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

Ten Ton Hammer: How long does a typical PvP session last?

James: We’re aiming for 15 minutes, we try not to have it go on much longer than that, though sometimes it doesn’t take nearly that long if one team is steamrolling the other team. We want it to be fast and furious and exciting.

Rob: There’s a sense of finality to Apocalypse too. When the other teams sigs get into your base, things start getting frantic and go south. But if you have someone smart enough to sneak off and get to your consoles and send reinforcements into the other team’s base at just the right time, you can turn it around. It’s a lot of fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: And this is just the start?

Rob: Everything you’ve seen in beta and everything you see tonight is just the start of tons and tons of cool things. I won’t say what we’re working on in the future for Apocalypse, but it’ll probably veer less toward villains and more toward big scary things.

Ten Ton Hammer: So which styles of Champions Online PvP are your favorites right now?

Rob: I really like the boxing arena, the first UTC, and Apocalypse Stronghold. I like BASH, just how fast and crazy it is with your teammates shooting you.

When a problem comes along....

James: I really like our latest UTC map, which hasn’t hit beta yet. It just looks completely awesome. Lava, lava everywhere. For people with knockback, it’s going to be beautiful. Disrupting flight over the lava, too - it’s going to be fun. That’s the 31 to 40 UTC tier - I don’t want to do that to people that are just learning PvP. I’m not that sadistic.

Rob: It was so hard for us not to make it competely over-the-top. I think some of us - me - were like, ‘We should have lava spurts... that grab you and punch you in the face and make you explode!’ (laughter)

Ten Ton Hammer: Are environmental hazards something you want to do more of in the game?

Rob: Definitely, I’m a big fan of the trapster maps, but we don’t want to get too complicated or have too many things going on at once.

James: We tried that with some of the original UTC maps, and people were too busy fighting to realize that this gets electified if I hit that switch over there. It was too much.

Rob: At the end of the day, the PvP team wants to look at the boards and gather feedback and reasonably react to that feedback in the next update and really give them what they want. If they want king of the hill or capture the flag or the electrocution switch, it’ll go in.

Watch for the second part of this interview later this week, as we’ll hit up Rob Overmeyer and James Laird for some Champions Online PvP tips to put you on top of the leaderboards. A big thank you to James, Rob, and Cryptic Studios for their time!