Champions Online Preview

Bill Roper is a PC gaming legend. As vice president of Blizzard North, Roper played a key role in the success of Diablo and Diablo II, still considered by many to be the Blizzard's best games. Then he left, co-founded Flagship Studios and released the now defunct Hellgate: London, a game that was, essentially, Diablo in first person. Now, as design director and executive producer at Atari-owned Cryptic Studios, he's in charge of Champions Online, a superhero MMO due out on PC this spring. Here, in the first part of a mammoth interview with VideoGamer.com, Roper goes in depth on Champions, and appeals to European gamers to give the now running closed beta a try.

VideoGamer.com: Champions isn't as well known in Europe as it is in the US. What is it?

Bill Roper: Champions Online is a MMO based on the Champions paper and pencil role-playing game which released in 1981. The thing that's very cool about that for us and for our players is that we've got this universe and this world, these characters that have been developed for the last 25, 26 years and have gone through lots of iterations. The universe of Champions has grown, the characters have grown and have been played both on that actual pen and paper world side as well as the game mechanic side. So there's this very rich world that we get to explore, that our players get to explore.

VideoGamer.com: DC has Batman and Marvel has Spiderman. What does Champions have?

BR: As every superhero universe gets built there are heroes and villains across all strata of powers. In the Champions universe the leader of Champions, which is the pre-eminent super group in the world, is Defender. He represents that epitome of what superheroes are aspiring to be. And Doctor Destroyer would be the main villain on the other side. Actually he destroyed Detroit in the early 80s, and that's the site where a battle took place where most of the world's heroes had to come to try and defeat him. It's where Millennium City is built, which is one of the major cities in the game, built upon the wreckage of Detroit. The thing that's really nice about that is the fact that players know these very iconic heroes in other universes. You talked about Marvel and DC. They know the heroes there intimately because they've been reading the comics for so long. So it's a two-fold thing that's an advantage that Champions has. Because you don't know our characters as well you get to discover them through the course of the gameplay. You get to have that story unfold as you interact with them and you go through the storylines, and you learn about the characters and learn about what they can do.

Also, you have that ability to not feel overwhelmed, not have your hero feel to a degree insignificant next to those heroes. If I'm playing in a game where I am supposed to be working with Superman for example, I as a fan of comics know every last bit of lore probably about Superman, and I know what all of his powers are and I know that he's Earth's mightiest hero. So there's no exploration there for me. I don't get to find out anything. There aren't any twists that I can go through from a story standpoint or pieces of information I can find out that I'm not already going to know. As powerful as I'm going to be able to make my character in the game, I can't imagine that it will ever be as powerful as Superman because, it's Superman, right? If I'm supposed to go on a mission for him or fight next to him I'm always going to feel, how could I possibly help Superman? My little hero could never do that! It's Superman for God's sake! I think that's a big advantage we have. Players can recognise that, for example, Defender is this very pre-eminent hero in the world and has a place of importance and a lot of reputation and influence, but at the same time there isn't that instant, oh well gee I could never be Defender. You don't know. Maybe you can be Defender. His power levels are not so mentally unattainable through years and years of training, from having read comics and seen movies. While the Champions universe is nowhere near as well known as those others, that's a big advantage because it lets us have players experience that and not feel like they're insignificant, that they can have a level of prominence in that world.

VideoGamer.com: Typically when you start an MMO you're faced with character creation. What choices will be available to players with Champions Online?

BR: One of the hallmarks of the Champions pencil and paper game is the massive amount of customisation possible. I remember playing back when the game first came out, actually I was involved in a combat test that I didn't know was happening. Right before the game was published I went into my local hobby store and the guy behind the counter said, hey there are these guys in the back and they've got this game they're going to publish and they're doing some combat testing, you want to go check it out? I was in high school and I'm like, yeah that sounds awesome! So I run in the back and here's some of the creators of Champions, with type written stuff and rules. One of the things that blew me away was the power system was amazingly open ended. The whole goal was if I could think of a hero I should be able to make him. As best we possibly can we translated that with Champions Online. So the character creation is amazingly flexible. When you go in you are choosing what your character's going to look like and I think more than any other genre the look of your character is key. If you think about superheroes, they are so identified by look. Instantly they have an iconic presence. That's very important for us because we are with Champions trying to bring that full colour comic feel to life. So having impressive silhouettes, having whether you're making an armoured hero or whether you're wearing leather jackets or whether you're wearing tights and capes, whatever it is, we do our best to let you do that. So the character process, when you start with the costumes, is amazingly complex in terms of the number of pieces you have. When you're putting shoulder pads on it can go on the left or the right or both. There's literally hundreds and hundreds of pieces to choose from. You can change the height and the size of your character and the facial expressions and then go through and really custom fit and create this whole costume out of the pieces we provide. You have control over the colour of every piece that you're putting on. Logos and cape types, literally everything. We're trying to give players the ability to visualise in their head a type of hero and let them create that from a visual standpoint with the costume creator.

Even when you're choosing the powers that you want, you can have power themes that you follow. So if I want to get in and very easily make a fire guy, say I want cool fire powers, or I want darkness powers, those are just presented as thematic frameworks that I can put on my character. They're simple to get into, you can do that very quickly and just jump in the game. But if you're a nuts and bolts kind of person, if you want to get in and you're like, I want him to have darkness powers and lightning and I'm envisioning dark clouds, or whatever you're coming up with, you can open up basically every power in the game as a giant pallet from which to paint, and choose the different bits and pieces and do that as you progress through. You can always dip in and out of that. I could follow the fire theme for 20, 30 levels and then say, you know, I want to go outside of that theme now and I want to grab something else. I want to get Ego Heal or whatever it is, and go and grab that. I always have the ability to open up that whole powers menu, so the amount of customisation that gives you is incredible.

Layered then onto that is the ability to choose for a vast majority of the powers, emanation points, where that power is coming from. So if a force beam normally comes from your hands, I could instead choose to have it come from my eyes or a chest plate. So if I'm thinking my idea behind my guy is that he's a power armoured guy with this big chest cannon, I'm going to find a costume that represents that and I'm going to put that force beam that I have on that chest cannon piece. I can also choose the hue of the power. I'll stick with that force power example. With that force power, which is normally blue-ish in tint or in hue, I can go in on the power, every power individually, and very easily open up a colour bar slider. I can then make that orange or green or aqua or purple or whatever I want, and have that power themed the way I want it to be. If I'm imagining in my head it's a giant laser that's coming out I can shift it to red. And now the beam instead of blue is going to be red coming out. So I can highly tune and customise my character.

Everything that happens with your character is designed to be able to stay true to the theme of your character. When you do character creation you choose an origin for your character. It's a bundle of statistic boosts that helps shape your character from the beginning. And then you learn talents which are almost like packs of stats, to boost certain areas of your character that's important to your combat or your skills. When you are levelling you also gain Advantage Points which allow you to go in and tune your powers that you've already chosen by giving them different advantages. So even though I have a Force Bolt and you have a Force Bolt, mine can end up being different than yours, not only in look and placement but also in exactly what it does. The whole game is layered with these ways to fine-tune your character. What perks I get from the game define titles I can get for my character or costume pieces I unlock or when I'm in PvP or not, they all have some level of ramification on the customisation of your character. So we really let you not only through the choices you make in the character creator, but even what you elect to do in the game, define your character.