General Discussion

After much speculation on what Cryptic Studios have been working on since the Marvel MMO was officially canceled, they have officially announced that they are remaining in the super hero business with an MMO based on the pen an paper RPG Champions.

LOS GATOS, CA – February 20, 2008 – Cryptic Studios™, one of the leading independent developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), announced today Champions Online™, their first ever self-developed and self-published MMORPG. Champions Online, based on the popular pen-and-paper Champions RPG, will give players the power of total customization of their hero experience while they explore a vast universe of richly detailed 3D environments. Champions Online is slated for release in Spring 2009.

Cryptic Studios also announced today that it has acquired the Champions intellectual property (IP) from Hero Games. First published in 1981, the Champions role-playing game is one of the first RPGs to forgo the traditional dice-rolling system of character generation in favor of a point-based system. Cryptic Studios has licensed back to Hero Games the rights to produce Champions RPG books, and the sixth edition of the HERO System and Champions, set to release in 2009, will include rules on how to recreate Champions Online characters and scenarios.

"We thought carefully about which IP to select for our next game,"said Jack Emmert, chief creative officer of Cryptic Studios. "I've been playing the Champions RPG since it first came out and I love both the rich history and wide array of compelling characters which made this an obvious choice for Cryptic Studios."

Read more here.

Visit the Champions Online Official site here.

Meh...  might be worth a look if I don't feel I have to compete against other players for anything.  Hopefully there will be no forced grouping and all content will be available to the solo player.  And please dear Lord, let there NOT be any PvP.  The IQ level of the player base drops by 100 in every game that has PvP in it.

City of Heroes 2.0 ?

For me it's worth a try.

Originally posted by Centhan

City of Heroes 2.0 ?

For me it's worth a try.

Oh and definitely worth a try for me aswell, i just hope they get the interface down with the 360 version.

the game sounds amazing, there will be pvp from launch in underground arenas, and cryptic said there will be solo content all the way up to and including the end game

I'm not a big superhero person, but if it has some cool features I'll definitely check it out.

Long time fan/player of the pnp rpg Champions. Only played CoX in the trial, and didn't continue cas of my system at the time ran it crappy. May have to check it out again the time being. But I willl sure follow this mmo. If they do it justice, I'm all in! Champions was my favorite pnp. The characters creation point system was just ingenious, I would just spend hours creating superheroes. Picking powers, disadvantages, multipowers, etc. The campaign scernarios were written well too. The CO team will have plenty of supervillians, mythos, etc. to pull from and recreate. Does any one remember the The Blood, an alien faction that came here by their hobo/alchoholic leader Pathfinder who was a multi-dimensional teleporter that escaped his own planet with his so called family, here to earth. And the chaos that followed, man loved some of the things they came up with. And the original cover for the manual was an instance draw for me as a kid to play. I'll try to find it if I have it still and post here in the forums. I had one character name Impulse, who had powerful energy punches, but one of his disadvantages was he was a major berserker, and always lost control killing tons of Viper millitia. So, many great memories of this game, I could go on and on.

My main concerns are 1) give the player full control of their character and his powers, if it's like the point systems, or some similar lvl based system, I'll be stoked. 2) The end game needs to be more than just smash-n- bash to death quests. They need to have the abilities for players to create their own headqaurters with their superfriends and be able to pvp against other superviliians (maybe even a FFA server where you can choose good, evil, neutral, or for self gain), and have destructable buildings to eliminate each others goals and acomplishments. In otherswords, have a wonderful pve system installed but allow character/player pvp immersion be part of the mmo world. To me that's the next gen mmo.

I never heard the announcement that marvel online was cancelled. Oh well with Cap dead and spidey screwed up for the nth time I don't care.

Ill give this new cryptic game a look they make nice stuff.

This game is gonna rock!

It'll be the most open ended MMORPG ever in terms of character creation!

What CoX did for costumes they will repeat and be as flexible in terms of powers!

This game is going to be great.  No way around it.

A little concerned that the screenshots look like CoH2-Cell Shaded Boogaloo....but I will watch this one closely.