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

In the past, Cryptic Studios has done well at appealing to both the hardcore and the casual gamer in the past with the “City Of” series and many gamers have been wondering whether their current work on City of Heroes/Villains is being used to “test” or “try out” various elements that need to be included in the Marvel Universe Online. For example, have the developers been working on wings and inventions in City of Heroes/Villains to really get things perfected for Marvel Universe.

“We’re not directly transferring anything or using anything for ‘training’,” Victor said. He wanted to let the public know that City of Heroes/Villains wasn’t playing second fiddle to Marvel Universe Online. The game is very dear to the hearts of the people at Cryptic, and that was evident in what Shayne and Victor had to say. Instead of “training”, CoH/CoV is serving as the foundation of experience for the upcoming title.

“We are using our experience with City of Heroes/Villains to our advantage with Marvel Universe,” Shayne interjected.

“It’s really about improving and implementing what we know on top of all the new stuff we’ve been learning,” Victor added. “There are many things that are comic book appropriate that we never really got a chance to do with City of Heroes. Since we’ve been building the Marvel Universe from the bottom up, we can do these things.”

“Take our character creator for example,” Shayne said. “People were really impressed with the stuff we could do with it back when the first game was released. Now imagine what we’re doing with it now.”

I can certainly imagine it well enough. The character generator behind CoH/CoV was a powerful tool, and one that I spent hours with.

Moving along the CoH/CoV vein, I wondered whether we could get any information on Issue 10 for CoH/CoV. Since Issue 9 was recently released, it seemed like an opportune time to ask about the future. Unfortunately, no information was really forthcoming. Victor and Shayne couldn’t answer the question, although more information would be released sometime soon.

Shayne did want to emphasize what they were planning to do with the next few issues, however, which was to take a core mechanic and just make it as refined and improve upon it as much as possible. “Our goal is to make something new with what we already have,” he said. “We want to keep tuning and tuning and tuning until we’re as close to perfect as we can possibly get.”

Community, according to Victor, has also played a major part in the implementation of some of the improvements we’ve seen in the most recent issues. “We’re really trusting the feedback the players have given us over the years,” he said. “They’ve wanted something done here, and we’re going to do our best to improve it so they’re happy.”