Bill Roper On Champions Online

19 Mar 2009 at 16:44:11 by Tim McDonald

We took the opportunity earlier this week to grill Bill Roper, the eminent gaming figurehead who has worked on Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft and is now design director and executive producer on the forthcoming Champions Online, on a variety of topics. This first part of the interview focuses on Champions Online.

First of all, other than the action-based gameplay which we've heard a lot about, is there anything really special that stands out about Champions Online to make it different from the rest of the games out there?

There are a couple of pretty big ones off the top of my head. One is the customisation. A bit of a hallmark of the actual pencil and paper game – that's where the IP comes from, and all the background and world and history and gameplay mechanics – is this concept of being able to build any hero you can think of, and we worked extremely hard to translate that into an MMO.

What you can do is customise the look of your characters, much along the lines of the City Of games, but to a much greater extent. There are tons of different costume options, and you can choose what the colours are with those options, and how they all go together. When you choose powers, you can then go through a custom process for that. The big thing with the powers is that you can go into a thematic tree, so for example you can have these power sets. If you want to, it's very simple to make a fire hero, or an ice hero, or a lightning hero or a darkness hero, and there are different martial arts schools and things like that. All of these are all laid out so that players who just want to get into the game and make a hero can do so, and it's really simple.

But, for other players who really want to delve into the customisation you can open up the whole power system. It's pick and choose, and every time that you're choosing a power for your hero, you can go in and do it in a very custom way. There are also different Advantages that you can put on powers, and for example, my lightning would be different to your lightning because of the Advantages I've chosen.

On top of that, you can choose “emanation points,” which is where your power's coming from and what the emitter is. So basically, I might have a force bolt which would normally come out of my character's hand, but if I want to, I can change it so it's coming out of my character's eyes, or coming out of his chest. I could maybe put in a chest cannon costume piece and make him a big powered armour guy, as opposed to a mutant character who'd shoot it out of his hands.

Does this actually change the power at all, or is it purely cosmetic?

No, this is just a flavour option - it doesn't actually change the power. All of the mechanics that change the powers are through the Advantages, any items that you get that alter your powers, and the powers that you're selecting. The emanation points for the emitters are all just to help you build the hero that you have in your head.

Can you tell us a little about the Nemesis system?

The Nemesis system is the other big thing. It's actually a way for players to create their arch-enemy. You go through using, to a good extent, the system you use in creating your hero, to make an enemy. You also choose his minions, what type of powers they have, and his personality. Then he goes into the world, and you then have a separate storyline that focuses on your Nemesis and his interaction with you. His personality comes into play, you'll be fighting his minions, and you'll get ambushed by them, so even when you're out in the general gameplay world, people are seeing elements of this content that you created. And then of course you can always take other people with you when you go on your actual Nemesis missions. It's a very unique element, especially for an MMO, where you're creating one of the main plotline villains – if you choose to do a Nemesis – that you're fighting against, and then you can later share them. So it's kind of that initial step for us into user-created content.

We've heard previously that you can choose weaknesses and vulnerabilities for your hero, to gain increased powers. Can you do this for the Nemesis? Would it be possible to, say, make your Nemesis fights easier or harder, by making, say, a fire hero, and then making the Nemesis weak to fire attacks, or vice versa?

In the paper and pencil version there are definitely weaknesses, but it doesn't actually exist in the online version. It may have used to. You're creating your Nemesis from different thematic power sets, and, well, your fire-based hero would probably be better against an ice guy, but there's actual rewards in the game for fighting all the different types of Nemesis that are available. We have a whole Perks system which is very similar to Achievements on the Xbox 360, and there's a whole series of Perks that you get, structured for defeating numerous Nemeses. It lays a lot of groundwork for us to do really fun things in the future with this.

How have you gone out of your way to make them interesting, so that it's not just a drawn out slugging match?

The Nemesis has the most advanced AI and powers interaction of any of the enemies you face. They're designed to use the same powers that the players use, and they take advantage of all the synergies between powers. They don't do things like a lot of AIs that you see that are on timers or other shticks, but they actually use powers, use cooldown, and react just like a player does in terms of how they use their powers and what you're doing. We want them to be more like a really exciting PvP style fight, so you're fighting kind of a computer-controlled equivalent of another hero.

The Showdown missions themselves are inside particular indoor instances – hideouts that you go through - and a lot of them have puzzle elements or tricks and traps, so the environment that you're in is really interesting, the fights that you have are really interesting, and usually your Nemesis will have some kind of lieutenants working under them that are designed to work well with Nemesis or provide support for Nemesis, so it's really a complete system. We have one designer that's dedicated to all these things and work on all the really fun, cool things that you can do. It's designed to be a very different style of gameplay from what you're facing in most MMOs.

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