Champions Online's Chris Matz talks on F2P changes, PvP, and the future of CO

Every MMO design team has a wizard turning balance knobs and experimenting with the magical formulas to make gameplay both fun and challenging. On the Champions Online team, that wizard is Chris Matz, better known as Ame on the CO forums. He's one of the more active developers on the boards, keeping a strong hand on the pulse of the player community to get a feel for what the players think about new gameplay changes.

Recently we got to sit down and have a chat with Chris, and he leveled with us on everything from the new heavy weapons powerset to the uses of Teleportation in PvP to the upcoming Void Archetype, which will be hitting the live CO servers next week.

Hit the jump to read the full scoop!

Massively: Can you tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Cryptic?

Chris Matz: I'm the lead systems designer for Champions Online, and that means doing a whole lot of things with the various systems: powers, items, critters, everything on those three main topics primarily. The majority of my work currently is heavily involved in powers directly and the new Archetype system, and the other people on the team are handling a lot of the other issues. We all dabble in all of those things, though. While each of us might have a slight expertise now, we're all trying to make sure we're all aware of everything that goes on with our systems.

I assume that, because you're the lead, you oversee a lot of the changes that go on with the various other systems too?

Yes, I work with the content team and the art team quite a bit; when we're working on new powers, I work with our effects and animations team, and when we're working on new lairs or adventure packs, I work a lot with the content team.

First, I want to talk about the new two-handed melee set. Can you elaborate on that, and maybe give us an idea about how it's going to feel?

Well first off, it's not going to be a two-handed set, per se. We have some limitations with... well, since our character creation system is so open with how you can shape your character with long arms, short arms, little tiny stubby arms or whatever, actually making it always a two-handed-looking attack is something we can't guarantee. And so, what we're doing is a big weapon. Crazy-oversized, you know, large swords, axes, maces kind of thing. And there are going to be some attacks where you're definitely going to be using your full two hands. Some of them will just be swinging a crazy big heavy sword, and you're just so powerful so you can handle that with one hand.

It is a considerably slower-feeling set, and I don't mean that as in "it takes a really long time to do things," but we want the weapon to feel like it has weight and is heavy and has heft to it. And so the animations have some real weight in them, and so you can say, "Man that sword took him some serious effort to swing."

We've translated that to, in the mechanics side, making their activate times a little bit longer, so instead of the typical half-second or lower activate times on the Martial Arts blade attacks, you'll see more two-third-second all the way up to like, .83 seconds, and this allowed us to have bigger animation for these attacks.

It's a pretty full-fleshed set. It's going to be in the Brick meta tab, so it'll have some shared powers with Might, and it will be able to use the Unleashed Rage tier 4, and we'll be making sure that all those interactions work. There will be some new interactions, of course.

I assume it'll use the Defiance/Enrage mechanic probably?

It will have Enrage, yes. It will have access to Defiance, but we are designing it more towards the aggressive side of Brick. It will still be a Brick, but it will be more focused on damage.

Is it just going to be longer activation times and higher damage? You said some things about new interactions -- could you elaborate on that?

I don't want to talk about too much just because, if things change, I don't want to disappoint people, but we're trying to make some synergies between the powers. There will be some similar Enrage-type mechanics to what Might has, where hitting multiple targets will be more likely to Enrage you, things like that. One thing we'll be doing with this that other sets don't really do is using melee cylinder attacks considerably more, where most of the melee multi-target attacks are cone-based. Because we have this big long weapon, we're going to have over-arcing overhand strikes and you'll be able to hit everyone in a line in front of you. So there will be a fair amount of multi-target attacks.

I realize that there's really so much going on in the PTS forums right now that it's really impossible to cover all of it in one interview, but can you give us an overview of some of the stuff that's going on in PTS right now?

Well, obviously Darkness is being worked on pretty heavily right now along with the Void Archetype; they're both going to be going to Live fairly soon, around next Tuesday. We've also added in a new tier 3 single target attack for Darkness, which won't just be used by Darkness. I'm sure a lot of the other Paranormal damage users are going to be pretty happy about it. Obviously we're really excited about the heavy weapons set along with the Devastator, which will be the Archetype going along with that which will be a little further out still. We have another Archetype that I'm working on now, which is the Inventor...

That's a Gadgets Archetype?

It's a Gadgeteering one. It'll be using pets, and it's got two new powers that will be coming to the Gadgeteering set. That'll be going up to the PTS fairly soon. I'm not sure on the exact date for that; it might be next week.

There have been a fair bit of complaints with Gadgets, especially with a lot of the powers being kind of weak, and especially that it doesn't have a spam AoE. I'm sure at least one of those two powers is going to be some kind of AoE attack.

One of the new attacks is an upgraded version of your Experimental Blaster that will be a cone attack, and it'll have some interesting mechanics with it.

With Experimental Blaster, the name of that power is "interesting mechanics."

Right, yes, this will be using the same model that Experimental Blaster does, with lots of crazy things that can happen with it.

That's pretty awesome... like turning Shadow Destroyer into a teddy bear and stuff?

We've seen that happen quite a bit, yes... with teddy bears. In combat.

So, there were a lot of changes in the F2P launch, more than anyone so far has really had time to test. I'd guesstimate there are probably several hundred hours of testing left just for us to figure out the game again.

There are definitely a lot of changes. We spent many months working on it, we did a lot of stuff, and there was definitely more we wanted to do. Those changes are still on the way; there were a lot of changes to some of the frameworks, and we didn't touch some of the others. And it wasn't because we don't think some of those don't need some additional work, because a lot of them are going to be coming. For example, we did some on Darkness, but more is being done here with the Darkness review and the Void Archetype coming out. We're doing a similar thing with Gadgeteering. In some ways we might be more aggressive with the changes we make, but one of the things that I'm trying to do less of is say "let's massively change some individual thing." There definitely will be a couple of those, and we had some talks when F2P launched about, say, Laser Knight being changed and reduced in "overpoweredness."

It's still pretty overpowered, really.

It's still pretty strong, but we didn't want to completely gut it and say "you never want to take this ever again." We want all the powers in the game to be useful. I do feel a little bad for the people that absolutely have to test everything to see how it works, but I'm glad that we have the forums there so I can keep the communication open. I can't answer everything there, but I do as much as I can.

Because you have your hands in so many different elements of the game right now, do you feel that maybe you'll get it wrong or throw things really off-kilter?

Obviously there's always that problem. I think there's never really enough time for that. One of the things we've come to realize is that if we're too cautious, we're not going to be putting out new stuff. There might be the occasion when we have problems with a new interaction that we don't catch with our testing, either by our QA or by people on PTS, and when it does get caught, we can fix it. As long as we're responsive to that and can take care of those issues quickly, I think that's better than the alternative of new stuff happening more slowly.