Ten Ton Hammer *Interview And IGN Power Armor Video

maskedweasel

 From http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/68230

 

 

"Champions Online puts the POW! in power sets

Super heroes are their powers. Without a super heroes powers or gadgets, he or she is little more than a grown up toddler that’s pretending to be the masked vigilante. So even though there are plenty of initial customization options in Champions Online regarding costume and body type, it’s equally as important for the developers to present gamers with a extremely customizable set of options and initial powers to choose from. As the first in a series of exclusive interviews with CO’s Bill Roper, we sat down with the Cryptic leading-man to learn more about the powers in the game and what kind of options the gamers have in terms of customizability and making the “best” super hero.

Ten Ton Hammer: First off, why did you guys decide to push back the release date? Obviously you felt like the game needed some more time, but which areas in particular are you focusing on with that extra time?

Bill Roper: From the other side of the fence, we really wanted to make sure we have the proper marketing and PR so people knew more about the game and have the time for that. But I think that the big deal really is that we have the time now to go through and really get the game polished and have all those different elements in that we wanted to get done so that we can launch as soon as possible but get it as polished as it can be. And with that extra time there are a couple things that were on the bubble of getting in that now we can get in, so I think that’s really good too. We got a couple of extra things in that we weren’t sure if they were going to make it by the July 14th date, but can definitely be in by September 1st so we’re finishing those up now, and then just bug fixing and polish and polish and polish and polish. We really want to make sure that when the game comes out that it’s as good as it can be.

Ten Ton Hammer: For those people that aren’t familiar, the term frameworks, is that from the original pen and paper version of Champions? And in that game do players pick a framework like they’re picking a class, or do you pick powers from different frameworks? How does that typically work?

Bill Roper: The frameworks are another way of thinking of how you’re building all the powers for your character. The reason we use that is to give it some kind of overall guideline on putting a character together, it goes inside of a framework.

The presentation to players though is that there’s different power sets. There’s 18 different power sets in the game and those are all very thematically put together - like Fire, Lightning, Archery, Gadgeteering, and Telekinesis – so they’re very ‘4 color comic’, thematic sets of powers that are together. If you wanted to you can stay within a power set to make that framework usable and just fill in the framework for your character, but any time you add a power you have the ability to choose from every power that’s available.

So that’s what we mean when we say you have a ‘custom’ framework that you can build to. The concept being that you’re not required to just stay within a certain class or power set. Whatever you can think up for your hero, as best you can and with the powers that we have available you can build that hero out by creating this customized framework.

Ten Ton Hammer: Would you say that the power sets you’ve put together initially, from a gameplay standpoint would you say that they’re mostly thematic, or do they have some archetypes built into them too like melee DPS characters, ranged DPS, support or tank?

Bill Roper: They’re really mainly thematic. What we’re doing right now is filling out all the power sets with at least some control powers, some utility powers, so that you can really be able to pick and choose amongst the different power sets. The goal of that will be thematic. Now, some of them are going to lend themselves more to melee obviously if you’re taking martial arts powers, or ranged attacks. But really you can use any of the different power sets to construct whatever type of character you’re trying to play, or whatever role you’re trying to assume.

Like I built what you’d think of as more of a classic tank-type character – so somebody who’s up in the midst of a fight, controlling agro and does certain damage – but it was all done with certain shielding, PBAoE and crowd control powers. So I built a character that fulfilled that role in my head, but it was around this thematic concept. It’s really one of the biggest strengths of such a flexible system that you can fulfill a classic MMO role, but you’re deciding what that is and you’re building your hero the way people believe it as.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s look at, not necessarily the typical gamer but the more hardcore gamer; the min/maxer to the extreme. Would it be possible for him if he’s not interested in a theme at all, would he be able to put together a really kick-ass super hero with a broad range of powers from different power sets? Or is the game balanced enough that he may not necessarily have the upper hand against somebody else who just is sticking with a particular theme?

Bill Roper: I always assume that the min/maxer will find the optimum connection of powers, and finding those emergent gameplay interactions between powers that we never foresaw when making them, that’s always our fun challenge is then saying “we’ve got to be balanced and what will we do about that?” But really the game was designed to, for example say I want to make a flying fire hero. Say that’s my character, I can just stick to the power set for fire, I could take Flight and I would a totally fun, confident, cool character to play. I think there will always be combinations that will be a percentage better, but really the goal is not to have it be where there’s certain builds that just stand out head and shoulders above anything else.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there easy ways for players to find powers from a particular archetype of character? For example if somebody wanted to play support, would there be an easy way for him to figure out which powers would be best for his character? Are the powers pretty much self-explanatory or is there some other way that players could figure out which powers to use?

