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Behind the Mask: A community guide to Champions Online
Behind the Mask is the new Massively column devoted to everything you might want to know about Champions Online. Fortunately for Massively readers, the guys at UNITY have given me the go-ahead to declassify my stories as a super-powered operative. As a result, we'll be giving you the down and dirty facts that you'll need to make it in the superhero world, as well as bits of news you won't hear anywhere else. Behind the Mask will cover issues related to life in Millennium City as well as detailed info about criminal hotspots around the globe. Our first column will be a community resource for Champions Online. While there were a fair number of community sites at launch, most of them have suffered from a lack of new content in recent months. The ones that continue to be updated are the best of the best -- ranging from community hubs for roleplayers to detailed info on the game's many missions. If there's one thing to be said about the fans of Champions, it's that they are devoted to their game and eager to put out new content for it.
Customization and community power in latest Ask Cryptic
Character customization seems to be the big focus in the newest Ask Cryptic for Champions Online. Questions about multi-limbed heroes (not at launch) and different stances to give your character (big yes!) receive the more strikingly straight-forward answers. It wouldn't be a big leap of logic to imagine that four-armed characters will eventually be possible, with the revealing of Grond (pictured above) last Halloween. We also learn that Cryptic is planning for plenty of wings and tails from the get-go, which should please a lot of players.However, the most interesting question asks Cryptic whether or not any of these community questions have actually changed their minds concerning design decisions. The response is fairly frank, with lead designer Randy "Arkayne" Mosiondz saying that fan response has definitely shifted the way that the team was implementing certain things. He goes on to point out that there haven't been any complete re-designs of systems, though. It's not surprising that Cryptic's listening to their community, as they've always been a rather smart developer in that way.
Champions Online developer post roundup
Having an insatiable appetite for all things Champions Online, we've gone and searched their official forums like rabid info-hounds and complied a nice list of developer quotes. Of course there's no official dev tracker in the forums and for a while we were sort of wandering around manually searching for Cryptic employee posts until we found this very helpful thread. Big thanks goes to poster Foo for coming up with the idea -- it certainly makes our monstrous thirst for information easier to quench.This time around we've got tons of topics ranging from XP dept to underwater missions -- trust us when we say you'll be happily surprised by many of the dev posts.
Meet the lead designer for Champions Online
The first of many Q&A sessions with team members from Cryptic's upcoming superhero MMO Champions Online has gone up. The first subject to field questions happens to be lead designer Randy "Arkayne" Mosiondz, who seems like a pretty nice guy from up north. As far as new information goes, the article doesn't really reveal anything that we didn't already know. However, it does give us a very good look at the man in charge, which is arguably new information unto itself.Most people have been assuming that former City of Heroes lead designed Jack Emmert would be taking the helm on Champions Online -- which wouldn't have been a problem since it seems like he's learned a lot since his first massively game. Our guess is that Jack is busy with more than just CO, since we know Cryptic definitely has some other interesting projects behind their veil of secrecy.
