Microsoft and Marvel have dropped out of their partnership with Cryptic Studios to create Marvel Universe Online. Cryptic has announced that they’re taking the code written for that project and repurposing it into a Champions MMO.
Champions, for those not familiar, is a pen and paper roleplaying game with a long history and one of the most-flexible character creation systems ever devised. It’s also notoriously hard to balance one character’s power against another.
My prediction–The game will have more customizations than any other MMORPG, but will only superficially resemble the Hero System of Champions.
Will you need a Masters Degree in Advanced Mathematics to make a character? Half the fun of Champions was finding every d6 in a 2 mile radius to roll for damage.
I can see it using the Champions universe: Primus, UNTIL, Foxbat, Dr. Destroyer, et al. But in the end it will still have the typical rock/paper/scissors aspect of MMORPGs with all the familiar classes. It would work much better in a Neverwinter Nights-style persistent worlds scenario versus a MMORPG.
editing to add: this is a reply to AndrewL.
Over at the Hero Games site (www.herogames.com) they’ve posted that they’re announcing something major on the 18th. That should tell us for sure, though what I’ve read about Cryptic’s statements seem pretty clear.
City of Heroes, originally created by Cryptic, is full of characters based on the developers’ own Champions characters. Statesman, Paragon City’s version of Superman, was a Champ char for Jack Emmert, the creative director of Cryptic. So we know they’re fans.
OneCent, the Marvel RPG was a latecomer into the superhero RPG genre. Champions, Villians & Vigilantes, GURPS, and a few others all preceded it and the DC RPG (which was better and worse at the same time).
I loved Champions. Was my favorite RPG. Loved taking very simple characters and breathing life into them while my min/max-er brethren found all of their limitations exploited.
Bleeding heck! Is the Hero System still going? I used to be deep into it and active on the mailing list. I was primarily a Fantasy Hero guy. But really, despite the flexibility, it was too much work. That said, thse days d20 PCs rival it.
I’ve not played Champions, but one of CoH’s big issues was that depending on your build you could be anywhere from permanently wimpy to uber-buffed out. If this game is even more customizable, that’s going to have some major balancing wars with the players.
I’m a little dubious about the concept of a Champions MMORPG, personally. The Champions universe was, frankly, never that interesting to me, so I don’t know how it would work as the background of an online game. The rules themselves are pretty complex and open to abuse… and I don’t know how well they’d work on a computer, anyway.
However, if all they use is the concept of advantages and limitations on powers, and character disadvantages, it might work- I’ve always felt those were the best contributions Champions made to the RPG genre.
Seriously, now, you make that joke here? Since when do we consider “Advanced Mathmatics” to involve only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? Or is it that there are – oooh, scary – fractions involved?
Calculators solved those problems even for the brain-dead few who couldn’t figure out how to figure out 30 x 1.25 – and since this will actually be played on a computer, I suspect you probably won’t have to fear the math that a 5th grader could solve.
And since the customizability of Champions/Hero is far more well-known than the Chapions Universe, I’d bet that’ll be the main feature of the MMORPG. They already have a pretty good engine for character creation in the Hero Designer program.
Personally, I’m pulling for the Hero guys. Even though I have no interest in a MMORPG, I’d like to see them do well.
Yes, I do make the joke here. As I said, half the fun was gathering up enough d6 to cause a seismic shift when rolled; the other half was trying to figure out how to build a kryptonian on 250 points.
If this goes MMORPG, it will be gutted. You’ll see none of that fun character sheet that my friends and I pored over long before we could employ computers to figure out just how fast we could fly (or how many points that last 1/4 disadvantage would save us). Actually, technically, we could have used computers, but how many people had computers with any type of spreadsheet in 1983? We didn’t.
I would say Champions/Hero is about as well-known as the Champions Universe (not at all outside a very, very small number of fans), and the ability to support a MMORPG on either audience, or the sum of both, alone, is impossible. They’ll need to give players who have no clue of Champions an easy way to access the game, and familiar archetypes. I stand by my statement - the only way any of the complexity of the game can be preserved would be if Cryptic went for a Neverwinter Nights-type business model.
Hmm… Well I think we can be reasonably sure that Cryptic can make a playable superhero online RPG since they’re on the very short list of people who have done superheroes games well. I am just dubious that Champions is really something that will translate well to an MMORPG. As already noted the system is notorious for its powergaming potential and it is fairly complicated. If a game is going to be “Champions” it cannot abandon the concept of building anything. Selecting a preset group of powers from a list or implementing a class system would go completely against the spirit of the pen and paper game but those shortcuts are almost necessary for game balance and player absorption in an online RPG.
