Champions Online has withstood a fair amount of criticism since its launch. Recently, MMORPG.com's Jon Wood spoke with Cryptic's Bill Roper about the game, its future, and the criticisms that it has weathered.

Recently, I had the opportunity to ask a few questions of Cryptic’s Bill Roper about Champions Online and the public’s receptions of their game and the general perception that it carries.

When it first launched, Champions Online was met with a number of players who felt that the game simply wasn’t up to par with what they were expecting from Cryptic’s second stab at a superhero MMO.

To be fair, reviews of the game since its launch have been mixed, from 87 all the way down to 40 on Metacritic(with an average score of 72). Still, it’s the detractors of the game that are often the loudest and it is their complaints that this interview was at least partially meant to address.

Read the Progress Since Launch Interview.

Surprise me then Cryptic,

What they have given us isn't a 'superhero' game... rather only a skin of IT with the core of the same old generic material for MMOs.

Sure it's fast-paced... But when you have to use the same power set (where if you don't have certain skills you are immediately 'gimped') , where concept characters suffer more than they should, where you have to use the same few buttons to kill everything, where pvp is just the matter of who has what skills (fotm?)... The list goes on.

I really want CO to succeed, but right now it's core elements are flawed and I have little hope of it recovering.

Pretty much the haters are still gonna hate this game for no reason.  Because thats all they do!  Its a great game and it keeps getting better.

 Notice that the fanboi brings nothing to the table

The game WAS fun, but after a month the "newness" wears off and the game is rather boring and repetitive.  If you play melee, get used to sucking at PVP and probably getting a little miffed at PVE.

Powers are still far from balanced, some of the powersets are still broken and unplayable (as of Dec 1, I went back to EQ2).

The game has huge potential, more potential than anything released in the last 2 years. For that potential to be realized, the devs have to understand that  the game has no re-playability in its current state. You have to grab damn near every quest in the game just to level up without grinding. If you create a second character, they too will have to grab every quest in the game to level up, once you have played through all the quests twice, you will not want to try it a third time.

The citizen quests give out 75% less experience than do the regular quests at the same level, absolutely a waste of time. All of the new "kill 150 of those" quests are a waste of time as well. Unless you have played the game already, you won't know where to find the "critters", and you spend time hunting around the whole map trying to find them.

The game stutters like a car on bad gas when you use the latest nvidia drivers. No other game has problems with it (it actually improved performance in Dragon Age and EQ2 for me).

The game doesn't suck, it isn't a disaster and I don't see it "dying" in the near future. But it is very boring after a time.

Champions Online is worth the cost of the box and the free first month, and not much more (unless you are a Champions fan or a superhero worshiper).

And Bill Roper does not know anything about "listening to their players". He would need to purchase a dummies guide first.

Originally posted by Manchine

Pretty much the haters are still gonna hate this game for no reason.  Because thats all they do!  Its a great game and it keeps getting better.

Why is the game great? What makes it great? I'm more inclined to believe people who actually list reasons than people who simply give me a nebulous thumbs-up.

(Note: I've never played CO, though I am a big CoH fan.)

 Things that will breath new life into this great game:

- Random missions that are generated by theme. This means that each zone have a contact that will generate random missions based on YOUR selected tastes. YES THIS IS LIKE COH. It works. So long as it is truly randomly generated from some basic core and doesn't repeat then it will aid in furthering the life of the game. Attach meanginful accolades to this and you probably have something people will love.

- The ability to TRIGGER your nemesis by doing something will help a lot. People don't feel super and that could go a little ways to doing so. Say there are street contacts that you can go to (like the same one for random content, but they also have a "Nemesis" tab. Basically you do some mission that the contact has for you and this triggers your nemesis. OR more drops from common mobs that lead to connections between your nemesis and the baddie groups of the game. Immerse us!

- Dress up the animations some. Make more animations for the current powers. More dynamic looking animations. Set them to randomly activate with the power on click. This is a minor tweak, but could make a difference.

- We need to feel as heroes that our actions are effecting the world. Right now there isn't enough of that. Make it so that random citizens come scream for help and then if we accept there is some big even going on that we (and our team) are told to go to. This would not be an open event, instead you HAVE TO be randomly invited to it by an NPC citizen that is freaking out about it. Fires, monster attacks and all out faction wars. These could have NPCs randomly spawned locations. Other heroes could see the event, but not join in. It is random. YOU (and your team) have saved the day. Not everyone else. You.

These are little things and I am sure that the developers have more in mind, but these are some examples. We need something to spice it up. Right now there is too much forced repetitions. You cannot level almost without just doing the missions in a pretty linear fashion and that hurts.

