Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Bill Roper: We haven’t really decided that. We do have a GM team, we certainly have the ability to do that. Anybody in the beta sees that we have GMs running around all the time. We’ve even talked about doing some stuff in beta like having the great and powerful Foxbat pop up in the world and have people try to find him and give out prizes to people that find him.

We have the ability to do that kind of stuff; it’s just going to come down to the bandwidth of what we can actually do in that regard and we haven’t set any kind of firm plan in place on what that is. There’s nothing in the technology that prevents us from doing fun stuff like that, like jumping in and interacting with our players. It really just comes down to time and what we can pull off that would be fun and interesting.

Reuben Waters: Will there be customizable minions? If so, will we be able to customize just their look, or their powers as well?

Bill Roper: I’m trying to be careful with what I say because I don’t want to step on the article we just did, since this will be out before that - it’s literally going to be out in a week or two. I think when you see the range of the things you can do, you get into the nemesis system. As with all parts of the game - as a basic tenet of Champions - we try to give you as much customization as possible.

Cody Bye: Lekteron has been very persistent with this question. Ranks were mentioned in the last Ask Cryptic. What are they and how do they work?

Bill Roper: I’m wondering if the Ask Cryptic was about roles - because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone on the team actually use that term. There are roles in the builds, yea, it’s weird, maybe I should have read the last Ask Cryptic to see who’s using a term I don’t know. It’s, you know, very possible.

Basically, roles and builds are ways for players to - as they go through and get different powers and items and put them onto their hero - you can basically set, for example, a defensive role, where you’ve got more defensive powers, absorptions, and reflections, and the items you’re geared with are more geared towards having higher defenses. And then you could have one that’s more offensive, where you have more of your offensive powers down in your powers tray and you would have gear, equipment, and abilities that are geared more towards that.

The idea with roles and builds is that as players build their character, they’re going to build them in a certain way. In your mind, you always know what your hero is. But there are times - and this is very common in comics - where you’re fighting as a team and, for example, the brick goes down. So now, the guy who’s now in there as melee combat and focused on doing tons of damage has to kind of take over as that tank-type character until his buddy recovers. What we want players to be able to do is have the ability to switch over into another role where they’ve set it up for themselves to be better at that type of thing. I don’t know if that’s actually the ranks thing that got talked about, but while I’m taking more questions I’ll actually go see if I can find that particular Ask Cryptic...

Jeff Woleslagle: If I could jump in here, it looks like ranks have to do with increasing the offense or defense of particular powers.

Bill Roper: Ah, sure, advantaging. I call that advantaging your powers because that’s what you’re really doing. But yes, you can increase the rank of your power when you add advantages to it. It can do different things, sometimes rank can increase damage or defense, sometimes it adds other powers to it - it’s dependent on the power itself.

See we got there, we figured it out, and you got a bonus answer about roles and builds!

Reuben Waters: Will travel powers affect combat? For example, will a character hit harder when moving at super speed? And to tie-in with that, someone else had asked that with super speed, will characters be able to move up walls or interact with objects in that way?

Bill Roper: So in terms of the combat stuff, right now it doesn’t. That’s actually something we’re looking at. I don’t know what we’ll be able to work out with that, it may be something where, in a movement speed your defense is higher, something like that.

We’re spending a lot of time on the travel powers right now, trying to have them be more interesting and enjoyable as you run around. One of the things that’s been cool about that is we’ve actually made some changes to the powers to super jump lately and that’s gotten some great feedback in the beta about that. We’re doing stuff with flight and acrobatics and supering and stuff like that, and how those work and how they’re different, not only with the different ranks, but if there’s a way we can tie any of that stuff into combat. I don’t know if we really will, but it’s something we’re looking at in terms of what’s doable.

In terms of players running up walls and things like that, again, nothing that’s in right now. Because not every area in the world that we take you to is a city, it makes better sense in some areas than in others. It’s a combination of design and tech, animation and stuff that I think we want to do and are looking into. I have no idea what we could actually get in for launch, but that’s the up side of it being an MMO - all those ideas that we love, we put on the long list of stuff to get in. Then the guys just keep ticking off the cool stuff and get it into the game.

Cody Bye: Is there any chance that powers that players use to attack might affect travel powers? Let’s say flight being enhanced by blasts that come out of a person’s hands or something like that, like what Ironman does with his booster hands.

Bill Roper: It doesn’t work that way right now, though that is the kind of thing that we’re working on - the ice slide for example. So if you’re an ice power character, instead of me doing super running I want to have this ice slide ability to zoom across the ground really quickly, but it has this different look based upon the powers that they pick. It doesn’t do that by default depending on the powers that they pick, but we want to put in a bunch of what we call power replacements, being able to choose a different graphical representation of super speed.

Cody Bye: Eagleon asks is there any chance of the environment affecting powers used? If I’m using an electrical attack underwater, will there be a passive effect on me giving me a boost to damage.