Lead designer Randy Mosiondz has been talking about how mission-complexity in Champions Online evolved during the development phase’s last days.

In his Development Diary he talked about how early missions were deemed too simple, and how the developers sought to add variety and complexity as the game’s launch loomed every larger.

He wrote, “Most of the missions were “click X, defeat Y, collect Z” because doing anything more complex that that simply didn’t work well. This obviously wasn’t acceptable, so we tried to ramp up tool development to allow more interesting content. By the time we hit Closed Beta this was better, but it was obvious players wanted more mission variation, particularly those that incorporated more genre-appropriate “heroic” elements that had an effect on environments. We started by adding in more “rescue” type scenarios where you free victims from villains or from underneath rubble in disaster scenarios. When our AI improved a bit more we started adding in “rescue and escort” situations where players could help escort victims through gauntlets of enemies.”

He added, “We also started rigging more complex missions (especially in our villain Lairs) which involved puzzles, friendly AI and more complex AI behaviours, etc. Now not only could you rescue a group of citizens held hostage by Destroid robots, lead them to a safe landing zone but you could fight off waves of attacking villains while you signal a helicopter to rescue them! We also began making...

Meet Star on Chest, spokeshero for Altmier’s Brand Zesty Hot Sauce and author of ‘An Awesome Being on Being Awesome’. He’s the creation of Champions Online player Shamus Young. You can follow his amusing adventures at Shamus’ blog, Twenty Sided. A quick clip…

“In keeping with his silver-age design, he’s got a chin that falls somewhere between “Jay Leno” and “bulldozer”. His suit is bright and colorful, and he’s ripped like Hercules even though his powers do not involve physical strength. In fact, I can’t think of a power more fattening than telekinesis. These days the only exercise I get is from walking to, and subsequently opening, the fridge. If I could move food with my mind and fly, then it would take me about two weeks to get to the point where I could cosplay as Castle Wulfenbach.”

Well worth a read…

Phil Dean heads up one of Cryptic’s most important departments, but you won’t hear too much about him, or his team. They’re the Customer Support people, the guys who solve your MMO problems.

MMOs are very complicated games, and so usually throw up more problems than an average console game.
Everyone knows the frustration of not getting the right help from a game-maker. And Phil’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

He says, “Customer support is often classed as a pit where all you get are canned responses all day, and the people have no contact with the developers. But the team here is a very central part of Cryptic Studios. That’s just the way Cryptic is. We’ve been involved in the design of the game from the beginning, funneling info from Beta players to the developers. And now that the game is out, we’re intimately involved in the game, in the players and in the developers. We’re a kind of hub. Not a pit.”

Cryptic knows that a bad experience with customer support can end a player’s relationship with the game and with the studio.

“We’re in touch with the players, we know what issues people are having. It’s down to us to resolve any problems,” says Phil.

He talks about the complexity involved in MMO customer support, far advanced from the early days of online games when gamers with a problem were seen as the problem.

He explains...

Cryptic says balancing combat powers in Champions Online is “an ongoing process” adding that future tweaks are going to be much more surgical than the wide-ranging changes seen at launch.

Executive producer Bill Roper says that even long-standing MMOs like World of Warcraft deliver balance tweaks. “We’re much closer to the desired game balance now than ever before, but as with any MMO, it’s an ongoing process,” he said. “Heck, even World of Warcraft still issues balance patches and they’ve been out for five years. We’ve made the major, wide-reaching changes we felt were required by Day 1 of the game launch and are now focused on more surgical changes ot specific powers or groups of powers.”

Roper has also addressed complains made about the Day 1 Patch. Speaking to MMOSite he explained, “We found some egregious errors that we simply had to fix for the long-term health of the game. We did an admittedly poor job of communicating this to our players and have made major changes to our process to get news out to our players. The experience curve was simply broken and numerous defensive powers were grossly overpowered, making the game play trivial. It was a very difficult decision, but we simply didn’t see these issues until we got such a high level of concurrency online.”

More here.

How would you describe your Champions Online character? Maybe - “He’s like Wolverine but different”? Perhaps you’re interested in creating a rounded character that represents your personality, rather than someone else’s imagination. Perhaps instead of semi-randomly playing with the character creaton tools  you’d like to start out with a concept in mind.

You have installed the game, created your first character, and blasted through some levels. But you can’t help feeling that something is missing. The character isn’t your character.

MMORPG players tend to fall into a few categories: casual, hardcore, PVP, and RP. For those who feel like something is missing, perhaps your play-style is shifting from one to another.  If that is the case, give roleplaying (RP) a try. For those with a creative streak, this can be a great outlet and can provide hours of fun both solo and with others.

