Champions Online Interview

Cryptic’s superhero MMORPG Champions Online suffered a torrid time following its September launch last year, but it’s still around, and has just celebrated the release of free expansion Revelation. Here, in a wide-ranging interview with VideoGamer.com, new executive producer Shannon Posniewski delivers an honest assessment of the game’s first six months of life, even giving the game a review score, and details what players can expect in the months to come.

Q: What’s your assessment of the game? What didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped, and how has the game changed since launch?

Shannon Posniewski: Launching a massively multiplayer game like this is very difficult because the competition you’re up against has had years and years and years of time to field lots and lots of content and hone their systems. When you launch a new game, you don’t have that. No matter what you do your game comes across as being smaller or weaker in some way. That’s very difficult to get over. We were able to finish a rudimentary auction house, but it’s not full featured at this point. So what people look at is instead of there being no auction house and they just didn’t get to it yet or something like that, they’re like, well, it’s half-arsed, and that’s not very good either.

In terms of things we have worked on though, there is work going on with the auction house, but nobody has seen it yet. One of the big complaints about Champions was there wasn’t enough content and the powers themselves were baffling and confusing. We’ve done our best to start fixing those things. We’ve added a bunch of content. We just launched Revelation, which is a lot of content at the top end. We’ve also spent time shoring up some of the content in the middle with citizen missions and things like that. We’ll be doing more of that, making sure there’s enough gameplay and missions and things like that. Our next focus there will probably be in terms of just generally in the game around levels 20 to 30. In addition we’ll be making raid level content, what we’ve been calling Adventure Packs, which will be about half of our updates from here on out. Adventure Packs are multiple missions together basically. But several hours long you can play at pretty much any level in the game, and it’ll scale to your level and scale to the number of people who are playing with you.

Q: Can you give us an example of an Adventure Pack?

SP: The first one that’s coming up, there is a group of people who are dealing with snakes, let’s say, and going to defeat them. You start at Millennium City and you go off to a jungle village where you find some clues about what’s going on, which might lead you to a temple that’s being guarded by a bunch of mercenaries. You have to defeat the mercenaries in order to get into the temple. Once you’re inside the temple there is a variety of missions, traps and tricks you have to do in order to get to where the central evil snakey entity would be, and then you have to defeat the entity, which is the big boss at the end. Along the way you’ve had bosses that you’ve had to fight. There’s a story as to why this is happening, and it all gets launched out of Millennium City itself.

Q: How do you balance improving the game based on what players want and what the team itself would like to do?

SP: Well it turns out that the team and the players are practically of one mind at this point. One of the other things that we feel aren’t quite up to snuff are the way teaming is being handled in the game right now. You can team quite easily, it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to do so. The way the game was constructed at launch, it seems to be difficult to keep your team together. You’re wanting to do different things all the time. Even something as simple as knowing where your teammates are; little bit lacking right now in Champions. That’s one of our major focuses going forward, and that’s going to happen pretty soon, which is an update to how teams work and letting you see what your other teammates have for missions, letting you stay together a lot more easily, and then rewarding you for at least not making it bad, for staying within a team. It turns out things like that are actually the same sorts of things we want to do. It sounds like I’m cow-towing to our player base, but that’s what maintenance of an MMO is. It’s a combination of what players really like in our game we want to do more of, what they don’t like we want to examine and see if there’s anything we can do to fix it. That’s what we do.

The worst thing to balance in terms of player versus game developer is when players dog pile onto a particular thing because it isn’t the way they want it. Let’s say a particular drop doesn’t happen often enough for them. Because players just want stuff, right? This is going to sound mean, but if you give players a 20 dollar bill they’d ask, why wasn’t it a 40 dollar bill? They don’t necessarily always see the big picture. They see the picture of how their character or characters operate. We have to take some of the feedback for powers and how much XP you get and what kind of drops you get, we have to take that with a grain of salt because we have to look at the actual aggregate information we get from log files. Somebody says, hey, I’m not getting this often enough. But we see that everybody else is, so they’re having some kind of anomalous occurrence. We can look to see whether or not it is anomalous, and we usually do. But often perception is a lot different than the reality. When we actually go in and measure things with the log files, we see that, oh no, the drop rates are fine. It’s just that you feel like you got a bad run, or who knows maybe you had a headache that day, and you feel somehow entitled to it because you had a headache, I don’t know.