Originally posted by Manchine

Pretty much the haters are still gonna hate this game for no reason.  Because thats all they do!  Its a great game and it keeps getting better.

That's a shock.  Your Xfire shows WAR and CO as your two games played.  It must be nice having your head in the sand.

Originally posted by Manchine

Pretty much the haters are still gonna hate this game for no reason.  Because thats all they do!  Its a great game and it keeps getting better.

I've played every trial CO has offered so far including open beta, cause I really really want to like it.  And while I have and could again list the many things I don't like about the game, I'll just say, I've yet to play a trial to completion. I get bored.

These forums are filled with well reasoned complaints about CO. Hell, even the article you're responding to acknowledges CO's problems, so your mindless fanboi-ism is really showing.

Most of the depth in Champions is in the awesome variety of builds that can be created with the open power (classless) selection system.  But admittedly this means a player needs to create several alts to experience the depth of the game. 

Right now there is only room in the xp curve to miss ~15% of quests on the way to level cap, so there really are no alternate paths.  Therefore each alt plays through most of the same quests, and the only difference in the experience is the different build of powers.

In any MMO I've played prior to CO, this all would have sounded terrible, but the difference is that CO has broken through to truly be an action MMO, so that the playing is intrinsically fun.  The combat is fast paced, it rewards skillful timing with the block button (anyone who says the game is too hard with such and such build has not learned to block or is not including blocking in the analysis, but their complaint is still valid of course, blocking takes a lot of practice and skill in CO but is very rewarding).   The different powersets have almost no redundancies i.e. reskinned powers, all the powers in the game play distinctly especially when you are talking about how they fit into various builds.

To summarize, the main reason to check out Champions, is to play the awesome combat, which afaik is the smoothest in the genre to date.  If you are a City of Heroes player, like I was, the only reason not to move to CO, IMO, would be for community, or if you don't like to make alts and want to powerlevel to cap then the game will be short.

If anyone is at all interested, they should keep their eyes open for the next free weekend.  They will probably do one sometime around the holidays, maybe in the week leading to New Years would be my guess. Free weekend means totally free to try the game for anyone.

Im not a fan of the Champions world to start with, so I knew it was going to be difficult to like the game with its characters and story lines. I cant stand the crisis tutorial, or the following disaster areas. The NPC mob groups don't really appeal to me either. and I cant seem to stay interested long enough to care about a Nemesis. I do like the power sets...how you can pick what you want. The graphics all around are good, but it's the game portion that should keeps me interested. I just think the lore, and the character are to goofy for me, but Ive never been to in to the golden age. I'm sure the game is fun to some, but it's just not working for me on so many levels.

I hope they turrn it around, but I just dont see how it will ever work for me.

I loved this game and the whole concept of it. Making my Super Hero, but I couldn't play it because of the whole server not responding issue. So I decided to not renew for a month and maybe wait for them to sort it out.

Couple of weeks ago I renewed my subscription and I unfortunatly got the same thing, but I do recommend that you give it at least a try. But as for me I gave up. 

CO is a good game - but not for a monthly subscription.

A lot of instacing (and/or Layers), repetative missions and a bad balancing.

Make it F2P (there is already a Itemshop - so only release 80% of the new costumes thru the shop) and the playerbase will grow.

At the last free weekend i played it some hours and then i logged out and played Borderlands or WAR (same instant action but better game-flow).

The game lacks in many departments, mainly content.  There is simply not enough content to keep my interest.  Crafting was tacked on, I believe, just to say that it offers crafting.  There really is no need for it.  The big Bloodmoon event was a joke...repeating the same instance over and over and the instances did not scale to level.  I lost faith.  After playing CoH for four years and then playing this mediocre game, where the devs fail to test patches.

I think most everyone mainly the dude being interviewed got this wrong.

The problem with city of heroes is one thing and one thing mainly.

It is not ability powers being unbalanced. (Not really a big deal somethign easily fixed if devs on on it).

Its not the quests or number of them.

The random quests do need help (team rewards plz).

The main issue is theres no reason to group, and 3 months later theres still hardly reason to group, no reason till 30. Which i am sad to say is simply stupid. I mean its dumb and there was hardly any attention brought to this.

Ill tell you this i have a gaming ring of 14 close people, only two are even interested in playing CO , and even them are on the fence becuase really whats the point? There is no challenge in the game there is no reason to work together for a common goal.

The game needs hard lairs/etc. from lvl 10 up that require full gtroups or reward for exp at harder difficulty levels.

Some of them should be repetable, to grind instances yes thats right , but why not?

If you have this in place you no longer have the problem where you do 100% of the quests to level. This resulting in better experience questing as it is less of a grind.

Altough the game has some nice features, such as fast paced combat and great customization, it is fundamentally flawed in the sense that it is an MMORPG yet caters so much to solo play that you can go through almost the entire content of the game and barely speak to anyone else.

