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Ten Ton Hammer: Custom frameworks weren’t available during the press preview a couple of weeks ago, but are they available now and why weren’t they at the start of the press testing?

Bill Roper: Actually they’ve been in for a long time, but there was a bug that had it just not show up on the choice list. Custom frameworks have been in forever but we had to fix this but that was allowing players to make invalid builds using custom frameworks when they first created characters so we had to fix that bug before we could turn it back on.

Really when you start playing, the big difference in starting with a custom framework and a power set is just being able to change your endurance builder and your next tier 1 attack power or defense power or whatever you want it to be. So that will be in there from the get go so players from the very beginning can be choosing a custom framework; that was just a bug that it wasn’t in there.

Ten Ton Hammer: I haven’t messed around with powers enough to really see it in-game, but I know in a previous interview that it was stated that customizing different parts of your powers might be something that made it into the game. Is that the case? Can players customize the colors of their various blasts?

Bill Roper: Actually there’s a lot of customization you can do with the powers. There’s a hue slider for any power so that you can go through and change the color for any power basically. You can set emanation points, so that means if I have Force Bolts for example that normally come from my fists, I can have them come from my palms, I can have it come from my chest or my eyes. And it depends on what the power is whether or not they can use emanation points or which ones they can use, but the vast majority of the powers have different emanation points you can choose for them.

Then as you go through and are gaining levels you also start getting Advantage points. Advantages are basically ways that you can augment powers that you have, and there are usually numerous choices of different ways to go with each power, but you can only put two Advantages on any power so even that way there will be differences in the same type of power.

So I think that’s pretty cool. You may have two heroes that have taken Chain Lightning for example, but one guy’s is coming from his palms and is blue and he’s just cranked up the damage with two Advantages while another player may have gone through and got it firing from a piece of chest armor that he’s got on and it’s yellow because it’s a different kind of electricity and he’s got the Advantage so it jumps to more enemies. So you can even see where within the same core power there’s big differences by the time players get through with building up their character.

Ten Ton Hammer: So pretty much at every level or every tier players can adjust their powers and make them really their own. Is that a correct assumption?

Bill Roper: Yep.

Ten Ton Hammer: Cool. How often are we going to see new power sets and new powers within power sets coming into the game once the title’s launched? Is that something that you’ll do only every once in a while, because introducing new powers always has a chance of unbalancing the game, or is that something you’ll want to do all the time to really give players the most diverse selection of powers that they can choose from?

Bill Roper: We’ll definitely be doing new power sets and things to update if the players want them on a fairly regular basis. I mean, they are expensive to make – there’s a lot of powers that go into a power set with the unique effects, sometimes they require a specific animation – so they’re definitely a good chunk of work, but they really have a lot of impact on gameplay. But we definitely are going to be doing additional power sets after the game launches, and then we’ll also of course look out there at the current power sets and see if there’s holes we could fill.