You just mentioned Atari. Cryptic was picked up by Atari late last year, I believe – have there been any big changes in the game since Atari came along?

Not really, other than a strong sense of security. (Laughs) Knowing that we've got a great publisher that's very excited about what we're doing, spending a lot of time coming out and looking at the game and playing it, and is really very excited about what we're doing with Champions specifically. We always like feedback about the game from people who're knowledgeable, and we've certainly got a lot of feedback from Atari, it's really been less them coming in and making changes, and more them coming in and giving us lots of observations that are pretty much in line with what we're looking at anyway.

You've talked a bit in the past that launches can be quite problematic for MMOs. Has there been anything taken out as you push towards launch? Have you got plans for early expansions or patches?

Well I think you have to be planning your ongoing content and expansions before you ever launch. We want to keep building the game after it comes out - it's one of the beauties of MMOs - so having that plan put together and knowing where we're going after launch is pretty essential. There are always things you look at and realise you're going to come up a little short time-wise, so you have to make that decision to put it on hold. It's sometimes a question of two weeks – if you just had two more weeks you'd get the feature in. I think that for us it's been less cutting out whole cloth and more scaling back to make sure we've got a great foundation there, and have it be very obvious how it's going to be extensible.

In terms of launches being rough, it's always bumpy when you put out products of this size. With online components there are usually some hiccups, but you try to minimise them through a lot of testing to make sure that you're getting the best possible experience for your players. est challenge tH whecbestepoeSibat faces developers, publishers, and players is just the level of expectation that is out there for MMOs. Everybody plays World of Warcraft – it's got 11 million players – which is fantastic in that it's really opened up the MMO market in the West. The downside is that everyone starts to look at that as being the expected norm as opposed to being the aberration, so developers look at it and go “We've got to get everything in, we've got to try and compete with that,” and they overextend. Publishers look at it and they go “We've got to get a taste, we've got to get those WoW numbers. If we can even get twenty percent of WoW that'd be great!” They're trying to plan for having two and a half million players, which nobody else really does, and so they start putting unrealistic pressures and expectations on the developers.

Then you've got players, who've experienced the game for five years now and forget what the game was like when it launched, and they hold up any new MMO that comes out as a direct comparison. It's a real shame, because there have been MMOs that have come out full-featured - especially considering they're just launching - and they get looked down on because they don't have five years of unlimited team size and funding behind them. People forget that when World of Warcraft, as an example, came out it didn't have a PvP system – it had duelling. But people look at the PvP system they have now which is very full and very fun, and they say “Pfft, you don't have PvP like WoW.” Well, when WoW launched, WoW didn't have PvP like WoW! There's a ton of things like that, so I always try to encourage gamers to look at the game. Do you like the core game? Do you like the mechanics? Do you like the world that's there? Can you look at it and just say “Wow, this is going to get cooler and cooler?” If so, then you're in earlier, and you're getting heard, because every MMO developer listens hard to his community.

What do you think is going to happen to the City Of games when Champions Online launches? They're both superhero games – are you expecting a lot of people to move over to Champions?

We hope so. Cryptic was the company that did the City Of games before it was sold off to NCSoft, and when they started Champions Online - I've been talking to Jack Emmert and everyone else about it - they said it wasn't “How can we do more of what we did there,” but “We never even thought to do this with City Of, and this is a a much cooler idea,” and everything that's been thought about is really centred around trying to bring that four-colour comics feeling to life. I really hope that at the very least the City Of players will come over and give us a look, and I think that if they do they're going want to stay.

Are you confident that there's going to be plenty of content for high-end players at launch? Something that Age of Conan suffered with was that players ran out of content quickly.

There's never enough content for high-end players! (Laughs) We're doing our best to get in as much as we can before we launch, and we have a lot of plans for how that expands out. We have systems in place that, again, are things that I think players now expect in the games. I've never launched an MMO with this, but we have daily missions to do, a full perks system that has specific rewards for doing high-level content, world-level bosses... I think that we have different types of PvP gameplay, on launch, so if you want to just bash on each other we've got different actual PvP styles of play in. I think the biggest thing that we're doing is making sure that players can understand the types of things we have in the game, and then ththose"are the tythpee gf hiegs pes of things we can build on.

How much of Champions is built on Cryptic's old project, Marvel Universe?

Not a lot. I think that they'd started on the engine. I wasn't here at the time, but everybody stepped up to the challenge of going from a lot of the ideas they had that were really Marvel specific, cutting that out, and then working with the new IP.

So how do you feel about the news that Marvel Universe is actually in development again? Do you think that there's room for another superhero MMO along with Champions, and DC Universe, and City Of?

Actually, we were all talking about that this morning! The good games will stick around and the ones that aren't will fall from the skies. I think that MMOs are a much, much bigger market than they've ever been, and I think the superhero genre is much more popular than it's ever been - so I think that there's a lot of opportunity out there for superhero based MMOs.

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