Massively interviews Champions Online's Shannon Posniewski page 2

What are the plans with the next adventure pack?

The next adventure pack is in the planning stages. We know the story; it's going to be related to Dr. Destroyer and basically... Dr. Destroyer and Multifaria are involved. I can say that much thus far.

We actually asked about this months ago, on our forums a few months ago, what stories do you want to see? And we had six or seven different ideas. And a lot of people wanted to see, well, what is going on with Dr. Destroyer? Because there's actually a big story going on with him if you can keep the threads together, paying attention during the game. But this really brings it all together with what's going on. So we've got some really cool things planned for that right now that I can't talk about yet.

Are we talking about the original Dr. Destroyer? Or Shadow Destroyer?

I... wouldn't care to say!

Oh, so that's how it is! Tricky! So what about the next balance pass?

We're going through... we've been making these balance passes, and one's about to go live, I don't know if you play pets...

Oh yeah, we actually have an article about the changes. They make a huge difference.

I'm really happy with the new changes... I think that they'll really change the way people play pets, which is a good thing I think honestly! I think there are going to be some people who prefer the old pets, but I think that they'll find something better in these and end up liking them a lot more.

But in any case, for the short term, that is the last sweeping change update we're going to do. We're still going to be looking at stuff, but we probably won't call it "The Force update." We've already hit the ones that we think were really off-the-scale problematic, and people complained a lot about. Obviously there's still powers people complain about, don't get me wrong. I'm talking about wholesale basic problems.

What we're looking at with feedback from people, especially people new to the game, is that the game continues to be baffling. The tooltips that you get are... nonsensical sometimes, or inaccurate, or wrong, which is not good. So we are making a... I guess I would call it a longitudinal pass, across all of the powers in the game, fixing up [powers] that are clearly broken. Just minor things like, very few people happen to use Power X, and therefore Power X hasn't been looked at, and when we look at it, we realize that it can't work properly because of some other thing.

I mean one of the drawbacks of a game where you can choose any power with any other power is that the implementation of these powers can get very complicated, very complex. We didn't do as well as we could have with mitigating that complexity, which is why we have to do these updates so regularly. So in any case, we're doing a major longitudinal update that is going to go through and change all of the descriptions so that they're accurate. It's going to simplify some powers that — in terms of their implementation — are just goofy.

In general there will be a couple things that are rebalanced a bit. Some of those rebalances are going to be, say, this framework is missing this kind of power, why don't we just drop one in there? Basically a power from another set, but we'll make it more attuned to this particular framework. That's what we're working on right now, making all the powers feel more cohesive and fixing the terrible number of bugs we have in the descriptions.

Player housing was recently announced as being in development for STO; does that mean that it's also in development for Champions?

It is on our "we want to do this" list. We wanna do player-based lairs. There is no time domain for that, that I can guarantee anything at all, but we very much want to do player housing. It's on our list of things to do. We saw the stuff they did already... like for their bridges, we want to provide sort of the same thing, but we want to be more flexible because everyone's not in a starship [in CO], and you might be in a batcave, or you might be in a mansion, or you might be in a penthouse or something like that. So we need a little bit more than what Star Trek has. We really want to do that; it's not in the "soon" timeframe. I'd be afraid to give anything more than that.

Are there any new powersets in the works?

Brand-new frameworks... you're not going to see much soon, and by that I mean in the next month or two. Like I said, we're adding several powers, and we'll get more information on the forums when we're certain about it. We are adding them sort of across the board a little bit to fill in a bunch of frameworks. Again, we felt like we've been focusing on individual frameworks for a while, and that was to the detriment to the system as a whole. So we're sort of filling in those spots where powers are needed.

We do have I think four frameworks that were pretty keen that we'd like to do, they're just after this broad patch coming up.

Thanks to Shannon Posniewski for taking the time for this interview!