GDC10: The future of Champions Online
We had the opportunity to sit down with Bill Roper at GDC 2010 and discuss the general future of Champions Online. There are two themes to Bill's answers during our talk: just about everything is free and listening to community feedback.
First of all, melee powers like Might are getting reworked based directly from player feedback. The goal is to make players feel as though they're on par with ranged powersets in PvP situations. Generally, people have been saying they felt "gimped" and the goal is to fix that. There's a complete reworking of the supernatural set coming as well, which will separate the previously single powerset into two new ones.
A ton of bug fixes are coming, which is always good to hear. Lots and lots of tech updates will be rolling out, although we're not clear as to whether this will be in one huge update or sprinkled throughout several patches. However, all the fixes and updates are based on player feedback. Sensing a theme here? Cryptic seems to have compiled a list of requested improvements and addressed several of them.
Adventure packs are next for Champions Online and they're completely free, as well. These packs are designed to be two or three hours long and -- most importantly -- can be done at just about any level. Adventure packs offer an alternate chunk of content for players who've already done the early missions over and over again, plus they're very story-driven.
At the end of our brief discussion on the future of Champions, Bill had this to say, "Past that, I think it's just about remaining as responsible as possible to what the community is telling us they want." That sounds the right approach to us. We're looking forward to seeing the fruits of all this development labor -- especially if it's playable-nemesis-character-fruit.
