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Champions Online: No Current Plans for Xbox Version
championsFan
Member Posts: 419
Since it was made as a minor announcement in the official forums, I thought I would share this news for anyone who had been looking forward to the previously announced Xbox 360 version of the game:
Jack Emmert: 100% of our focus is on making the current PC product the best it can be. There are no current plans for a console version of Champions.
Pretty unfortunate. The likely causes were the low number of subscribers, and the difficulty of doing business with Microsoft. We do know for certain that the game runs on an Xbox, as a technical matter, and I know first hand that the controller support is great (as of this latest expansion). Therefore it was not a technical issue with porting the game, it is a business issue. In my opinion that still leaves hope for the distant future, depending on how things go with CO's competitors in 2010.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
Comments
This is most likely Low sub numbers, if not, Microsoft I hear vetos lots of MMOs for xBox or forces people to pay for a service to play MMOs, plus retail cost and sub cost, at least thats why I heard theres not gonna be a FFXIV for xbox. This is a good thing, Cryptic obviously did many things wrong with this game, I left dissapointed seeing as Cryptic, failed this game, not the community. So since this game has many wrong things, its better if Cryptic works on the game itself (content, more missions, more endgame, and more things to do) before making another version to milk more money.
MMOs played: Too many
Watch List: FFXIV, CoH:GR, GW2, SWTOR, TERA, Earthrise
Sadly I think many of CO's most serious problems arise from its overly simplistic and generic nature, there's a lack of real ambition in what the game tries to do and that probably arises a a direct result of wanting to tailoring it to the console market..... the problem lies in the limitations of the core engine and the lack of conviction in the theme, without the inspiration of a new potential market ie console, that looks less a less likely to change.
Microsoft is a large part of this problem.
1 - for games that use the XBLA service MS demands a cut of any money made
for MMOs MS wants a piece of the monthly fees.
2 - if its not a small patch it has to be sold
for MMOs if its a free large update it would no longer be free
3 - any and all patches and updates have to be approved by MS Q&A team
for MMOs it means that if the game has to be taken down because of a bug and a ptach is deployed to fix the bug the 360 version wont come back up until the patch that fixes the bug is approved by MS
Low subscriber numbers could have played a part here but according to Cryptic the 360 version of Champions was very close to release when they ran into problems with Microsoft.
These problems were echoed by Square Enix over Final Fantasy 14.
Interesting. It's not a consolation to those who feel the game was released to early, but in terms of ambition I think it is impressive that they built the game from scratch in less than 2 years. No assets re-used from CoX or the cancelled Marvel Universe project, a complete start-over in early 2008. That seems pretty ambitious (especially to then charge full price, but that is another story), and that they did STO in the same two years. Even if a lot of people think both games are mediocre, unfinished and overpriced, it seems impossible to disagree that it is a lot of output in a short time.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
I cannot disagree with you and technically I think what Cryptic did was incredibly robust given the timescale......but the lack of invention in gameplay and the lack of involvement in the gameworld and the lack of conviction in the theme are direct consequences of rushing and/or not really being invested in what they were doing. Equally Cryptic had prior experience and smarts that should have really paid dividens in their next project and instead we get something that is less inventive than a studio that is simply cloning another game. Yes the avatar customisations are exemplary, but improving aspects of a game where the genre already had excelled isnt really going to make a significant improvement (or distinction) to the overall experience. Worse the lack of attention, conviction and imagination evident in the generic static theme park of a gameworld is actually a regression from pretty much any other paid mmo here we have a game where you can make yourself anything your little heart coudl desire, but the gameworld fails to react in any way, fails to permit any choice or show any consequence and even goes on to insist you are exactly what it wants you to be instead of the character you had spent all your time fine tuning. A great shame, a profoundly compromised game engine and a missed oppertunity imho and now part of the excuse (ie design for console) isn't even going to be carried through =/
Yeah... That's what we need. Developers bringing half dead mmos to consoles.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP