Champions Online's Bill Roper
Cryptic's new ambassador on nemeses, consoles, and life after Hellgate.
A good reason to care about being involved in the Champions IP is that very reason - you get to discover all these things.
From a design standpoint, from a creation aspect, it's wonderful for us because Champions has been around since '81. There's 20-odd years now of people playing the game, the core mechanics, the core IP, expanding on those, making it deeper and richer. It's almost like this world has as much depth and history as any other universe, but people just haven't had the opportunity to experience it. The really fun part is that players can jump in and now find something that is huge and immersive and deep and that has all these connections and story and gameplay, but they're discovering it for themselves.
I think it always has to evolve fast in the first few months. The challenge is for developers to get enough highly-polished content that provides that base, that platform. I think that sometimes if players don't see that you're going to have it, they don't believe you're ever going to have it. You launch a game that has no PVP whatsoever in it, players think there'll never be any PVP in it.
I think the other difficulty is that, when you're launching a new MMO, your competition is always going to be a game that's been around for 3, 4, 5 years. It's had that much time and effort put into it, and it's bound to be a good game if it's been around for that long. I think that unfortunately leads to a very unrealistic expectation from players.
If someone comes from World of Warcraft for example, they're viewing what WOW is now. They don't remember that when WOW launched, all it had was duels. It didn't have a PVP system. But the thing that they did was at least put in a thing that showed, hey look, you can fight another guy.
A lot of developers really kill themselves trying to do too much at this point.
The problem with Hellgate was that we tried to do too much. We launched as a single-player game, and a free-to-play game, and a subscription-based game, and we were one of the first Vista games, and we were doing high-end graphics but also trying to do stuff for low-end systems, and we launched I think in 14 languages. We were trying to appeal to and appease too many different types of players and business models.
The thing that we learned was keeping a focus on what the core of your game is from every aspect - from the business side, from the gameplay mechanics, from who you're addressing. I think the upside after what happened with Flagship is now I can look at things and say, "hey, you really don't want to do that, and here's why".
It's obviously not a bad thing, but Blizzard was pretty much all successes. And you learn a lot from that, you learn what to do right. But you never learn what you shouldn't do... Those are very difficulty lessons to learn, but ones that stay with you. When Flagship closed, I took it very hard, but I wanted to jump back in and keep making games in the industry because I felt like I had learned so many lessons.