Beckett Massive Online Gamer

Lead Game Designer, Randy Mosiondz, gives us the scoop

I am crouching on the ledge of a skyscraper in Millennium City, peering through the early morning fog as my cape billows in the wind. I hear cries suddenly on the streets below me as a group of hoodlums begin to terrorize a passer-by. My body turns to ether as I teleport myself to street level - an instant later I reappear before the largest and ugliest of the thugs, fist at the ready. I make fast work of them and the rescued citizen turns to offer me his thanks, but I’m already gone, speeding towards another gang setting fire to a building down the block.

They get a lucky reprieve however because my alarm suddenly goes off, reminding me that I’m not really a superhero and that I have a phone interview with Champions Online lead game designer Randy Mosiondz in five minutes.

Champions Online is Cryptic Studios’ new superhero MMO that launched in North America on September 1^st. As of writing this, it’s in the final beta testing phase and thousands of eager caped crusaders are helping the game developers iron out the last few remaining bugs. In recent weeks, Cryptic have officially announced several of the major game features they believe will set Champions Online apart from the current pack of MMOs available and Randy Mosiondz (crazy name, crazy guy) has been kind enough to tell me personally how some of these systems will work.

At level 25, players can create their own arch-enemy Nemesis! I had my first battle with my Nemesis last week and while it was great fun, the Nemesis was definitely a harder solo fight than I was used to.

Randy: Nemeses are designed to be a little tougher than your regular boss because they are your major enemy in the game, the one that is always lurking in the shadows hoping to defeat you at every turn. The Nemesis doesn’t have a straight damage increase; instead they actually use their powers more efficiently. The way that the AI is set up means they will act more like a player than a regular NPC - they will be a little bit more cunning and use their powers more effectively. We wanted to try and turn up the difficulty a bit on the Nemesis so that they are something that people will actually be watching over their backs for.

As you go though the game, you’ll be attacked by your Nemesis’ minions and of course just like good minions, they will provide clues as to what other schemes your Nemesis is up to. So that leads you into catching up with your Nemesis and eventually putting them away in Stronghold Prison.

I’ve heard it mentioned that your Nemesis may appear while grouped with other players in instances?

Randy: That’s going to be coming up shortly after launch. This instance will be a special scenario and it is actually geared towards your entire team taking on a group of the team’s Nemeses together.

Cryptic recently announced the Sidekick feature; can you tell us a little bit about that?

Randy: Sidekicking is the system where a team leader can assign a ‘champion’ and everyone in that team can sidekick to that champion. So basically if you have a group of mixed level characters and the team leader makes the highest level character the champion, then everybody else has the option of sidekicking up to that level.

The main feature we want to put in is to allow people to play together as a group without worrying about level disparities. It’s always frustrating when you are in a game and you are level 20 because you played all week, but your friend is still level 10 so you can’t group with them anymore.

Many MMO players believe that the real game begins at level cap. The Omega System is Champion’s name for endgame missions; can you tell us how these will function?

Randy: The United Nations Tribunal on International Law (UNTIL) are worldwide peacekeepers that keep an eye on super-powered activity and if there is a supervillain in an area, they send in their people to try and help secure the situation. For the bigger situations they have their own set of superhero affiliates known as UNITY, and when you hit level 40, you are invited to the UNITY headquarters where you choose from a list of current threats to deal with that change every day.

One of the things we wanted to do was provide content for the players at level 40 who want to continue playing the game but also want to be casual players, so the daily missions are doable solo or in groups.

Once you earn enough reputation within UNITY, they give you some special assignments that are a little bit tougher. Eventually you will also be able to unlock access to some of the big endgame special maps, which are currently Lemurian Strongholds. There are two of them in the game: one involves the Mandragalore, which is a Lemurian super-weapon that can wipe out all resistance on the surface world, and the other one is the Ruins, where an ancient Lemurian sorcerer is trying to harness energies so he can become one of the most powerful beings on earth.

What will be the real benefits to the player for completing the daily missions other than the content it provides?

Randy: There are lots of UNITY NPCs who can provide you with special training and special types of supplies and gear, and as you earn reputation with UNITY, you gain access to more and more of this stuff.

Daily missions are fast becoming an MMO standard and many players consider these to be a grind designed to replace a lack of endgame content – is this the case in Champions?

Randy: We don’t want Omega missions to be filler; we plan on releasing regular content updates every few months, so instead of waiting two years for an expansion, we want to provide expansion updates every 4-6 months. We will also be increasing the endgame cap in increments, so we want to raise it up to level 50 in the next year over the course of three expansion updates.

Will these updates be something we will pay for?

Randy: That is something that will be discussed with marketing (laughs). I don’t handle the money, but we are planning on having a number of free updates.

