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Champions Online subscribers will soon be getting another massive zone to explore with the Revelation digital expansion, due out later this month. Centered around the half human, half angel Therakiel’s attempts to bring the apocalypse to the mystic city of Vibora Bay, players will be gaining new powers, new costumes and an all new repeatable lair to get their capes dirty in.

Ten Ton Hammer recently had the opportunity to discuss the upcoming expansion with executive producer Bill Roper. If you’re interested in learning more about Revelation’s theme, content, and some of the cool things that await players venturing into Vibora Bay, we’ve got you covered in this exclusive interview.

Ten Ton Hammer: How have things been at Cryptic Studios in the six months since Champions Online launched?

Bill Roper: It’s been good. We’ve had a very vocal community which is good. I’d rather have people that talk about the game and what they want to see in it than nothing getting said. I think that one thing we’ve really started noticing over the past couple weeks is people recognizing that we’ve really made a big refocusing on the community. We’re also putting the Revelation expansion up on the Public Test Shard this week.

So it’s been good. Our player base has definitely settled out. It’s really strong and excited about what we’ve got coming and I think we’ve got a much better plan of attack moving forward. The first six months has definitely been doing a lot of catch up in trying to get stuff working right and making sure that we’re in a very responsive mode in terms of trying to get things done that the player base wanted. Now we can kind of shift gears and be a little more forward thinking and be working on things from a more proactive stance rather than a reactive stance.

Ten Ton Hammer: When you announced that Revelation was going to be a free expansion you also mentioned that that decision was partly to address concerns within the community and player feedback. Could you maybe expand a bit on what went into the decision to make Revelation a free expansion vs. more of a traditional boxed release?

Bill Roper: Sure. First off, we never intended for it to be a boxed release. I think that one, digital is just the way to go and two, it’s not ever been designed as an expansion set that I think players in their heads are used to seeing. The first time I talked about it I even think I called it a “mega-adventure pack”. It’s got probably about 20 to 25 hours of gameplay in it, and it also has a repeatable endgame lair built in which is massive and awesome. Here at the office over the last couple of weeks we’ve had people who haven’t really seen much of it that got to go through Therakiel’s lair and were blown away, so I think it’s going to be pretty exciting for our top end players.

I think really the biggest deal was that we looked at the amount of content that was in there and it was something that I tried to address, but we definitely feel that it’s of the quality that you would expect from downloadable content. You could look at a lot of games that are out there that say here’s a new adventure pack, or here’s a new scenario such as Dragon Age or games like that and sell it as downloadable content or different DLC programs. We definitely feel Revelation is of that quality level, but we didn’t want to charge for it. We wanted to be able to give it to our subscribers for free. They’ve been there through the first six months with us and really working with us in helping make the game better and I think a lot of their comments and interest is reflected in what we’re doing in Revelation, so that was pretty important.

Ten Ton Hammer: In terms of the content then, how expansive would you say Revelation is if you were to compare it to the current game world in terms of size and scope?

Bill Roper: It’s level 37 to 40 in terms of content. There are five new enemy groups, and a new endgame lair which is easily the biggest and most challenging one that we’ve done which is of course geared towards a group of five heroes. There are six new “metapowers” which are new Tier 4 powers so they’re the highest level powers in the game, and they’re designed to fit over multiple groups. For example Martial Arts shares a metapower. We also designed them to be really high end and really powerful.

There are over 30 new perks, and then beyond the new perks we also designed ways for you to be able to achieve old perks in the new area. There are a ton of new costume parts and not only an entirely new costume set, which is a post-apocalyptic costume set, but then there are just tons of new pieces and textures and body paints that are unlockable through finishing missions or doing perks.

If I was looking at the overall scope, it’s hard to say in terms of overall size since we do a little more instancing than we’ve done before. But in terms of the size of the city you’re going through, it’s maybe half the size of Millennium City. That’s just the overland areas, and then there’s a lot more instancing that you do which was again in response to what players wanted to see more of. They’ve wanted more instanced play and I think that helps in terms of feeling heroic.

I think that gives you a high level overview of what you can expect to find in Revelation.