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Ten Ton Hammer: Would you say that the power sets you’ve put together initially, from a gameplay standpoint would you say that they’re mostly thematic, or do they have some archetypes built into them too like melee DPS characters, ranged DPS, support or tank?

Bill Roper: They’re really mainly thematic. What we’re doing right now is filling out all the power sets with at least some control powers, some utility powers, so that you can really be able to pick and choose amongst the different power sets. The goal of that will be thematic. Now, some of them are going to lend themselves more to melee obviously if you’re taking martial arts powers, or ranged attacks. But really you can use any of the different power sets to construct whatever type of character you’re trying to play, or whatever role you’re trying to assume.

Like I built what you’d think of as more of a classic tank-type character – so somebody who’s up in the midst of a fight, controlling agro and does certain damage – but it was all done with certain shielding, PBAoE and crowd control powers. So I built a character that fulfilled that role in my head, but it was around this thematic concept. It’s really one of the biggest strengths of such a flexible system that you can fulfill a classic MMO role, but you’re deciding what that is and you’re building your hero the way people believe it as.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s look at, not necessarily the typical gamer but the more hardcore gamer; the min/maxer to the extreme. Would it be possible for him if he’s not interested in a theme at all, would he be able to put together a really kick-ass super hero with a broad range of powers from different power sets? Or is the game balanced enough that he may not necessarily have the upper hand against somebody else who just is sticking with a particular theme?

Bill Roper: I always assume that the min/maxer will find the optimum connection of powers, and finding those emergent gameplay interactions between powers that we never foresaw when making them, that’s always our fun challenge is then saying “we’ve got to be balanced and what will we do about that?” But really the game was designed to, for example say I want to make a flying fire hero. Say that’s my character, I can just stick to the power set for fire, I could take Flight and I would a totally fun, confident, cool character to play. I think there will always be combinations that will be a percentage better, but really the goal is not to have it be where there’s certain builds that just stand out head and shoulders above anything else.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there easy ways for players to find powers from a particular archetype of character? For example if somebody wanted to play support, would there be an easy way for him to figure out which powers would be best for his character? Are the powers pretty much self-explanatory or is there some other way that players could figure out which powers to use?

Bill Roper: We’re actually doing a lot of work on the UI right now to try to get that not only explained really well in the power descriptions but also different methodologies for sorting. Right now when you go into any power set it will show you if it’s offensive, defensive or utility; it shows you what type of power it is, so you could sort it that way. We’d like to add just being able to say, “Show me all utility powers across all power sets” so it could be just, “oh, great, here they all are.”

We also actually just started this week going through and starting our pass through on all the powers to write the descriptions better, make sure things are looking correctly and making it really explanatory so players will know what they are. But we’ll have at least a couple of different ways that players can parse through the power list – go through sets, go through functionality – to find the exactly the type of power they want for their character.