So these mission instances are the current endgame ‘raids’?

Randy: Pretty much; we don’t really have anything beyond the 5-player instances. There are 20-person bosses that occasionally come into the world, but they are separate from the UNITY content because we want anyone at level 40 to be able to encounter these world threats as well. They are usually in very high danger areas and there are special mechanics that you have to watch for and learn. There will occasionally be sightings in the world of a super powerful ‘cosmic’ level threat as we call them, and you will need a large amount of people for them.

What kind of items will these outdoor bosses drop and will there be item sets that provide added bonuses when you collect all the parts?

Randy: There is actually a fair amount of drops associated with these bosses and they are very high quality, so it’s definitely worth trying to take them on. We are trying to get item sets in for launch, but it all depends on whether we can get the necessary things in from programming in time; if not, it’s definitely something that’s planned for soon after launch.

The proposed level cap at game launch will be level 40 – I managed to level my first character to 28 in just a few days and imagine I could hit the level cap in about another week or two. Was the decision to make this process so quick a deliberate one?

Randy: Part of it is that we wanted to appeal to casual gamers a bit more. If you look a few years back, in order to reach level cap it took hundreds and hundreds of hours and there were people really getting tired of the grind. As newer games come out, they are a little more forgiving to players because there are a lot of casual gamers who want to play the game and see advancement but don’t want to spend 20 or 30 hours just to gain a level.

Perhaps it will encourage players to create several different heroes too?

Randy: Absolutely! I worked with the City of Heroes team as well and the amount of alternate characters that players had was insane because they always wanted to try different costumes with different powers. We are going to expect a lot of that in Champions too.

Characters in Champions are free to choose from a massive pool of powers and cookie-cutter builds are sure to emerge. Will instances encourage players to specialize in order for a group to complete them or will switching stances to offensive, defensive and support be enough?

Randy: We built a lot of flexibility into our basic power system and when you combine that with builds it’s pretty broad, so however you deal with a certain boss is up to you and how you want to coordinate your team.

For example, if there is a boss who has a heavy damage attack that is based on his aggro, you could have a tank type character go in that was built with a lot of heavy defenses to draw aggro and block. Or you could say you won’t use a tank, you will use the healers and try to bounce aggro between a bunch of guys who have regeneration and deflective shields. So it’s really up to the players to figure out the best method for dealing with these types of bosses. You really have to watch what the cues are for the boss and try and figure out the best way to deal with it.

There are dozens of powers to choose from, some of them more powerful than others; what steps are you taking to ensure PvP doesn’t get out of hand with overpowered builds? Or should we as players just accept that some builds are more powerful than others?

Randy: With an open power system like Champions there are endless power combinations, so I’m certain there are going to be FotM builds where players find an excellent connection between different types of powers. But I’m sure within weeks people will find a different combination of powers that will either counter it or be a more optimized version of it.

I imagine balancing PvP verses PvE is a development nightmare that goes with the MMO territory. Do you think there will ever be a solution created to satisfy all tastes?

Randy: I don’t know if there is ever a silver bullet solution, especially when we have an open power system, but because we plan to keep introducing new types of power sets into the game, there will always be another wildcard factor. Every few months there will be another set and all the PvP players will jump on it to see how they can use it to change their chances in PvP or make an ultimate build. We also have different types of equipment, rewards, training, special devices and everything that allows you to alter those outcomes as well, so it’s a very fast playing game.

There have been some varied responses to the announcement that microtransactions will exist in Champions in addition to the monthly fees. What sort of items will these include?

Randy: Things I know we have been handling on the design side are additional costume sets that take a bit more time for the artist to put together because they are very specialized. The core game has a ton of different costume options, so these are just little extras that players may want that our artists are taking extra time to complete. We are not going to have any game-breaking items in there; it is going to be mainly aesthetic.

Do you plan on broadening the scope of the microtransactions that are available or will you limit them to costume upgrades and the like?

Randy: Basically we will see what players want in terms of what we do for microtransactions. Perhaps if there is a task that you have to do in-game that is a long process to complete, we might just make it so that once you achieve the task with one character, it does an unlock in the store so you can just purchase it for other characters. Things like that.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Randy. Finally, if you could offer advice to a fresh player in Champions, what would it be?

Randy: Explore your options, try to make the hero of your dreams and really just have fun and enjoy the game. We want players to really have fun with the comic book genre, we had a lot of fun building the game and we really want players to have fun playing it too.

Sounds good to me! I decide to hold off on transcribing the interview until tomorrow and head back to Millennium City instead; after all, there are still plenty of villains who are literally dying to meet with my own particular brand of hero justice...

Here’s a great place to discuss Champions Online: http://www.massiveonlinegamer.com/community/forums