In the last section of our three-part interview with powers chief Brian Urbanek, we talk about the games that inspire him, and some of the mathematical rigor that is going into Champions Online…

Colin: Let’s talk about some of the mathematics behind Champions Online…

Brian: I daily work with a pair of spreadsheets which individually are twelve megabytes in size. Everything is on spreadsheets and everything is driven by the formulae… [draws incredibly complicated axis-graph on napkin]…and in theory everything falls within the same space in terms of its efficiency and utility to cost over time. So is it fool proof? Absolutely not, but it is a very good starting point from which to hand things to the QA department and say I think this is pretty good, find what I missed.

Colin: Do they often find things you missed?

Brian: Absolutely, but it’s usually a bug. Like for example, I am infamous for mistyping the cost formula into the damage part to the power and the damage formula into the cost power, making powers that cost five energy and do five thousand points of damage.

That being said, no one has yet found a hole in my formulas or a power that adhered to the formulas and was still not right.

Colin: From this perspective, does PvP combat work in the same way as PvE

A. PvP is always a consideration in the powers that are built. For example, we went through a ridiculous amount of iterations and amount of work to make our taunt system and our aggro system be something that works as well and makes as much sense in PvP as it does in PvE. Our system works the same for players as it works for NPC enemies. I believe we succeeded in making sure every system and how it effects the player it effects an NPC in the same way, with the exception, the notable exception of multiplayer super villains. Epic and legendary challenges, they follow their own rules. They kind of have to.

But master villains follow the exact same rules as players, taunts effect them the same way they effect players

Colin: How do the taunts work?

Brian:  A taunt in our game is a advantage you buy and add onto another power. No power is natively a taunt. The effect of a taunt is  - an enemy you hit with a taunting power, that enemy suffers a debuff which causes them to do reduced damage versus anyone but the person who hit them. And that debuff goes away very quickly unless the person that used it on you keeps hitting you.

Colin: What have you enjoyed playing in the past year or two years that has really helped you in the work that you are doing at the moment? External games that have made you go right, I’m learning a lot from playing this game.

Brian: Well I will always give props to World of Warcraft. While I could speak for hours about things I see as shortcomings, that is the griping of a loyal fan who really enjoys the game and still plays on an active basis.

Beyond that I try to get input from as many different projects as I can. In terms of things that inspire me, I’m actually going to call board games and pen and paper RPGs an as big or bigger inspiration than computer games at this point.

One computer game I’ve played recently that I found very impressive is Fallout 3. It’s not so much I drove any particular mechanics inspiration from that as simply took great pleasure in seeing a game developed to such a high level of quality and that in and of itself is inspiring to want to be in that same world of developing that quality of a product.

Also,  I’ve seen a game recently which did have a little bit of math that I really liked. Electronic Arts recently released Battle Forge which used an approach to doing Area of Effect damage that I had never thought of before.

In some games, the area of effect attacks are simply limited to ‘will not hit more than X targets’. This is to prevent certain abuses called dumpster diving. As a result of the dumpster diving events in our previous games we instituted a cap on the number of people an area effects fell on, a fireball or an explosional effect.

Battle Forge uses an approach that I think is much cleverer where it’s predefinitely defined individually the maximum amount of damage an area attack will do in total to all of its targets and that maximum amount is divided up equally among all who are hit by it, and they also define a maximum amount of damage done to any single target.

So if there’s only one person in it that person will probably not take the whole effect, they’ll still only take a portion of it, but it’s a very nice way of capping how much an effect can potentially be done. It also introduces an interesting gameplay element - it distinctly implies a  tactic which is to get as many people as possible hit by the AoE so that the damage is distributed out fairly thinly across everybody.