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

Was that pretty intensive to get that implemented into the game? To the lay person, it seems like it would be relatively easy, but this is doing it at range. What was involved in this?

BR: It’s really more that it’s different. It’s going through the table and we have to add [the ego check]. It’s less maybe technically difficult, but it’s filling in and tagging everything in the world to do that. It was a lot of work that had to get done to make it work. There was a little bit of technology and then a lot of busy work [laughs] going in to flag everything and make sure that works. We have to make sure we are tracking ego the same way we track strength. It was less that we had to do a massive amount of crazy technology. There was some technology that had to get built. It was more that we had to go in and make sure that every single thing in the world that was going to do that was flagged.

Gotcha. Taking a step back from the powers specifically, where are you at in the development of Champions Online? Obviously, you’re set to release in the early part of September, but you’re still adding stuff. Are there extra things you want to add in at the end but you might not have had enough time? Where does the adding stuff in and the complete polish phase of your production meet?

BR: It’s doing both. A lot of the stuff that we were hoping to get in that was kind of on the bubble because we were working on it we will now be able to get in. Some of it was being able to have the extra time to figure out things. A lot of it is the result of polish because polish is us looking at it and saying, “Oh, we really need to add this.”

It’s newer technology, but we’ve really got to make sure that we get it in. For us, it really is part of the polish pass even when we’ve done things that are mission reworks. Things that are big things. It’s definitely also a [situation] where we need to make sure we are approaching it correctly and doing the things that have to get in. The polish pass really is sometimes getting in things that a lot times look like, “Wow! That was totally an incomplete feature or a new feature.” We really had to figure out how we get this in and make it work.

A lot of getting those things done was ensuring that when we went through and were doing that polish pass and [seeing] how we fix this up and make it better. The whole team really gets involved at that point [and they figure out] what they can throw in and get it working correctly so it really is awesome. We can all stay on a Saturday to get this last thing in that wasn’t really on the table before but we do have the extra time, so we should do it. We’re able to get in some stuff that wasn’t on the plate before but we realize we can totally pull off with a little extra time and extra work to get it in there and get it working. That’s been a really good thing for us.