You know, the question strikes me: why CAN’T it be as complicated as Champions? We’re dealing with computers, for the love of Pete, and while the programming for “can only fly in daylight” / “uncontrollable use of power on random chance” / etc will be trickier than “power does x damage to target”, what are the major problems?
The ones I can see are:
Balance. It’s going to be very, very easy to make a completely useless character. In City of Heroes it’s just easy to make someone who is only useful in a team.
Losing the user. In a world where your major competition is a game where you start out by choosing ‘warrior’ or ‘mage’ and you don’t even have to pick your spells, you don’t want people taking one look at chargen and saying “I’d rather do my taxes.” AD&D was based on actuarial tables, if I remember correctly, and Champions’s chargen is pretty cruel.
Not making it a programming nightmare. For example, let’s say I want to make a fireball thrower. That’s it, that’s all she does, but she can throw her fireballs in various shapes and sizes and they stay for various amounts of time. The programming for this does not just involve “create fireball centered here” – if the thrower can dynamically determine size and shape, how’s she going to do that on the fly? More importantly, how is the computer going to handle it, and how are the programmers going to make an engine that doesn’t squash normal home computers or drive their QA team to suicide?
Frankly, the solution I see is pretty close to being City of Heroes, and looking at it from the perspective of “let’s uber-simplify Champions” I can see how they created the engine. Find the main archetypes of characters people play (the one who heals or buffs, the one who socials at people, the one who shoots from far away and is made of kleenex, the one who does crazy damage from up close, and the one who can’t be killed if you drop 16 tons on him). Give them something useful and something to back it up. Let them tweak it personally from there.
There’s my concern, then: how is Cryptic going to create a Champions MMORPG significantly different from what they already have on the market? How are they going to get more marketshare (cynical answer: have some marketing. That would be nice) without stealing it from themselves?
This is, in fact, why they abandoned a Champions-like model for City. They tried it early on, and discovered that it was far too easy to make completely unplayable characters, and that everyone who knew the powers well enough to avoid that gravitated toward a single, maximized build. So everyone was either gimped or cookie-cutter. Not fun. They created the archetypes (classes) because they couldn’t see any other way out of it.
I could actually see a fairly simple UI approach to controlling the size of AoE attacks like fireballs. It would work the same way that shape tools work in graphics editors–click, drag, and release to define a circular target area. The parameters of the power would limit the max size of the area. There’s not much point in doing it, though, since the optimum size will almost always be “nuke from orbit”. (Unless they make friendly fire damage players/friendly NPCs, which is a recipe for failure, especially in a fast-paced game.)
I’m wondering that myself. It’s a fairly small niche, and now that NCSoft owns City outright, they’re making noises about pushing it harder. There have been hints of new games in the franchise in the works. Cryptic has limited funds for any kind of major promotional effort. Personally, I figured the Marvel MMO was doomed from the start, even with backing from Microsoft. I don’t know how much better it will do as Champions.
You can’t even really say they have the advantage of experience, since nearly all of the staff involved with the City games moved to NCSoft along with the franchise. About all that’s left at Cryptic is Jack Emmert, and the general consensus seems to be that City has been better off since he handed over the reins to Miller.
There’s another major reason for classes instead of point builds in an online RPG: playability.
Around a table top players can make whatever they want and the GM can adjust on the fly. The GM can tailor the game to challenge the players, cover the holes in the line up, and set the game for how players want to play. A computer can’t do that so classes give players clearly defined roles. Get one of every class and you presumably have a fairly balanced team.
There’s also a very serious issue of player progression, the meat and potatoes of online RPG’s. They depend on the players being hooked into getting one more beanie to progress. Classes offer an easy solution to that: the next level. Point build adds a layer of complexity to it and an incredibly flexible point build like Champions is even worse. A few more build points with an open field for applying them would be problematic.
Which isn’t to say that these issues are insurmountable. In fact I can see many possible paths for a more flexible system now that the way has been paved by City of Heroes. But I think to make it Champions is a rough trail.
They could very easily streamline the Hero System by cutting back to using only Sidekick rules, and then relying on pre-statted packages – such as the UNTIL Superowers Databse books and Ultimate books stat out.
At that point, instead of near-infinite combinations of powers, advantages, and disadvantages available, you’ve got a manageable menu of choices for players to select from.
You could set up the experience system so the player selects which power, skill, or whatever to spend the experience on, each is upgraded in a predetermined manner (e.g., 5 experience spent on an attack always increases it by +1 DC, and you can only spend multiples of 5 experience on 'em).
Limiting choices in this way should reign in much of the potential for abuse or confusion, but still leave it looking like Champions.
