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General: Cryptic Announces Champions Online
Szark
News ManagerMember Posts: 4,420
After much speculation on what Cryptic Studios have been working on since the Marvel MMO was officially canceled, they have officially announced that they are remaining in the super hero business with an MMO based on the pen an paper RPG Champions.
LOS GATOS, CA – February 20, 2008 – Cryptic Studios™, one of the leading independent developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), announced today Champions Online™, their first ever self-developed and self-published MMORPG. Champions Online, based on the popular pen-and-paper Champions RPG, will give players the power of total customization of their hero experience while they explore a vast universe of richly detailed 3D environments. Champions Online is slated for release in Spring 2009.
Cryptic Studios also announced today that it has acquired the Champions intellectual property (IP) from Hero Games. First published in 1981, the Champions role-playing game is one of the first RPGs to forgo the traditional dice-rolling system of character generation in favor of a point-based system. Cryptic Studios has licensed back to Hero Games the rights to produce Champions RPG books, and the sixth edition of the HERO System and Champions, set to release in 2009, will include rules on how to recreate Champions Online characters and scenarios.
"We thought carefully about which IP to select for our next game,"said Jack Emmert, chief creative officer of Cryptic Studios. "I've been playing the Champions RPG since it first came out and I love both the rich history and wide array of compelling characters which made this an obvious choice for Cryptic Studios."
Read more here.
Visit the Champions Online Official site here.
Comments
Meh... might be worth a look if I don't feel I have to compete against other players for anything. Hopefully there will be no forced grouping and all content will be available to the solo player. And please dear Lord, let there NOT be any PvP. The IQ level of the player base drops by 100 in every game that has PvP in it.
City of Heroes 2.0 ?
For me it's worth a try.
Oh and definitely worth a try for me aswell, i just hope they get the interface down with the 360 version.
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the game sounds amazing, there will be pvp from launch in underground arenas, and cryptic said there will be solo content all the way up to and including the end game
I'm not a big superhero person, but if it has some cool features I'll definitely check it out.
Long time fan/player of the pnp rpg Champions. Only played CoX in the trial, and didn't continue cas of my system at the time ran it crappy. May have to check it out again the time being. But I willl sure follow this mmo. If they do it justice, I'm all in! Champions was my favorite pnp. The characters creation point system was just ingenious, I would just spend hours creating superheroes. Picking powers, disadvantages, multipowers, etc. The campaign scernarios were written well too. The CO team will have plenty of supervillians, mythos, etc. to pull from and recreate. Does any one remember the The Blood, an alien faction that came here by their hobo/alchoholic leader Pathfinder who was a multi-dimensional teleporter that escaped his own planet with his so called family, here to earth. And the chaos that followed, man loved some of the things they came up with. And the original cover for the manual was an instance draw for me as a kid to play. I'll try to find it if I have it still and post here in the forums. I had one character name Impulse, who had powerful energy punches, but one of his disadvantages was he was a major berserker, and always lost control killing tons of Viper millitia. So, many great memories of this game, I could go on and on.
My main concerns are 1) give the player full control of their character and his powers, if it's like the point systems, or some similar lvl based system, I'll be stoked. 2) The end game needs to be more than just smash-n- bash to death quests. They need to have the abilities for players to create their own headqaurters with their superfriends and be able to pvp against other superviliians (maybe even a FFA server where you can choose good, evil, neutral, or for self gain), and have destructable buildings to eliminate each others goals and acomplishments. In otherswords, have a wonderful pve system installed but allow character/player pvp immersion be part of the mmo world. To me that's the next gen mmo.
I never heard the announcement that marvel online was cancelled. Oh well with Cap dead and spidey screwed up for the nth time I don't care.
Ill give this new cryptic game a look they make nice stuff.
This game is gonna rock!
It'll be the most open ended MMORPG ever in terms of character creation!
What CoX did for costumes they will repeat and be as flexible in terms of powers!
This game is going to be great. No way around it.
I'm not here to complete my forum PVP dailies.
A little concerned that the screenshots look like CoH2-Cell Shaded Boogaloo....but I will watch this one closely.
the screenshots are probably of marvel online and they just renamed it and took out all the marvel characters.
Champions was one of the best if not the best RPG system for creating whatever you wanted--hope Cryptic can do it justice.
Apply lemon juice and candle flame here to reveal secret message.
The time spent developing Marvel was not wasted. They just renamed the game.
One thing I found here (http://www.champions-online.com/game_features) should be quite fun to play with as well...
Your powers, on your terms: There are a multitude of astonishing powers to choose from in Champions Online, and its flexible character creation system gives you total control over your hero's abilities. You can even pick the appearance of your powers. Do you want purple force fields? Green fire blasts? Jet black claws? In Champions Online, you decide!