But in general, though, at least on Champions right now, the players and us are pretty well aligned. They want more content; we want to give more content. They want better teaming; we’re working on the teaming. Come April we’re updating the melee powers and the supernatural powers, which is really big. And the updating of powers is something that’s going to be ongoing as we try to bring them into alignment a little bit. We’ll just be trying to make it a better user experience in general. Power descriptions are a lot better than when we launched, but still today, some of the power descriptions are like, well what does that do? I don’t quite understand. Even myself, when I play, I’m like, what does that do? I don’t understand. We’re working to fix that, too.

Q: If you were a game reviewer, what score out of ten would you give Champions Online? What score out of ten does it have the potential to deserve?

SP: Champions was graded quite harshly, honestly. A lot of the scores that were given were based on this perhaps unfortunate decision that was made – but a decision that probably had to be made anyway – which was to greatly modify how easy it was to kill critters. We expected people to kill two every once in a while. Instead they were killing six. It was just totally off the scale and it basically broke the whole game. Unfortunately a lot of people took that as being the fun part of the game [laughs]. We didn’t necessarily realise that when we saw it. The mistake we made was we made this change, and it didn’t to beta for very long at all, and suddenly the game was different when people started playing, and of course they cried foul. And everyone cried foul, which obviously taints a reviewer’s opinion, because they’re part of those people who want the game to succeed too, a lot of them.

It’s very hard for an MMO, right? The game at launch was an eight or so. That would be my guess. There were things that were bad, but there was promise in the game. How do you rate an MMO at launch? It’s a difficult thing to do anyway. I do not relish the position of a critic for an MMO, because the game evolves so much over time. Some people do. Others, sadly, don’t. The game was a lot of fun to play. It had some flaws. I really liked it.

What does it have the potential to be? Well these games can go on for years and years and years, and all of them are trying to asymptotically reach the ten number, I suppose. In the next couple of years as opposed to its infinite lifetime, this game can creep up to a nine. It’s hard to say. No-one’s ever going to be completely happy with a game like this. You might not like superheroes, so this game is a two for you. You can punch things, and that’s fun, but otherwise this game just isn’t for you. It’s also an action-oriented MMO, so if you’re used to a slower-paced game then this game also isn’t for you, and you might hate it. If you’re somebody who likes to have your hand held and have a really awesome character without really thinking about it – I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a game where you can’t make a bad character at all. On the other hand all your characters are about the same sort of awesome. But in Champions you have so many options that it’s easy to make an iffy character, which is something we’ll be working on, but if you really like to get into the, hey this does this, and I can use that with this different power, if you like trying to figure all that stuff out, this is a great game for you. So although I gave you numbers, it’s hard to say. It depends on what kind of stuff a particular player likes.

One of the decisions we made early on for this game during its design, was that we wanted to take some of the open world things that were in World of Warcraft or something like that, and move them into the superhero genre. You do a whole lot more in the outside world. This might have actually hurt us because there already was a superhero game out. City of Heroes was out there. That is not a game that does pretty much anything in the shared world. It’s almost all instanced. People expected a superhero experience along those lines. Instead they got one that was a little bit more open world World of Warcraft-ey in that respect. I think they were taken aback by it because there are things that are really irritating about that kind of game, and those are the same things we get hit for. It’s like, oh I hate spawn camping. Well, yeah, everyone hates spawn camping. Sorry about that [laughs]. It’s one of those design decisions where you start down a path and it’s very difficult to change the direction.

That said, that’s one of things we are doing. We are going to be providing more instanced content. The Adventure Pack I discussed is all instanced content. And even the smaller missions that we’ll be making will have more instanced content. Vibora Bay, that came in the new Revelation update last week, the ratio is about 50/50 between open and instanced content, whereas the rest of the game is 80/20. That comes from what we want to do, because a lot of us are from the City of Heroes background, as well as what players are asking for. Again we sort of agree with most of our player comments.

Q: Cryptic Studios boss Jack Emmert recently revealed that the console version of Champions Online has been cancelled, but we don’t know why. What factors led to that decision?

SP: I’m sad that we are unable to make a console version. There were a couple of things that factored into that decision, one of which is cost. We had done a lot of development on the console version. We had in-house operational versions of it, but getting it that last little bit to make sure it stays up to framerate and works properly and loads fast, and all of those things, that was going to be more development time and therefore money and resources, which sadly we didn’t have. That’s part of the decision.

