I recently enjoyed a fascinating lunch with Brian Urbanek, whose work includes creating and balancing the in-game combat and related systems. With nearly ten years MMO development experience, he’s got lots of sparkling ideas and opinions which we’ll be sharing with you in the next few weeks.

In this first slice of our interview, he talks about how the Champions Online team is turning combat dynamics upside down.

Colin: What are you doing with Champions Online’s powers and combat systems that’s new and unique?

Brian: I came into this project about a year into a three-year development cycle. A lot of early groundwork and principles had been defined but there’s still been room for adjusting course along the way.

The original design team did a really good job creating some new paradigms. One of the things that they wanted to play with - as soon as they told me about it I thought it was wonderful - was as follows…

Most game models are a degenerative model, right? Think in terms of the way most RPGs have worked; they have something like a point system. The fight starts and you have all of your resources and as the fight goes on you become weaker and weaker, you have less and less resources to do things with and your points go down.

This always bothered me and, as I found out, it also bothered some of the other early developers for Champions. Fundamentally it just isn’t the way the fiction works. In the fiction, as the fight goes on for heroic characters and for villain characters, your resolve hardens. You draw upon ever greater reserves of your internal energy to fight harder and harder as the stakes get higher. You actually get an escalating model in fiction.

So what we really wanted to do was bring into the game something that better reflected the tempo and momentum of combat in traditional fiction.

This is why we started creating, around the energy system, this equilibrium point that maps the energy. So, yes, there are attacks that drain energy. There are also attacks that create energy so that during the combat players can moderate their own actions to their own advantage.

They can, for example, choose to generate energy by doing weak attacks that build momentum to subsequently unleash a torrent of heavy attacks and then going back into a cycle again.

Within the power system you can try to build in secondary energy mechanics to help accentuate it and push that idea further. For example, we’ve been doing a pattern with the fire set where fire characters can have access to powers that let them absorb energy from ambient heat.

That’s the contextual fluffy side of it; the crunchy side is it means that as they light up enemies or set the environment on fire, they can absorb heat power that starts feeding them a constant trickle of energy so that as the fight progresses they can segue from doing their small ‘building’ attacks to doing just heavy big attacks.

We’re trying to build in that principle to every power set but each one will have its slightly own unique mechanic.

Colin: Does that make it complicated for the player?

Brian:  The intent is that when we build the powers we don’t build the secondary energy mechanics in as a core aspect of the power. Like the absorb heat power, also functions as a self-heal.

The assumption is most players will see the description part of the power. Maybe it says that ‘if you press this button you’ll absorb heat from nearby sources and heal yourself’ and that’s why they’ll buy it. It’s a mastery level thing. They’ll notice, ‘oh hey, this is also making me gain energy from fires nearby’ and it’s something that they’ll graduate up into. So the intent is for the secondary mechanics to be non-intrusive and be something that the players just notice, that advanced players dive into and find the relations between things and start to realize the new play patterns that it unlocks for them if they choose to explore them.

Colin:  And this example of heat and fire, does that translate to ice and electricity or various other powers that people can use?

Brian:  Yes, each in its own unique way. For example, electricity is very much about doing area effect damage. It’s about striking multiple targets. Attacks have the ability to jump from one target to the next, to another.

So electricity’s secondary energy system deals with a special power we call negative ions. The way that works is you strike someone with electricity power and sometimes you’ll see an inverse color palette electrical buff, an electrical aura bounce around the enemy target. Advanced players understand what that means. That means that they want to switch targets because if I see that on my target and I switch to a different target, it means that my electricity attacks will always jump into the negative ion person and that will complete a circuit and I will get energy back.

Now a player who doesn’t understand that mechanic yet, well no problem. They just stay on the same target and they do DP damage and they in some ways are doing the right thing because the faster you take down a single target the less damage you take. That’s good gameplay.

But if your player’s more advanced you might realize that ‘okay if I’m careful and the situation is right I can switch targets, do some damage to two people, and I get the reward back. Now I’m bouncing lightning between more parties and getting more total damage output and I’m getting energy refunded to me from completing the circuit.

Colin:  You are relying on the players to just figure this stuff out, right?

Brian: Absolutely, absolutely. They’ll figure it out. We’re not at all trying to hide it. The power descriptions clearly state these behaviors are there but we don’t want to beat players over the head with it and it’s important to us that they be able to finish the game without ever even noticing these things are going on.

Really I’m a big fan in the reward of being able to find depth, right? I’ve played lots and lots of the card game Magic and I always think it’s a wonderful thing when I figure out a new way to use a card or a new result from a combination of cards that I had not seen people use before. I want to put that in the game where people can notice that there are these interactions and get the feeling of discovery of ‘oh hey, I just found this cool side effect thing’.

Next week we’ll hear some more from Brian, about the hardcore mathematics behind balancing combat.