Champions Online Article Round-up

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Written by BuckGB on June 20th, 2009

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But there are pragmatic considerations. Let's say an MMO came out and it had 150 hours of gameplay. That's a lot of content. It probably took the company a couple of years to make all that content. But it's not going to take players two years to get through it. There's the problem.

A hardcore gamer might get through that 150 hours in a few weeks or a couple months. So I look at the time invested by the developer against the time enjoyed by the player and it works out, in a case like I've just mentioned, as a year of work equaling a month of play. And, in my experience, that would be a pretty good ratio.

You can never, ever keep up with the content train. It will always take you longer to create content than the time it takes for a player to get through it. If it takes me, as a designer, a day to make a mission that takes twenty minutes to get through, that's a 500 minute to 20 minute ratio.

It's a much easier going MMO on the new comer he explains, and doesn't require near religious devotion to have fun with it. "Accessibility is something we talk about all the time. We want Champions to be as simple to get into as possible for anyone. People love superheroes, so we want to make a game for them, regardless of their experience with MMOs. This game is easy for them to get into and have a lot of fun playing."

Each Open Mission starts with a fairly easy stage that a solo player could do on his own. The next stage gets harder, and the one after that gets even harder, and so on up until the final objective. You may start off rescuing citizens, then have to fight a number of critters, then take down the boss, and then destroy the ship and escape! With each stage getting progressively harder, you'll need more players as you go along to actually complete the whole mission. The difficulty of the Open Missions varies from mission to mission. Some final objectives will take five players, some will require up to 20. We want to try and keep the players guessing and not repeat the same Open Mission 10 different times in 10 different locations.

The Open Mission rewards, which I'm sure many people out there want to know about, are distributed based on contribution to objectives. For everything that a hero does during the Open Mission that contributes to completing the objective they receive a certain number of points. The more difficult the tasks you accomplish, the more points you get. So, if you defeat a lot of really tough critters, you'll get more points than if you'd only fought really easy critters. Once the Open Mission is at the final stage, your points get tallied up and you get rewards based on your overall point total. The top three contributors will be awarded special items while the remaining contributors receive normal loot drops, so everyone who participates will be awarded something.

Along the way, we'd run past these big ugly machines that seemed to be broken. Mitchellson explained that these were mental suppressors, and that normally they'd be up, which would prevent the psionics from using their powers against the guards. We had some spare parts with us to fix the machines, and doing so would break any nearby mind-controlled guards out of their stupors to join our side again. Unfortunately, we only had a few spare parts, and we figured it'd be best to save them until the end, because who knew what Menton had planned for us?

After we fought our way to Captain Miller, we led him to the elevators so that he could head out safely, and we worked our way further down to the lower levels of the prison. This time, we reached the main Cell Blocks: four blocks each housing hundreds of criminals. In order to get the elevator working again, we needed to find all four key cards, one from each block. We decided to save time by splitting up, which is always a bad idea, if horror films have taught us anything. Luckily, I found one key card in the pocket of a guard who has just been injured, while Rekhan defeated a mind-controlled guard and grabbed a key card off of him. Stormshade and DBT stuck together to slowly work their way across the cell blocks. Meanwhile, I got ambushed by Mind Slayer! With some help from the guards, I took her out and found another of the key cards, and with Stormshade and DBT's last card, we got the elevator working again and took it down to the last level.

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