Bill Roper: We’re actually doing a lot of work on the UI right now to try to get that not only explained really well in the power descriptions but also different methodologies for sorting. Right now when you go into any power set it will show you if it’s offensive, defensive or utility; it shows you what type of power it is, so you could sort it that way. We’d like to add just being able to say, “Show me all utility powers across all power sets” so it could be just, “oh, great, here they all are.”

We also actually just started this week going through and starting our pass through on all the powers to write the descriptions better, make sure things are looking correctly and making it really explanatory so players will know what they are. But we’ll have at least a couple of different ways that players can parse through the power list – go through sets, go through functionality – to find the exactly the type of power they want for their character.

Ten Ton Hammer: Custom frameworks weren’t available during the press preview a couple of weeks ago, but are they available now and why weren’t they at the start of the press testing?

Bill Roper: Actually they’ve been in for a long time, but there was a bug that had it just not show up on the choice list. Custom frameworks have been in forever but we had to fix this but that was allowing players to make invalid builds using custom frameworks when they first created characters so we had to fix that bug before we could turn it back on.

Really when you start playing, the big difference in starting with a custom framework and a power set is just being able to change your endurance builder and your next tier 1 attack power or defense power or whatever you want it to be. So that will be in there from the get go so players from the very beginning can be choosing a custom framework; that was just a bug that it wasn’t in there.

Ten Ton Hammer: I haven’t messed around with powers enough to really see it in-game, but I know in a previous interview that it was stated that customizing different parts of your powers might be something that made it into the game. Is that the case? Can players customize the colors of their various blasts?

Bill Roper: Actually there’s a lot of customization you can do with the powers. There’s a hue slider for any power so that you can go through and change the color for any power basically. You can set emanation points, so that means if I have Force Bolts for example that normally come from my fists, I can have them come from my palms, I can have it come from my chest or my eyes. And it depends on what the power is whether or not they can use emanation points or which ones they can use, but the vast majority of the powers have different emanation points you can choose for them.

Then as you go through and are gaining levels you also start getting Advantage points. Advantages are basically ways that you can augment powers that you have, and there are usually numerous choices of different ways to go with each power, but you can only put two Advantages on any power so even that way there will be differences in the same type of power.

So I think that’s pretty cool. You may have two heroes that have taken Chain Lightning for example, but one guy’s is coming from his palms and is blue and he’s just cranked up the damage with two Advantages while another player may have gone through and got it firing from a piece of chest armor that he’s got on and it’s yellow because it’s a different kind of electricity and he’s got the Advantage so it jumps to more enemies. So you can even see where within the same core power there’s big differences by the time players get through with building up their character.

Ten Ton Hammer: So pretty much at every level or every tier players can adjust their powers and make them really their own. Is that a correct assumption?

Bill Roper: Yep.

Ten Ton Hammer: Cool. How often are we going to see new power sets and new powers within power sets coming into the game once the title’s launched? Is that something that you’ll do only every once in a while, because introducing new powers always has a chance of unbalancing the game, or is that something you’ll want to do all the time to really give players the most diverse selection of powers that they can choose from?

Bill Roper: We’ll definitely be doing new power sets and things to update if the players want them on a fairly regular basis. I mean, they are expensive to make – there’s a lot of powers that go into a power set with the unique effects, sometimes they require a specific animation – so they’re definitely a good chunk of work, but they really have a lot of impact on gameplay. But we definitely are going to be doing additional power sets after the game launches, and then we’ll also of course look out there at the current power sets and see if there’s holes we could fill."

 

maskedweasel

 Power Armor on IGN  -  clicky

 

 

 

Manchine

That looks so cool.  I know I have a character that uses missiles that never could be made on CoH. 

Elikal

Not my type of char to play, but surely cool looking. I must say that CO looks better with each vid now.

maskedweasel

 I completely agree. The more I learn about this game the more exciting it gets for me.  I feel theres a lack of information about this game on this forum. Theres no reason to build up so much hype per se, but this has potential to become a "sleeper" hit on these forums as cryptic is a very strong developer and the core mechanics look to be a recipe for some action packed gameplay.

 

I'll be updating more frequently as we get closer to september.