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Champions Online News - Progress Since Launch Interview
Posted by Jon Wood on Dec 11, 2009 | 32 comments in our forums
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
yeah...well what we should all take from this is...item shops are dumb in P2P!
Well, Roper has some of the facts right although there are issues which he has failed to bring up. I just canceled last Sunday so here's my take :
1. Technical - There are issues with the connectivity right now. We get people being disconnected, serious lag, rubber-banding, long load times (my max before I logged out was over 25 minutes to log in), inability to get past the patcher, patcher crashing (and no one on CO's side knows it's crashed for an extended period of time), inability to connect to login servers, etcetc. Apparently all these issues relate to my isp or my computer so I have been advised. Actually, it supposedly relates to all the affected users isps irrespective of whether they are in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA or Asia. Just have a look through the PC & technical issues forum on their website and you'll see what I mean.
2. Nemesis Update - I wouldn't know to comment since I can't group since the launch in September because I get seriously horrible lag whenever I group with anyone. Apparently this is caused by my Nvidia 9600, with and without latest drivers. How do you like that guys ? Forced solo play lol.
3. Powers - Ok, this was true. They were seriously unbalanced at launch and the devs are currently trying their level best to rectify this. What caused a big ruckus was the wildly swinging nerf bats that came out in their initial attempts to fix things. There was literally no such thing as "Ok guys, this power is unbalanced, maybe we can tweak it here, buff it there and add this other thing."; It was all "Ack ! This is wrong. Get rid of it." It was only very recently that the devs have finally sat down with the gen pop and tried to balance things out.
4. Content - Yup, seriously lacking. CO is basically a stand-alone game played on a big server with other people you can chat with. 90% of the content is soloable. In fact I even soloed a few lairs where it's supposed to be meant for a 5-person team. The holiday content is, shall we say, slightly 'hohum'. The Halloween event was a big let-down for me. There was simply no challenge to it and there was also basically no real reward at the end. Gimme a bright shiny star to stick on my cape at least. I do admit that I didn't finish the entire event since I didn't do pvp. 2 reasons for this - (1) I don't really pvp and (2) I can't group remember, so pvp would likely be just me bending over every time I tried.
I do agree with the other posters here in that CO does have potential. The designers really need to take a step back and think of not how it can measure up to CoH but how to surpass it.
yeah...well what we should all take from this is...item shops are dumb in P2P!
I follow the news releases about this game because it interests me. I'm still sitting on the sidelines because of the item shop that offers things like respecs and performance enhancement (correct me if I'm wrong).
I think there are probably a lot of people on the sidelines because of the subscription fee, plus extra for respec, plus extra for enhancing items. It doesn't matter if these items are available in game because this can be easily manipulated (E.G. the ingame option can be made dull, repetitive, too difficult, too long etc.). If this happens, people are going to be herded into the item shop to avoid the grind. That's a non-starter for me.
Costume pieces in an item shop (things that don't affect gameplay) are fine with me btw. Fix this issue, and I'd give it a try. I'm not touching it otherwise.
It also sounds like launch was buggy and imbalanced, and that significant rebalancing was done after release. Those issues bite MMOs in the backside all the time, and it would be nice if companies learned from the history. I suppose all they can do now is admit the error and try to make improvements with player input.
Listen to the players about priority fixes, don't mess up their progress, and stick with purely cosmetic RMT items (no enhancements or respecs) and you got me. Otherwise, it just sounds like a hassle and a money pit, not a fun entertainment service.
This is sadly how most feel about CO, this is of course including me. I got hooked on the game durring open beta due to the freedom on what I could create. Sadly the game just wasn't very fun or challenging so the majority of the fun was in creating the toons not actually playing them. For the first run through the game it wasn't to bad, the second run through was more than enough and I pretty much had my fill of the game after that. I tried sticking it out and focusing on PvP but even that got to a point where I wasn't really having fun any more. It's far more repetetive than I expect an MMO to be. No variation at all really.
CO would have made a killer single player console game and would have been worth every penny. It has about the expected garunteed play time you would expect from a single player console game so that is probably a large part of it. CO requires just shy of 50 hours to hit the end. They have added a little here and there but it's still not even up to what I would consider par for an MMO at launch.
