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

Ten Ton Hammer: Awesome. The Omega-class villains obviously played a large role in shaping major aspects of the Champions universe - for example Millennium City wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Doctor Destroyer. Is the Omega system in Champions Online built around that same notion of massive confrontations with some of the world’s most powerful villains?

Bill Roper: The idea behind the way the Omega system works is that, UNITY, which is an organization within the Champions IP that is basically the high end global threat response team. They’re an organization that looks at threats worldwide and the ones that are the most dangerous are the ones that UNITY finds out about, and has a superhero response team that they send out.

What we wanted to really do with that was to make sure that these were really fun, really challenging high end instance-based content, and kind of having that ‘global crime computer’ feel where they’re finding out what’s happening. Then once you’ve been invited in and accepted into UNITY which is really the best way to put it in terms of storyline, once you do that you can go to UNITY’s headquarters in a hidden area of Millennium City. Then there are basically five threats a day that have been identified, and those threats will change every day so there will be five different missions you can go on each day. When you complete those five missions you’ll be able to get a sixth which is a ‘higher-end’ mission.

As you’re completing these chains of missions you’re earning commendations within UNITY, and then you’re able to use those commendations - which is an alternate form of currency that you’re now able to use - to get special Omega rewards which will be gear and costume pieces or titles and some other things like that. And then you’ll also be able to use those commendations to get access to high level, repeatable lairs.

So the idea is that we wanted to make a system that changes every day, somewhat along the lines of daily missions. But as opposed to doing the same ones all the time or having them on timers or anything, every day there are five new missions that you can go on.

The thing that I like about it is the way that our mission tracker system works you can have up to 15 missions active at a time. So if I’m level 40 and I’m really not doing any other story missions in the game and I decide to go do some Omega missions, but say it’s a Thursday night and I’ve got to go to dinner with friends and family and things like that so I’m not going to be able to play but I know my friends are going to be on this weekend. I can go Thursday to UNITY and get the five missions and then the next day I can go and get Friday’s missions from UNITY and I can still do all 10, because they’re still in my mission tracker.

This is something we wanted to do so that it’s a bit friendlier to players that don’t have the ability every single night to be playing. I know that there’s players who will do that, and that’s what the system was designed for is those high end players who will want to run these missions but maybe they’ll want to store up a couple of days. Then they can go do them all, so say it’s Friday night and you can say, “I’ve got both Thursday and Friday night’s, let’s go do those.” Then since the associated missions, that sixth mission is tied to the completion of the first five you’ll also be able to do that one.