Champions Online Developer Diary

Comic book writer John Layman brings us up to speed on the progress he and the team have made on Champions Online in a new developer diary on IGN.

Champions Online is going to take players across a vast and diverse world, a world of gleaming cityscapes, blistering deserts, relentless winters, lush tropical jungles, and frightening oceanic depths.

Champions Online is making fantastic strides every day of every week, and so is Cryptic’s underlying technology platform (currently used by Champs and Star Trek Online). With each advance, the Cryptic design teams are inspired to push the game further creatively. We’re continually finding new ways to deliver missions and make types of missions and gameplay more varied.

The Cryptic platform is giving us the freedom we need to tell better stories. The tales we tell in Champions Online continue to get increasingly complex and compelling. A player’s decision will have consequence and there is not always one right way to do things. Not only that, but not every decision the player makes will be the right one. That is, certain decisions will have some moral ambiguity to them, so some decisions are grey. Just about everybody who’s read a comic in the last 20 years can tell you heroes and villains have evolved beyond two-dimensional cartoon cliches, and recent Cryptic platform advances allow us to make missions to better reflect that.