One day the game could really be killer but it would require a ton of work and possibly a relaunch or an NGE type of overhaul.
When DCUO launches CO needs to outshine it by a great deal and I just don't see that happening. CO just needs to much work.
I will check back in on it every few months but I couldn't even stick out my 6 month sub, I probably have 3 months left and I can't bring myself to log in still so I simply canceled and uninstalled.
Good costumization, definetly worth the initial buy, but sadly the rest of the game comes up extremely short and it definetly isn't worth a monthly sub.
But this is just imho.
This is sadly how most feel about CO, this is of course including me. I got hooked on the game durring open beta due to the freedom on what I could create. Sadly the game just wasn't very fun or challenging so the majority of the fun was in creating the toons not actually playing them. For the first run through the game it wasn't to bad, the second run through was more than enough and I pretty much had my fill of the game after that. I tried sticking it out and focusing on PvP but even that got to a point where I wasn't really having fun any more. It's far more repetetive than I expect an MMO to be. No variation at all really.
CO would have made a killer single player console game and would have been worth every penny. It has about the expected garunteed play time you would expect from a single player console game so that is probably a large part of it. CO requires just shy of 50 hours to hit the end. They have added a little here and there but it's still not even up to what I would consider par for an MMO at launch.
One day the game could really be killer but it would require a ton of work and possibly a relaunch or an NGE type of overhaul.
When DCUO launches CO needs to outshine it by a great deal and I just don't see that happening. CO just needs to much work.
I will check back in on it every few months but I couldn't even stick out my 6 month sub, I probably have 3 months left and I can't bring myself to log in still so I simply canceled and uninstalled.
Good costumization, definetly worth the initial buy, but sadly the rest of the game comes up extremely short and it definetly isn't worth a monthly sub.
But this is just imho.
So true. The customization was the best thing in the whole game. And you nailed it when you said it would have been a great single player stand-alone game since grouping was not really necessary. They could have set up something like a "Hire" mercenaries/sidekicks kinda thing for the 5-person lairs and it would have worked nicely as a single player game.
Actually I wonder if they thought of that at the start ? Then after launch they could have said that there would be a mmo side to it where everyone could log in to a server somewhere. Lol, but then I guess too many people would cry "Flagship !" and that would have been a disaster.
Meh. SWTOR may not kill WoW but it can certainly crush this flop of a game. It's too much like CoH with a few tweaks and new world.
I've never fully understood the desire people have to "kill" a game. Simple schadenfreude or is there a practical reason? There's always some people a game brings a bit of joy to, don't they like it when people are happy? Is it that the refugees all supposed to subscribe to the hater's chosen game, to reinforce the idea that they made the right choice and soothe their ego?
In actual fact when a MMORPG fails it's a pretty bad thing for the genre as a whole. It could potentially mean less investors, confidence, innovation amongst other things. Not to mention the loss of jobs.
Although I agree on a sterile technical level; there's actually much more to the issue of missions/quests in an mmo - the presentation of the gameworld in CO is much more clumsy and arbitrary than any gameworld I have experienced,and this actively undermines the variety of reward you can possibly draw from each mission. Instances in other games provide objectives and features you can resolve in total, they allow you to see the conclusion and result of your efforts, no alternative method of providing such an illusion is attempted in CO, while zones are large they actually convey a cramped and cluttered feel, the careless design of mission objectives forecebly drives you past respawned features with alarming frequency undermining any sense of immersion, respawn rates are fast and ignorant of shard populations so you can often face the futile realisation of wasting your time before you have even digested your accumulated loot, mission texts are clumsy and wildly different in tone, mission arcs don't integrate consistently so you will find a cure for one blighted enemy in one arc and be back to havesting the same folks you now know to be innocents in the next, enemy ai has zero variety everything behaves like herding animals, locations and response to attack are identical accross the board, even the oldest games provide some choice of contact or mission but there are no occurences of player choice that have any stylistic influence in CO..none whatsoever, which is a new low for player involvement.
