Ask Cryptic - February 23, 2009

Can we take multiple defense sets, or mix max between them? (Steamtank)

Defense is going to come from several different sources. The first of which is your gear. Whether it’s that your vest is made of Kevlar, or some sort of nano-gear, or you’re shielded by your heroic certainty. That’s not the majority of your defense, though. The majority comes from your choice of defensive powers. The defensive powers in the game have been reworked such that while they can stack, they all have differing areas of coverage. For example, the Forcefield defensive power is extremely strong at the start of a fight, but it will wear down and weaken during the course of that fight. Conversely regeneration will ramp up in effectiveness, being a very slow heal as you’re first getting wounded, but the more times you get hit, the faster you’ll regenerate – up to a certain cap. Similarly Invulnerability and Lightning Reflexes are on their own axis. Also, every defense has an active power, a button you can press on a cool down which gives you an extra little burst of defensiveness. All of these powers have a certain amount of inherent strength, and they’re also going to be driven by your stats. No two defenses use the same stats. While there is some stacking, because the defense powers all have different areas of specialty coverage and are all pumped up by different stats, you’ll never be able to get maximum protection from all of them at the same time. This is our inherent balancing factor.

In a previous "Ask Cryptic", you stated that there are essentially four categories of defensive powers, two axis of two (resistance & dodging, force fields & regeneration). Will players be allowed to mix-and-match from these pools, or are they mutually exclusive? Or is there some other limitation, such as players can only pick from one power in each axis (resistance and force fields = okay, resistance and dodging = not okay)? Finally, if I wanted to make a character who is impossibly tough, could I give him resistance, defense, force fields, and regeneration? (The_Altruist)

Question 1 answers this, but here’s an addendum. Certain defenses are specifically tuned to synergize well with certain power sets. We are setting up the rules so that you can synergize any defense with any power set, you just have to deliberately take some build steps to do it, as opposed to it being the default. We build in some synergies so that we can easily point them out to players so we can say to players if you want to be this guy, here’s the simplest path to doing it. For people who really want to tweak and customize, as much as possible we are putting in the ability to redirect which stats benefit which powers. That’s our secondary priority, though. It will never be the case, however, that you’ll be able to strongly combine two defenses for example.

It’s been mentioned that this game may have shapeshifting. My questions are: will there be shapeshifting and if there is shapeshifting, can we customize our forms? (Jriggle45)

Shapeshifting is not a feature at release. A lot of people on the design team have played shapeshifters, or metamorphs, in other MMOs; we think metamorphs are freaking cool. It was a conscious decision on our part, though, not to put them in until we have the time, budget, and resources to make them a highlight. We want to take the time to do it right and make them really shine. We don’t want to do them halfway. So, yes, there will be metamorphs in the game, just not at launch because we’re doing it right.

Many supergroups have already formed and are working out how they will play together. Are there any details that you can provide for how the player can approach supergroups upon launch? Will we have to wait until a certain level to make a supergroup? Will there be supergroup options for costumes? For the really involved or themed supergroups, will they enjoy the same customization as found in character creation? How interactive will the player be allowed to be with their supergroup? Can you disclose any other future plans for supergroups? (Runaway)

You can form new super groups at level 10 by paying a resource cost, but you can join an established super group at any level. Super group costumes are supported with super group specific emblems and colors. Super groups also have a rank system, chat channel, message system, and super group vault access. As the game progresses we're looking at adding other features to super groups; possibly a leveling system or super group hideouts.

Can you use the same power to heal others as you use to heal yourself? (i.e. are there single target powers that can be used on friends and self alike depending on what's selected, or put another way: can you target yourself or must we have separate skills for self buffs/heals than for ST effects?) (SaintKairos)

Some of them. Some Powers natively will heal you and everyone in front of you. Some Powers natively will heal only you. Some Powers natively will heal only your allies. Some of those Powers can be modified by Advantages to cover multiple categories of people.

As a longtime fan of the Champions setting I'm pleased to see from the screenshots that VIPER will be in play. Will we also get to deal with the other Champions organizations, such as UNTIL, DEMON, Primus, the Tiger Squad, the War Machine and/or Eurostar? (Strannik)

Absolutely. In addition to dozens upon dozens of signature heroes and villains in the game, we have a great variety of different organizations and villain groups we’ve plucked from Champions’ rich history and its many game supplement books. If you know Champions lore, I have no doubt you’re going to be impressed by how many of your old favorites make their way into the game—and we’re constantly coming up with stories which will allow us to get even more groups and organizations into Champions Online. And if you don’t know Champions, you’ll still be impressed by the variety, and how each group and organization has its own distinctive flavor and visuals, motivations and objectives, and unique styles of gameplay.

In many of the videos and interviews we've seen so far, the Devs seem to be playing with XBox 360 controllers. Most of us are used to playing MMOs with keyboard and mouse. Do the Devs prefer the XBox 360 controller over a KB/Mouse? If so, why? (JuryDuty)

It's not so much a matter of preference. Console controls are something we definitely had to keep in mind while developing since there's a restriction on the number of buttons you can press, so there was an initial emphasis on getting those to work naturally. Usually for demos it's easier to step back from the screen with a controller, so most of the devs have been doing that. Also, there haven't been a lot of MMOs for the console, so we wanted to show that was possible. But don't worry! We're doing UI revisions right now to make the keyboard feel as natural as the console controller.

How varied are the number of effects/advantages you can add to a power? For example, could you create some sort of self-buff power that increases your defense/offensive power when near-defeat? (openget)

The advantage system has a small number of generic effects that can be applied to a large number of powers, like increasing your Constitution characteristic or giving you a chance on use to return Endurance. Then there is a substantially larger number of per power customized tweaks that are ridiculously varied. There is no direct sense of something just increasing your defense or offense conditionally. That sort of thing happens in the Ranks. And we don’t want to step on the toes of the Ranks too much. For most of the custom advantages we wanted to change the way you use the power rather than change the efficacy of the power conditionally. For example, there’s a power that’s an area of effect, that zaps people around you. The custom advantage is you can turn that into a toggle, press it down, and then do other stuff while it zaps people for a certain duration, but it also acquires a recharge time.

If Telekinesis is to be implemented, will it allow manipulating objects at range (such as picking up cars/enemies) like Strength/Superstrength could? If so, how will we 'control' Telekinesis? (Alluvian_Est-Endrati)

Yes, still in development. Telekinesis will work like strength at range, as opposed to a very catch all power, like it is in comics. To get that catch all power -- the way telekinesis is normally represented in comics -- you will have the ability to select a combination of powers from different sets. For example force and psionic powers might be a good match up.

Will summonable minions or creatures/robots/drones/whatever be directly controllable via commands or will they be uncontrolled? (Alluvian_Est-Endrati)

We are going for a mixed model on pet control. For the most part they’re going to be intelligently uncontrolled, where they aren’t sticky to targets, but instead assist you. They will only attack your target. If they have any untargeted or party non-combat abilities then they will use those intelligently in and out of combat. If you have a pet that has a heal power, and that’s one of it’s more important powers, it’s going to choose to use that power over randomly attacking dudes. That being said, we’re also going to have a certain number of modal pet commands that can make the pet only passive or only aggressive, or only stay in one spot and do its normal thing. We don’t have the concept of telling individual pets to attack specific targets. We wanted to avoid micromanaging pets as a gameplay aspect. We would rather pets be something where you manage their abilities as complimentary to your own, as opposed to managing their every action. We find that managing pets in games ends up being a fight with the UI, rather than fight with what you’re currently engaging.