The first thing a player needs, especially in Champions Online, is a concept. A concept is always easiest to create if you come up with one sentence to describe your character first. Try to stay away from specifics, such as specific costume pieces or specific powers. As an example, here is a one sentence concept for Defender from Champions:

Although Defender is a decisive leader and a bold, courageous warrior, he is somewhat shy and awkward socially.

This sentence doesn’t tell you anything about his powers or costume, but it is easy to imagine how this character looks...

After reading a bunch of reviews, I’ve tried to pick up some common threads. Here are ten opinions which keep coming back from the reviewers…

* Everybody loves the character customization and spends too much time playing with same.

* Launch-window technical problems are a part of the MMO experience. Cryptic have done a reasonable good of fixing problems and a pretty good job of informing players of what’s going on.

* Reviewers like to BOTH bolt on any powers they fancy, AND get the benefits of a unified powers system.

* The tutorial is functional. Getting travel powers soon after is great.

* Combat is very nicely designed, with a straightforward difficulty curve. Even after the Nerf necessitated team-based combat, the game still feels often feels like a single-player action-RPG at times.

* If you liked City of Heroes, you’ll like Champions Online. Except more so.

* 7/10 reviewers are unable to resist using the word ’spandex’ in relation to this game.

* Quests are fairly standard fare and could be improved in future. More missions are needed to give Champions Online genuine longevity.

* Lovely graphics and art-style. Almost universal praise for this.

* This game won’t take over your life, like WoW maybe did. but its definitely worth playing.

Here are the details for the new patch that arrived in the wee small hours. The patch takes care of some of irritating gameplay and technical problems.

General
• Perks: Perk Cape Symbol Rewards: Fixed these rewards such that players cannot deconstruct them for parts or sell them to vendors once they have the unlocked symbol.
• Power Replace items sold by the Perk Vendor are now level 40. These items require the purchaser to be level 40 as well.
• Added some performance fixes to counteract some of the changes from last night’s patch.
• Fix for one of the major stalls while moving around.
• Fixed a crash some users were experiencing loading into the game with ATI graphics cards.
• We’ve added a number of performance improvements to Supergroups. Supergroup commands should be much more responsive now.

User Interface and Chat
• Large powers and advantages UIs are now movable.
• Fixed-position UIs and large window UIs no longer close each other (large window UIs DO still close other large window UIs).
• Added search button to social UI.
• Map itself now takes up larger portion of the large map UI.
• Main map UI now can be shrunk a bit more.
• Integrated overflow bag into inventory and experiment UIs.
• Many user-facing messages (in chat, etc.) have been reviewed/improved for grammar/consistency/brevity/clarity.
• Fixed a bug that prevented players with an @ in the account name from logging in from...

GameSpot’s Kevin Van Ord  has posted his video review of Champions Online, with a positive recommendation for players. Van Ord says the game is working through initial technical difficulties, and says it has a good three months worth of play with current content levels. Additional content is planned for the weeks ahead. Here’s the video.

Balance is always going to be a big issue in the early days of a combat-based MMO. At a public dev-chat last night, Champions Online fans wasted no time in quizzing the team on balance issues.

Exec producer Bill Roper made it clear that his priority is finding balancing issues that are really and truly broken, before turning to any balancing tweaks. He said, “No MMO comes out perfectly balanced. But we’re dedicated to getting there. Our goal is to only decrease the effectiveness of powers if they are honestly broken (doing multiples of expected damage, for example). It’s better for us focus on fixing broken powers that aren’t effective enough before we lower the effectiveness of powers.Basically, we’re thinking more surgically moving forward in regards to how we address balance as opposed to dropping huge bombs.”

He added, “Our top concerns are concerning you as players. We’re running as fast as we can to address issues, work on the overall balance of the game, and be as responsive to possible.”

He was quizzed hard about the early patch, which made the game significantly tougher.  Roper said, “The large changes we made to the game recently were made to help bring the difficulty of the game into line. There was very little to no challenge to the game, so we had to make a major adjustment for day one. Lets be honest we we never intended for heroes to solo...

Community manager Cryptic Daeke has posted on Twitter a way to gain your Champions Online character a free respec, which will allow players to change their powers - something that was missing from the patch yesterday. He wrote, “Free Retcon workaround: Type “/Character_UseFreeRespec” in chat. It will remove all your powers without warning, though, so beware.”

A respec is something that gamers have been asking for, as they’ve attempted to match previously desired combat powers to changes within the game, and personal taste changes. We’ll keep you posted on any updates regarding the patch.