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New Champions Online Details
Eurogamer sat down with Bill Roper of Cryptic Studios to discuss Champions Online, their superhero MMO due out in a few months. Roper mentioned that the PC version of the game will be coming out well ahead of any console versions, and he provided some insight into the game's Nemesis system. "When you get around the mid-game, you have the ability to create your Nemesis... Then you start going on these separate Nemesis missions — you'll start getting ambushed by the minions of your Nemesis, and eventually one of these minions will kind of break down, and say 'oh no please don't, I'll tell you I'll you,' and you get a clue off him. You go through a whole series of these very Nemesis-specific quests which revolve around the things you put in about your Nemesis, but it's not always the same path that you take, there's multiple story directions that you could be going through." Examiner also spoke briefly with Randy Mosiondz, lead designer for the game, about the questing and the game environment. IGN got a look at Lemuria itself, and Cryptic posted some of the concept art.
Anyone know why Cryptic are realising a superheroes game that's going to be in direct competition with their previous superheroes game? Is City of Heroes dying?
Who ordered that?
I remember this quote from flagshipped.com:
"I should really go into the video game market. I mean, what other market can you go in to, quit a good job, form a company and be one of the biggest contributing reasons why 100 people lose their jobs, a foreign company has to sell itself to another, and over 200,000 customers are left with $50 coasters, have to liquidate most of your assests, and STILL get a job - one that the employer is even ENTHUSIASIC about wanting you to work with them."
Prove it.
If you look at the actual numbers , you'll see that City of Heroes had its highest subscriber numbers while Jack was in charge. In fact, the thing that he's criticized most for, Enhancement Diversification, is widely regarded now as a necessary step for the game's gameplay systems to evolve as they have, and the game actually gained subscribers—that's right, gained subscribers—when it was released.
Jack-bashing is very popular with City of Heroes fans, but the truth of the matter is that City of Heroes was his baby and that the game's best years financially so far have been under his reign.
I don't mean to take away from Matt Miller's competence, because he's doing a fine job, and City of Heroes continues to be a great game. I also don't mean to imply that Jack was perfect, because I disagreed with him on one or two fundamental points. But this whole "Jack was destroying the company" line is so tired and really, it's always been nothing but a bunch of nonproductive BS propagated by fanboy forumites who don't know what they're talking about.
As for the whole "he didn't listen to the subscribers" crap, if developers listened to everything the subscribers whined about, we'd undoubtedly have a "make me level 50" button by now, complete with purple IOs, infinite influence, the ability to take all powersets on a single character, and a power that recharges instantly that immediately defeats all enemies. PvP matches would be won based on who could hit the button first. There's a reason that developers don't jump through hoops to do everything players ask for, why all games, even City of Heroes as it exists today, are the visions of their developers (duh...). If everyone got what everyone wanted, it would effectively destroy any game.
The funny thing is that I see plenty of posts on the City of Heroes forums making the same tired old claims that you're making about Jack about the current developers. Waaah.
Regarding competition from Champions and DCUO, it's really hard to say. CoX is a traditional MMO-styled game in tights, but the other two are very much action-RPGs with a very stylized aesthetic. They're in the same theme, and arguably the same genre, but so were Ultima Online and Everquest. UO is still ticking along even now, because there is an intense sense of ownership among players of that game-- personal housing still magnetizes the player base, which is why the newer landmass expansions include space for it. Even if it's possible to duplicate a character's identity in another game, the psychological impact of virtual uprooting is a strong deterrent to making the move. For CoX, that sense of ownership is in the character avatars themselves, their Badges (analogous to Xbox Live Achievements) and Veteran Rewards, instanced Supergroup bases and to a lesser extent, the optional value-add costume packs. The added opportunity to purchase extra character slots (and free slots earned every year of subscription) indicates that NCsoft knows exactly where the strength of their City lies in the face of competition.
Well as someone who has played City of Heroes off and on since day 1, I can't say its dying at all. NCSoft is continuing to improve and expand the game - and all expansions are free of charge. The only expansion they charged for was City of Villains which was essentially a completely new game environment using similar mechanics. Both games are now merged into one.
There are still a ton of people playing new low level alts, and the game is going strong in my opinion. The game does have an extremely low churn rate as someone noted, and its evident by the fact that so many new characters are regularly being generated and played.
Mission Architect is coming out in the next expansion and it holds the promise to revolutionize the MMO industry in one regard: It allows players to create their own missions, their own NPC opponents, define their own story arcs and define a series of related missions, up to 5. It allows access to all of the existing NPC opponents and the modification of them to have their own powersets and appearances. Once created a mission can be uploaded so that the rest of the playerbase can try it out and rate it. The best rated missions/arcs will be examined by the devs and added to the canon of the game. There is a tremendous interest in this of course, and I think if it proves enjoyable, that this will raise the bar on MMO design considerably.
Although its filling the Superhero MMO niche and that is not to everyone's taste, the game is a fantastic design, and very effective in what its set out to achieve. MA is just another large step in improving the game and its due out soon I believe. Its in private beta at the moment, and usually NCSoft will bring that public for a few weeks to iron out any last bugs before it goes live.
The biggest advantage for NCSoft if they get MA working right is of course that the players will be adding to the content of the game, making it far easier to add other improvements to the game by taking off the pressure to add new missions and opponents (although of course someone will have to be fixing problems with MA in the meantime). I expect this will allow them to expand the game in other areas. They do not seem like they are slowing down at all.
COH probably seems like its a stagnant game to many players who are not familiar with it primarily because most of the expansions (COV aside) have been offered free to the players. Thus there are no new boxes showing up on the shelves at regular intervals.
They recently added a Mac OS/X client (well really its the Windows client with cedega back end support) that works *very well* at least in my experience. The client was available for download for free and still is. Yes, you can *buy* it and get some added in game bonuses (costume items, and a Teleport-straight-to-mission power), but you can also buy those bonuses separately for a nominal fee.
All in all I hope Champions Online does well, and I will certainly try it. It may indeed draw a lot of the playerbase away from COH, but for the moment COH is going quite strong actually and still has a bright future in my opinion.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I'm one of the players that's currently involved in Closed Beta Testing for this on their European servers.
Without violating the Non-Disclosure agreement (I'm posting anon as we're not allowed to admit involvement of any given named accounts) I can say this:
The Mission Architect is part of "Issue 14" (one of the City Of Heroes free expansions).
Generally speaking they've done a terific job on this so far. There are still a number of bugs to be worked out, naturally, but it's really coming together in terms of all the customising you can do. At present, you can create a mission arc populated with virtually any kind of encounter in the game, on virtually any of the game's mission maps.
That's things like straight "Defeat X enemies", ambushes, rescues, boss fights, escort missions, "find the glowie", "destroy the object", timed fights, outdoor "brawls", etc. You can also set enemy alignment so two enemy types will fight each other as well as you, or just fight you, or help you.
Custom enemy factions are possible too, and can be created using City Of Heros' costume creator (the absurd levels of customisation allowed in this is still one of the game's biggest selling points). Currently you can assign "powersets" of your choosing to each enemy in a custom faction, set its rank (strength), AI type (prefer melee/range), etc.
As an example of what can be done: At the moment I have a mission in the creator which makes you rescue ten different "Elite Boss" level NPC allies - each with their own individual names, costumes, biographies and powersets. These are all exact copies of many of the playable characters in my supergroup ("guild"). In this mission, these characters all join up with you to help you fight against three similarly-customised Archvillain-level duplicates of three playable characters from my villaingroup. There are multiple triggers for different lines of custom dialogue during each rescue, as well as during each villain encounter.
This is going to be HUGE. A Superhero/Supervillain game where all the roleplayers are able to make their own missions, including encounters with their own personal customised nemesis, etc? Pure Dynamite.
Players are able to rate and comment on each other's arcs, so there's also a level of "fame" to be won. You get "rewards" for playing other people's arcs and having them play and rate yours.
The biggest problem we're currently seeing at the moment during testing is that the Mission Arcs are rather restricted in terms of file size. Creating custom characters uses up rather a lot of space since a copy of all the costume data used for custom NPCs is stored seperately for each mission arc - stored as a stream of uncompressed text in a format that's very similar to XML. This is something that they're hopefully going to rectify during the final stages of Beta before Issue 14 makes it onto the live servers.
I'm not going to give details on the rewards or exactly what maps, factions, powersets etc. are allowed as that would likely breach the NDA. It is however going to be a *lot* of fun, and will likely eclipse the "regular" content for a while.