Champions Online Preview, Interview, and More

There has been quite a bit of activity for Champions Online recently, so I thought I'd round it all up into one newsbit. To start things off, we have eight new screenshots to check out on the game's official website.

Next, we have a preview on Strategy Informer:
Enemies level up alongside your own character, so things remain suitably challenging at all times, giving you the perfect reason to upgrade your burgeoning abilities. There are 900 missions in total, spread across five distinct regions meaning that there's plenty to do and huge potential to earn experience to level up your hero. Your powers must be gradually earned as you progress and level up through the course of the game, so you won't necessarily be able to take to the skies instantly even if you assign flight powers to your crime fighting machine. Still, our guy kicks ass like a pro, leaping about like an agile martial artist, and as punches register with comic book style thwacks and pows, the action looks bold, dynamic and exciting. Visually, Champions Online is as close as it's possible to get to the four-colour comic books the game so faithfully references, adopting a cel-shaded art style that utilises bump mapping, various lighting techniques and more, to give the graphics a far greater depth and solidity.

A spot on Big Download's list of the Top 10 Most Anticipated PC Games For Summer 2009:
Perhaps the biggest PC game of the summer is one that is actually due for release on September 1. Developer Cryptic Studios and publisher Atari are prepping their long awaited super hero MMO for that launch date.

Made by the original City of Heroes dev team, Champions Online promises to be the next generation super hero MMO. It's also perhaps the first true test of Atari's new online gaming business model.

And another "powers" interview with Bill Roper on Ten Ton Hammer:
Ten Ton Hammer: Out of the three elements, Ice seems to be the most variable in term of usage that we see in comic books. There are options for it to become a shield, slide, ice construct, etc. in the comics. Are all of those power options available for players to pick up?

Roper: One of our big focuses when building powers is to give players a diversity of powers that they can use to build a theme from each of the various power sets. For example, you can take ice slide as a power specifically, so we tried to take some of those big thematic elements and implement them into the powers. Fire has the same thing in terms of fiery flight where you light on fire and there's a fire trail behind you as you fly. I also think we were doing electrical teleport, or something along those lines.

Blocking powers, buffing powers, we wanted to give all of these power sets these different aspects in each. I don't think we have a summonable in each power set, because we separated summonables out into different power sets because it's such a different gameplay mechanic. It was odd to just kind of paste summonables on into the power sets at the end just for the heck of it.

However, there are all sorts of powers that we may release post launch and give every one of those powers a summonable creature, like an ice golem or a fire sprite. That's the cool thing about this game, we can continually add powers into the game. Like, we might decide to one day create a batch of summonables for players to use.

That said, there are a bunch of different powers and abilities in each power set that provide you with both offensive and defensive categories, along with a number of other elements.