The reward for completing a mission in CO is that your avatar gains experience, the reward for completing a mission in virtually any other mmo you care to mention is likewise experience but additionally they attempt to provide conceptual fulfillment, they often define the choices/journey you have ahead, they respond differently to your chosen achetype, they attempt to engage your imagination and draw you into the lore, they aim to support the theme in a manner that assists and encourages player involvement and immersion - these conceptual rewards go hand in hand with the physical rewards....maybe not always with the same success but CO is the first mmo I have come accross that doesnt even bother to try and convey them.
For these reasons identical mission mechanics in other mmo's are potentially more real fun or else more likely to appeal to a wider variety of player than the monosyllabic reward CO offers. Simply adding more of the same missions/quests/lairs as they have to date styles will not broaden the appeal, they desperately need to go back to the drawing board and revisit the core theme with some genuine conviction or else variety and depth will have no hope of seeing light of day.
The character creation screen is still the best thing about this game after all this time. Roper need realize that in order for CO to get better. Because as of now CO is still full of FAIL for all the same reasons as 1st month when they were bleeding players.
As for CO not being immersive, I agree. I have been playing Mass Effect, to prepare for the sequel, and that game is 10 years ahead of CO in terms of immersion and lore, etc.
But I am not looking forward to TOR as an MMO because Bioware has yet to make my a game with good controls. Sure the controls are always "good enough" to get you through the story, but the acting of controlling my character is too clumsy to be intrinsically fun. In other words, if you removed all the story and lore, I certainly would not load up ME to kill baddies for hours.
There is only one MMO I have found with combat that is as good as an action game, and that's CO. Gameplay matters more to me then presentation, as I am an old school gamer, and while I agree the presentation in Champions is lacking, the combat gameplay is top notch for an MMORPG.
That's not true at all with a game like WoW out there (and wouldn't be true in the long term even if that wasn't the case). When bad games die it does send a message though. LEARN FROM THIS, DON'T MAKE IT'S LIKE AGAIN! Sometimes some learn the wrong lessons, but it can be quite helpful to the industry overall; bad games should die.
How about you purchase "Understanding MMOs for Dummies" and come back but you probably can't because Scott Hartsman is too busy
listening to playersgetting promoted to Producer by sodomizing his community to allow the sockpuppets to realize his game is just as guilty of everything you mentioned above after 5 years.Thanks for picking on the fanboy, an EQ2 apologist has even more to contribute... not.
This game needs lots of work, but most of it is the fundamental problems with MMOs as a whole. Someone needs to design a way to make playing with other people more fun than the typical "let people PVP, group, raid, or do public quest type things."
Every MMORPG is boring and repetitive. It really isn't the game, what people mainly seem to need is something that isn't going to drive their friends away so that they have someone to play with. What can we do to mix things up a bit?
How about you purchase "Understanding MMOs for Dummies" and come back but you probably can't because Scott Hartsman is too busy
listening to playersgetting promoted to Producer by sodomizing his community to allow the sockpuppets to realize his game is just as guilty of everything you mentioned above after 5 years.Thanks for picking on the fanboy, an EQ2 apologist has even more to contribute... not.
This game needs lots of work, but most of it is the fundamental problems with MMOs as a whole. Someone needs to design a way to make playing with other people more fun than the typical "let people PVP, group, raid, or do public quest type things."
Every MMORPG is boring and repetitive. It really isn't the game, what people mainly seem to need is something that isn't going to drive their friends away so that they have someone to play with. What can we do to mix things up a bit?
A little bitter, aren't you?
I am no EQ2 apologist, I think SOE has a track record for spitting in their customers face.
But I do now a fun and entertaining game when I play one, EQ2 is a fun and entertaining game, whereas Champions online is not (anymore).
Yes this game has issues, and yes the problem lies within the industry. The game companies think that the entire MMO community will accept garbage at launch. (AoC, WAR and DF are examples) .
But the reason they think this way is because there are too many moron gamers that will eat a bucket of crap and tell everyone how wonderful it tastes. The real problem is the low expectations of gamers and the IP fans who (just because they like the IP) will lie about how well a game is doing, when all evidence points at the complete opposite.
Yes men are just ass kissers, ass kissers are useless
And, not every MMO is boring and repetitive, only the boring and repetitive ones are. Just stay away from them and you won't feel so depressed all the time.
Oh, thanks for the personal attack. It isn't my fault your friends left the game, and you.