Bill Roper On Champions Online Page 2

How are the instances being handled? Are they going to be randomised, like in the City Of games, or hand-designed, like in World of Warcraft?

Both, actually. There are very specifically designed five-player instances, for example, that are level appropriate. They're tied into the storyline, and they'll definitely have lots of fun elements – puzzles in them, and little tricks: things that require co-operation between players. There are also some solo versions of these big instances that are very hand-crafted. But, if they don't want to do a mission chain, we also want players to be able to just do a randomly generated instance.

There are a fair few non-combat skills – lockpicking, science knowledge, and the like. Are these going to be essential to a team going through an instance?

They're not required, but you get a lot more out of the instance. We make sure that for anything that is an ancillary skill - like a lockpicking or crafting skill – there are things that you can find that you gain benefits from, or areas that you can get into if you have one of those. It can help you maybe get different players than you might normally run around with. Once you find what those are, it's fun to go through the instance again, and realise “We've gotta make sure we bring an arms-crafter with us, because if we can have him operate that table we can then open that door, and that's a whole area we haven't been in yet.”

How are the grouping mechanics going to work, on that note? Do the heroes tend to fall into the usual tank/DPS/healer roles, or have you changed that up a bit?

It's changed a bit. There aren't classes per se, so you're not building a tank or a healer or a ranged DPS guy. All the skills are there to build those types of characters but that's where that customisation comes in. It's not like, for example, in fantasy where only the warrior can tank. You can build a custom guy that can do that, and have different mechanics for surviving damage. We got a lot of feedback on this from our beta players, who didn't like the idea of being forced into making a certain type of hero. They wanted to have the ability to really make the hero they want and put them in the kind of role they want to put them in. If you look at it and say that you're going to make a Might-based guy, he could easily be a tank. He's going to have high defences, he'll be a melee guy.  I could take that guy and naturally drop into a tank role if I don't want get into those nuts and bolts. But those players who really want to tinker around can make a tank character that you wouldn't normally think of as the type of character that can do that. We really just wanted to provide the tool for players to build the hero that they want to build.

What about players who prefer to play solo, as opposed to those who prefer to play in groups? Can the game actually be “completed” solo?

We've definitely made sure that you can get to max level soloing. There is content that is specifically designed for groups, but we've made sure that the ones that are big parts of story arcs are five player missions, so you don't have to go out and find 10, or 20, or 30 people – you can get four friends together, or a pick-up group, and finish that.

There are also what we call open missions which you actually find in the world. Sometimes they play as events, so things will be happening that you'll just come across. Some of those are even what we determine as “Cosmic-level” enemies, which take 15 or 20 people to take down, but even a solo player can get involved in that because it's an organic grouping - it just happens. So the game is very solo friendly, but there's also a lot of content that is very fun to do in groups, and some things that we've designed specifically for groups.

We've heard that the 360 version of Champions will be released after the PC version, now, and we thought they were originally intended to be a simultaneous release. Is there a reason as to the hold-up?

I think the hold-up is on the business side so it's out of my realm, but I think they're still in the process of working out details as to bringing the game to the console. We've continued to develop the game knowing that we want it to be on console eventually, so we make sure that the gameplay decisions and the mechanics will work on console as well as PC. I think it's just a great opportunity to reach out to console players and to bring them a really cool MMO.

We spotted a job advert on the recruitment page that mentions a PS3 programmer, along with Champions. Is Champions something we're going to see on PS3?

Well, since the acquisition by Atari, we're definitely trying to gear up to potentially bring the product onto any of the platforms - PC and consoles. I think they want to start by getting some in-house talent on the different consoles that'll then be ready to do whatever it is we have the opportunity to do. So I don't know; we're not actually doing any PS3 development in-house but I think they want to start going out and finding people who have experience doing that, to give us the potential to do that in the future.