custom job)? The game publisher may not care, but it's built into the ability to make a console game because Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony control that channel almost entirely (alongside retailers).

Basically, I'm not seeing where there's any parallel except in the most abstract "well they all make games" sense.

I disagree. MS and Sony would absolutely love to get successful MMOs on their systems. Just thinking about the next WoW exclusively on their console gives them mahogany. They could take a cut of however the game is monetized, whether it's subscriptions, buying silly hats, or whatever. The real problem is the locked-down console security model and certification process. You can't just push changed code to a console, it needs to be certified, and both MS and sony are incredibly slow at doing so. That's why neither console has been successfully or pervasively hacked to run unsigned code.

Well, the 360 was hacked a couple of years ago via the king kong game, but it was patched right away and never went anywhere. Its security model isn't inherently flawed like the previous generation of consoles.

To properly support a MMO, the developers must have the ability to patch at will, particularly in the first couple months of operation. The certification process isn't an insurmountable problem, but it is a sizable one. Any successful console MMO would either need to somehow run in its own hypervised DMZ or MS/sony would have to be willing to give up some degree of control.

No MMOs doen't need to be patched anymore than any other console game in their first months.  The mindset of developers that they have such leeway does need to change, however.

In principal I would agree. But of course you can't offer any examples of that actually happening, because it never has.

Also there's a distinct need to leverage players for test servers, the ability to rapidly patch ingame exploits and dupes, and so on.

I can barely give examples of non-DIKU MMOs either.  A lack of evidence doesn't mean it's not possible.  It just means accepted standard practices need to raise their standards.

Absolutely, and I would love to live in that wonderful world. So, how do I make it through that door? Every time I get within reach, the rainbow disappears and I fall back to this boring old stuffy planet.

:(

So the reason this is a business decisions is because of the "locked down security and certification process". If they truly wanted to suck players into one game to rule them all, they could, ya know, change the process. Sony is already doing that, but of course playing the homefield advantage, as they have the right to.

But I contend that they don't because of what I said above. Which actually corrolates with what you just said about there being no precedent. There isn't, so it makes it hard to change the thinking when a) things are working so well for them already (Xbox Live is an uncontested marketplace unto itself); and, b) Wii rolled the evolutionary clock back by a few years (man I hate the Wiicade setup... it's like some mid-90s website... bleh!).

Which ultimately means that it's not a "console" problem, but rather, a Microsoft and Nintendo problem. And no single solution works for either one. Microsoft was probably hoping for VG to be their card to play in the "homefield advantage" thing, their DCUO. And Nintendo just doesn't seem to really care at all right now, because they don't need to.

I'm sure they can find a way to put parts of the code outside of the certification process, while keeping enough inside to hold the game hostage and milk residuals. Which is all certification is about anyway.