It is an MMORPG, built with a single player mentality. Until the devs "gets" that the game will continue to slide down to oblivion.

Originally posted by TatsuOyama

 Things that will breath new life into this great game:

- Random missions that are generated by theme. This means that each zone have a contact that will generate random missions based on YOUR selected tastes. YES THIS IS LIKE COH. It works. So long as it is truly randomly generated from some basic core and doesn't repeat then it will aid in furthering the life of the game. Attach meanginful accolades to this and you probably have something people will love.

- The ability to TRIGGER your nemesis by doing something will help a lot. People don't feel super and that could go a little ways to doing so. Say there are street contacts that you can go to (like the same one for random content, but they also have a "Nemesis" tab. Basically you do some mission that the contact has for you and this triggers your nemesis. OR more drops from common mobs that lead to connections between your nemesis and the baddie groups of the game. Immerse us!

- Dress up the animations some. Make more animations for the current powers. More dynamic looking animations. Set them to randomly activate with the power on click. This is a minor tweak, but could make a difference.

- We need to feel as heroes that our actions are effecting the world. Right now there isn't enough of that. Make it so that random citizens come scream for help and then if we accept there is some big even going on that we (and our team) are told to go to. This would not be an open event, instead you HAVE TO be randomly invited to it by an NPC citizen that is freaking out about it. Fires, monster attacks and all out faction wars. These could have NPCs randomly spawned locations. Other heroes could see the event, but not join in. It is random. YOU (and your team) have saved the day. Not everyone else. You.

These are little things and I am sure that the developers have more in mind, but these are some examples. We need something to spice it up. Right now there is too much forced repetitions. You cannot level almost without just doing the missions in a pretty linear fashion and that hurts.

Yeah this is the main requirement at this stage - a dynamic and immersive world, people can say what they like about the terrific customisation but it isn't the all consuming feature for many players and currently its the ONLY satisfaction the game delivers. The problem was highlighted from very early Alpha with little to no progress evident, it's as if the design team have no feel for the gameworld whatsoever, just adding a greater volume of missions wont solve this issue they need to give the player more substance to actually care about what they are doing - hooks onto which variety and involvement can build.

As it stands CO is a game of violent disparity, awesome on one hand and abysmal on the other,  the problem is the awesome side is all front loaded in player time. Theme realisation, involvement, immersion, quest variety are the urgent requirements to make the actual gameplay fun beyond the customisation aspects. 

(I see comments about the combat system, in truth its a 6 of one half dozen of the other change, the raw mechanics quickly become as relentlessly unvarying as any other mmo and the enemy ai in CO is awful, if you want a truly engaging combat system I don't think MMO's have got there yet.)

 While fanboyism is not right, neither is plain hatred. 

CO has many interesting features that are interesting.

1) The ability of having a high number of combinations in powers. That doesn't mean that I can get a random power selector and get it right. There are so many selections so it  requires some research to get it right. I admit that it affects in some degree thematic heroes, but there is a balance in that, to get too thematic performance has to be sacrificed, this is true in almost every game (Try to raid with a wow melee hunter )

2) Nemesis. The personalized enemy. While it has a lot of room for improvement the whole idea is pretty promising.

Many of the complaints (not all) are exagerated

1) Missions. CO missions are not so different from the other mmos I played like wow or CoH. Kill Xs, Kill big guy, collect something, escort, etc. 

2) Balancing, there is no mmo without balancing problems, I still remember that classes were taking turns in wow, that warlock are OP or broken or whatever people felt like at the moment.

The complains I completely agree,

1) Group content, it is pretty reduced, at the same time the leveling is so fast that there is no much reason to actually group except for a few instances and mainly for enjoy them but you can level to 40 without teaming at all.

2) Small amount of content, at launch with deficit, now with 15% of surplus, but still too small. However, most of the content is non-generic instance like CoH so Cryptic could actually creates a lot of content easily if they dare to go that route more.  

In conclusion, I think the game is good, with a lot of area requiring improvement and really good potential.

I never gave it a chance because there is an item shop in it and it is P2P. That is an immediate no play for me.

Originally posted by Angorim

Originally posted by Manchine

Pretty much the haters are still gonna hate this game for no reason.  Because thats all they do!  Its a great game and it keeps getting better.

 

That's a shock.  Your Xfire shows WAR and CO as your two games played.  It must be nice having your head in the sand.

lol that was incredibly harsh...but really funny, kudos. :P

Originally posted by qombi

I never gave it a chance because there is an item shop in it and it is P2P. That is an immediate no play for me.

yeah...well what we should all take from this is...item shops are dumb in P2P!