State of the Game: June 17, 2009

Greetings, heroes!

Chronomancer, here. And do I have a lot of incredible news for you today from the future. Without further delay (such as it is for a time traveler) here's what's happening!

After talking about the UNTIL Terminals in last week’s State of the Game, we looked at what the main complaints were. Basically, it broke down into two camps. First, there were concerns over immersion and appropriateness for certain hero concepts to be telling “the man” about their powers. Second, some players felt like it was a waste of time to arbitrarily go somewhere to gain new powers without any benefit they couldn’t gain in the world at large. Within these discussions, the idea was thrown out that it would be cool if you came back so you could try out powers before committing to them.

We heard you, we listened, and we’re going the extra mile to make it happen.

We’re now making a specific location, a “Hazard Vault” if you will (no, not the final name, please reserve your comments), that heroes can access from numerous locations in the world. This common area will have test dummies set up so that you can try out new powers and see how they look and work before making them an ongoing part of your character. This is also where players will come to Retcon their powers, advantages, and so forth.

Both the character and costume creation systems in Champions Online are incredibly flexible and powerful. This has many positive effects for our players, but also presents some problems because of the complexity of the systems. We’ve been banging away at this issue for the past couple of weeks and are currently in the process of simplifying the character creation flow without losing any of the power behind the system. We should start seeing the first stages of this (power set selection) in beta next week.

Both of our new Crisis zones are in QA testing so we can get them out to beta next week. These are unlike our other areas in many ways, and will be using some cool new technology to get players grouped more organically. Speaking of which…

We have been working on revamping our PVP queuing technology and in the process came up with a way to get players into PVE instances in a similar fashion. You’ll see this on display in the new crisis zones as you are put into the fray with other heroes entering that zone. We don’t make you sit around all day and wait until a certain number of players are ready to go into Lemuria or Monster Island, but the opportunity is now available to meet up with some like-minded heroes while still going through a highly story-driven experience.

We’re adding patrol missions to both Desert and Canada, and these should be in for next week’s test. Then we’re on to implementing Omega-level missions!

We’re putting the finishing touches on the new lower-level Nemesis content, as well as getting some new story-tracking technology AND the ability to globally shift the hue of all your Nemesis powers. The goal is to bring back your favorite foes by the end of the month in the way and place you’ll see them in the game.

We want players to go through this part of the game with their first character, and we’ve done a lot of work to make it both informational and exciting. But we realize once you’ve learned the ropes, you probably don’t want to go through that again (unless you’re a total perk hound) so we’re working out the details of letting players skip the tutorial with any additional characters.

See you online, Champions!

Link to the forum post