The other part is business related that I’m probably not allowed to go into. But basically, we just couldn’t make it make sense for us, is the upshot there. We’re very disappointed on the team because we really like the game and on top of that, we think the game plays really great with a controller – I mean we had made sure that it did all along. Now it doesn’t seem like, unless you plug a controller into your PC, which I do at home, that really great feel sort of gets lost when you use the PC controls.

Q: Nothing to do with Microsoft then?

SP: I can say that there were business reasons but I can’t say anything more.

Q: How do you approach keeping Champions Online going in the long term?

SP: There are actually multiple ways to approach it. You can do the World of Warcraft thing where you keep adding more and more levels, so a new update comes out and now you have another five or ten levels you can go up. We’re not planning that direction. Champions Online is more of a game where you explore different superheroes. This is for the very long term: we expect some content to be happening up top, but not as often or as big like what World of Warcraft would have. Instead what we’re planning on doing is providing more of these Adventure Packs. Your superhero can go on these adventures, you might have a sidekick that is your other character that you want to bring on those adventures too, so you’ll play them another time and they’ll operate in a slightly different way the next time because there’s a little bit of a difference in randomness going on in there. We’ll continue to add more power sets, so there will be more abilities for you to explore. That’s really what this game is all about: it’s based on the Champions pen and paper game, which is all about being able to build any kind of superhero you can imagine. That’s why our power system is the way it is, so you can just pick and choose from anywhere. That’ll continue. We’ll provide more options there.

I would be remiss to not mention that the costuming in the game is very important, so we’ll be continuing to do that sort of stuff as well – adding costumes. In terms of legs we’ll be adding more content throughout the entire levelling cycle of players. Replayability is one of the things we focus on, with different kinds of characters in order to get a different experience. In addition we’ll be adding some top end content – this is longer term – but I don’t see that being a focus for us. In addition to that we’ll be putting more focus in the future on new and different nemesis things. You can make your nemesis, multiple nemeses, and defeat them. We’ll be expanding that system more to provide excitement and allow you to tell your story with your superheroes.

Q: We like to compare MMO subscriber numbers against each other, and use them as a yardstick of success. Is that an unfair thing to do?

SP: It’s generally unfair unless you’re comparing apples to apples. Is China a more successful country than America or the UK, because they have so many more people? Well, in some ways yes, in some ways no. Nobody can compete with the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft, so comparing anybody to it is impossible, basically. That doesn’t mean there aren’t games out there that are worth trying at all. So it’s a little bit unfair, in that respect. But, in other cases looking at the trending of subscribers; obviously if you don’t have enough subscribers the game can’t continue to operate because it costs money to operate and keep up. But the subscriber number isn’t necessarily dependent on how good the game is. You might just hate superheroes, or you might hate fantasy, or you might hate flying around in a space ship, and so that game is just not for you. When a developer says, hey, we’re going to make a game about flying space octopi, in which you get to play an octopus, the likelihood that you’re going to get the middle-aged mom as your demographic probably isn’t very good. On the other hand if you make a game called FarmVille, that’s all about talking to people and getting them to do stuff for you on your farm and you put it on Facebook, you’re pretty much going to get everybody on the planet to play.

So, in any case, subscriber numbers, and especially the trend in the direction of are you increasing in subscribers or are you decreasing in subscribers, that is important. Certainly if you don’t have enough people so players can find other players when they play, that’s really awful. But as long as there are enough players so that players can find other people to play with and they’re enjoying the game, then I don’t think the subscriber numbers are a measure of how good a game is.

Q: We know Cryptic doesn’t release subscriber numbers, but is Champions Online a success in terms of the criteria you just outlined?

SP: I would say it’s a middling success. It’s not necessarily as big as what we were hoping, but the subscriber numbers are good and they’re solid for us. We wanted more, like everyone would like more! But on the other hand the game itself is bringing in enough revenue that we can maintain and expand it over time. That is a good measure of whether or not a game is sound: whether or not it’s still being worked on. Once you hear a developer isn’t worked on a game, that’s when you know that they probably have a problem with the subscriber base. The proof is in the pudding. We’re still putting money into it. We’re still working on it. We’re excited for the next year. We’re making plans at least a year out now.

Q: So Champions Online isn’t going anywhere?

SP: Champions Online is not going anywhere.

Champions Online is out now. For more info, check out the official site.