I haven't played CoH in quite some time, so I don't even know if they added this, but I always thought it would be a great idea to modify the looks of your powers. I know programmatically it could be a nightmare for the developers, but if Champions can pull this off, I think it would be a blast.
I never heard of Champions until today, so i researched it some today on the internet. What sparked my interest is that it was a pnp game. Turns out that they can't use the Hero System in the game, so I am not so excited about it anymore. My favorite thing in any type of game is character creation and development. The world I develop it in doesn't matter a whole lot to me, since after a while, the stories and conflict all sounds the same. I heard some comments about the screen shots and took another look myself. I think the graphics for this game is horrible. Well, not so much the graphics, but the artistic use of it. The game looks extremely comic book like and not nearly enough realistic for my tastes. I want something that looks realistic. I don't think I am the only one who would think a super-hero in a realistic setting shooting lightning out of their hands would be cooler than a super-hero shooting lightning out of their hands with comic book graphics. It would just feel fake and dull, sort of like these side scroll free MMORPG's.
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR
Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
CHAMPIONS ROLEPLAYING GAME is one of the most openended game systems ever created.
you can literary create anything you want there
It will be a great game !!!!
Lookin forward to it
If this was done by someone else would you guys still be giving this thing a "worth a try" rating?
This is not a game.
I certainly would. Just because it isn;t another tired, fantasy-genre game. CoX, regardless of who developed it, was a fun game, if not the most indepth. This looks like it will take the Superhero genre to new heights.
A Little Dab'll Do Ya!
Even if a game company's previous game was a bomb, if I read up on another game that they are doing, and I feel it's at least worth a try, I will try it (that doesn't mean i will stick with it more than a month).
No matter what anyone says, this game will be looked at as CoH2. There is no getting around that. I for one hope things will be improved in this game that weren't in CoH.
This is awesome news! Cyrptic out of the clutches of M$, and doing a MMO on the PNP Super Hero game that makes Marvel look like Poo.
Best announcemnt this year period. My bags are already packed I'm leaving Paragon city for Melinium City as soon as this hits beta.
Jack Emmert is a smart designer. Matt Miller is not. CoH became great at the hands of Jack. It is in decline because of Matt. Matt now works for NCSoft, spearheading the continued decline of a once-great game.
I am VERY excited that Cryptic is designing a new superhero game with Jack and no Matt.
Oh and definitely worth a try for me aswell, i just hope they get the interface down with the 360 version.
I hope so. I pray the quests and content are MUCH more in depth. Maybe even have things to buy other than powerups.
Champions was an excellent pnp game and the HERO system was a really great tabletop game system. It actually is reassuring that Cryptic is not following it for a MMORPG because it could be abused way too easily.
That said, I'm holding judgement until they can show that they're trying to keep the customizable feel of the system rather than just mashing superheroes into standard EQ-MMORPG classes like CoX did (Tank, Healer, DPS).
Sure the HERO system had categories that superheroes generally fit into, Superstrength Brick, Martial Artist, Energy Blaster etc but those were only loose categories. There were no real classes and you were free to pick any powers you wanted. Cryptic will have their hands full trying to make a game that keeps that sense of freedom and choice.
I'll probably be following the game just for nostalgia sake.
Oh yeah, the following is only for old fans of Champions - what the HECK happened to DEFENDER? They made him look like a re-vamped Statesman, for pete's sake! And in his description they say he'll fight without his powersuit helmet?
The Defender I know wasn't an idiot, does Tony Stark go out into battle without his helmet? He suit is supposed to have life-support functions, kind of hard to have THOSE with that Statesman-style face shield. /sigh. That Dr. Destroyer needs work too, the Dr. D I know was a massive, towering figure who could go toe-to-toe with any Brick, the character in those screenshots looks like an athletic magic-user.
Ya, I agree with ya Alienovrlord, they made them to cutsy looking for my taste. I think they need to rethink there art direction a little. There going to have a comic book line out for sure with this release, and in order get great sales from it, there going have to hired some good artists to come up with some original characters and not just the common archetypes that we all have seen too many times.
Ok, I read the article in Game Informer. Not impressed to be honest. It sounds just like City of Heroes(which I could not get into in the least and I love superheros and comics).
For me, the graphics are the problem. I know games are more than graphics but they should at least be pleasing to the player in some way shape or form and I personally cannot stand any, ANY variation of cel shading. I've hated it ever since it came on the scene and because of it I won't even bother TRYING the game.
I'm intrigued by the 'City's Transform' part of the game features...love the idea of actually being able to influence the world through storylines, hopefully they dont disapoint, i would also love to be able to play as my secret identity(clarke as opposed to superman) and have storyline to do through that aspect as well.