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

Ten Ton Hammer: What if a player decides that maybe they don’t want to jump into crafting right away, but then decides to go back to it at a higher level; is the system easy to dive into later on?

Bill Roper: It definitely is. There are two ways that you’re gaining skill points in crafting. One of the ways - if you want to use sort of a generic MMO term – is by finding resource nodes. In other words there are things you can find out in the world to investigate, but you gain the vast majority of skill points by deconstructing items.

The way our crafting system is designed, there is Research and Development. Research is actually taking things apart and looking at what they’re made of. With most fantasy MMO crafting you’re making a mountain of short swords before you can go up to the next level to make cutlasses or whatever. We wanted to make it so that the vast majority of your points come from tearing things apart to see how it works, so that you’re learning from the way it was constructed.

We do a double duty with that, where if you have an item upgrade that can be taken apart, when you deconstruct those to do development you not only gain points from that in terms of learning how it was made but it will also give you the component parts that you can then use to make other items. You do get a little bit of skill from making things, but the system is definitely not designed to focus on that as the way you’ll be gaining levels.

So as a high level player, any items that are dropping for me are going to be a lot faster for me to skill up on, or I can always go to the marketplace and buy a bunch of cheap items from other players to deconstruct. Or it would also be really easy for me to fly, Superspeed or Superjump around the lower level zones and get resources.

Having done a lot of crafting in other MMOs, I find it’s not – I don’t know if “grindy” is the right term – but I don’t have to do a ton of travel. Using WoW as an example, if I decide to take mining I’ve got to go and start looking for copper in the newbie zones even if I’m level 50. That was the only thing that frustrated me actually about making a Death Knight. I wanted to start crafting but I realized I’d either have to buy all the stuff or I’d have to go and find all of it. So for something like herbalism you have to go find wild flowers and pick them to gain levels, and you really can’t do anything else to achieve that. It was like, “I’m starting at level 65, I can’t believe I have to do this” you know?

Ten Ton Hammer: Oh I know. I think I’d just hit level 62 on my Death Knight when I got the bright idea to pick up mining and blacksmithing and then realized what a grind it would be to get both of them up to my current level.

Bill Roper: The cool thing with our system is the fact that you’re basically just deconstructing stuff that’s really simple to go out and get. So I think it’s a really nice system; it’s definitely very different. You can make specific items, or you can even make algorithmically generated items where you’re basically deciding on certain parameters and telling the system that you want it to care about three specific things and it can make you a random item. Then there are also blueprints for exact items that you can get.

So it’s a nice system, it’s pretty deep and I think it can be easily picked up. You can definitely dive into crafting fairly easily at a higher level if you decide not to start with it until later on in your character career and it won’t be super frustrating.

Ten Ton Hammer: One final thing that I wanted to touch on that was addressed briefly as Champions transitioned into open beta is the push towards getting more polished support for gamepads in for launch.

Bill Roper: What we have in now, the way I’ve kind of looked at it is that we have combat controller support in. We’re not quite yet “officially” supporting the controller because there’s a lot of stuff that it doesn’t do yet such as certain menus that it won’t go through since we’ve recently gone back through a lot of the menu structures and things like that. But one of our programmers went in and wanted to get all the combat controls in and working.

So you can’t play 100% with just the controller. Every now and then it will be easier to go to your mouse and keyboard; you can navigate some of the current menus but it’s not really supported well quite yet. But the combat is really pretty fun with the controller, so we’ll be putting up a thread on how combat works with one.

As an example of something that isn’t quite supported yet, you can choose what mission reward you want to get, but that doesn’t give you the mouse-over text since that’s currently triggered off of a mouse action in the system. The controller doesn’t send the same message, so you can still go in and choose an item, but you won’t really know what they are unless you actually mouse over it. But for just cruising around the world and fighting it definitely works for all the combat.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for taking the time to talk, and good luck with the upcoming launch!

Bill Roper: Thanks, we are stoked! Things have been going great, we’ve been getting great feedback from people and we’re really looking forward to getting in with our early start people on the 28th and then everyone on the 1st. It’s been an awesome ride to get to where we are now, and we’re looking forward to continuing our interactions with our players and just continuing to make the game better and better.