Welcome Guest:

Other MMO Coverage

Select an MMO...

Most Popular

Recently Popular

Even More MMOs...

  • Advanced MMO Search
Close this window

Loading... Live Ep. 7 - Champions Online Dev Chat Transcript - Page 3

Tags: in

Posted March 5th, 2009 by Ethec

The other thing I’ll note (because I was watching some stuff go by in the events room) - yes, we have put some screenshots out on the web, it is Lemuria that is opening next in the beta.

Jeff Woleslagle: Cool, and will Champions Online have some kind of achievements system, like the badges system of its forebearer, City of Heroes? What can you tell us about it?

Bill Roper: Actually in Champions Online they’re called perks, again, something from our original IP. So you get perks as you go through the game. There’s tons of them, hundreds and hundreds of them, that you can find, unlock, and earn. The plan right now is that they’ll give you points that then you’ll be able to spend at certain perk vendors to get other cool stuff in the game. So you want to be going out and finding the perks not only just to complete your list and collect ‘em all, as it were, but also to get titles and all kinds of neat things we want players to get for completing story chains and missions and exploring and making stuff. So we’ve got perks for combat and non-combat stuff, all kinds of things for players to do.

Jeff Woleslagle: Excellent, I’m going to turn it over to Cody Bye who I believe has our first audience question. Cody?

Cody Bye, Ten Ton Hammer: This question comes from HighCommander. There seems to be an unusual amount of criticism on the Star Trek Online forums about the style of graphics for released content. For Champions Online I’ve heard mostly positive things. Would you say that the two games both adopt a stylized look that’s “cartoony” to enable compatibility with next gen consoles and account for scaleability?

Bill Roper: With Champions (I’ll speak to that first), the “cartoon” look is because we’re making a game about comic books. It’s a very specifically stylized look to bring that four-color feel to the game. With us, that was a choice that was directly impacted by the genre of what we’re doing.

I don’t know - the screenshots I’ve seen of STO, I don’t know why people would think people would think they look good. The ships and the space stuff is freaking awesome. And playing it... I think that’s the challenge too. When you’re playing it, it goes through the roof. I think that’s the difficulty often with games, it’s that when you’re grabbing screenshots out of gameplay and putting those up you never get the full impact of things when you see them in a screenshot. Like with the Lemuria shots that just went up, we’re trying to get really good accurate representations of the game out there to get people excited about it, but when you’re actually underwater and you’re seeing the effect go by... it’s so much cooler when you actually play the game or see things in a video.

But every time I see a screenshot from Star Trek and it’s got a ship type that I recognize in this galaxy, I get pretty blown away by it. I don’t know, I think those people are nuts - how’s that? (laughter)

Reuben Waters, Ten Ton Hammer: The next question we had then is on animation. Someone was asking will there be different types of run animations? They were wondering if their character would be able to float or slouch moreso than just running?

Bill Roper: There are different ways that characters can move in that regard, certainly depending on running vs. super-running vs. acrobatics look different now. We’re working on different representations of travel powers. One that I think has been in a video or people in the beta have seen that we’re trying to make more pervasive is an ice slide, for example. So if you have the ability, especially if you’re an ice power user, to make this kind of surfboard underneath your feet and cruise around, that looks really cool. So we’re trying to come up with more ways to represent more thematically with your character movement in the world.

Reuben Waters: Ok, and I think the person was specifically asking about floating - is that something you’ll be able to do?

Bill Roper: You mean like flight, or something different than that. Because, yes, you can fly now, so I guess that’s like floating forward? Yes, BronzeRaptor, you can actually fly a few inches off the ground, so if that’s what you wanted to do. I mean, levitation is a limited amount of flight, so sure. (laughter)

Cody Bye: The next question comes from Genetix and I’ll paraphrase a little bit. How does Cryptic plan to introduce scheduled events and live events. Are you going to have a GM team that’s running NPCs around for people to talk to, or is it going to be scheduled events, more like what LotRO and WoW have? How are you guys planning on doing that kind of thing?

No one has commented on this post yet. Be the first! »

Latest CO Articles More »

Latest CO News More »