Champions Online Interviews

IncGamers and Ten Ton Hammer have both whipped up new Champions Online interviews with Cryptic’s Bill Roper.

In the IncGamers interview, we learn what the team’s priorities are until the newly revealed September 1st release date:

The big news this past week is the shift in our release date to September 1st. We’ve been getting some great feedback from all of you, and you’ve been seeing us implement changes based on it. We now have the chance to take the time to get things done right. This means adding a few last things to really smooth out the play experience, as well as doing huge amounts of balance, tuning, and polish. In fact, here’s an idea of what we’re all getting out of the extended schedule:

First and Foremost – TONS of Bug Fixes and Polish!
We want our launch to be as smooth as possible, with the game as polished as it can be. We’re glad to have the extra time to do so.

Crisis in Lemuria
This intense, story-driven introduction to Lemuria has groups of heroes directed to the lost undersea kingdom to assist a relief mission that has been attacked. Here they discover the dark secrets behind the violent civil war in Lemuria.

And in the TTH interview, we learn about character powers and customization:

Ten Ton Hammer: I haven’t messed around with powers enough to really see it in-game, but I know in a previous interview that it was stated that customizing different parts of your powers might be something that made it into the game. Is that the case? Can players customize the colors of their various blasts?

Bill Roper: Actually there’s a lot of customization you can do with the powers. There’s a hue slider for any power so that you can go through and change the color for any power basically. You can set emanation points, so that means if I have Force Bolts for example that normally come from my fists, I can have them come from my palms, I can have it come from my chest or my eyes. And it depends on what the power is whether or not they can use emanation points or which ones they can use, but the vast majority of the powers have different emanation points you can choose for them.

Then as you go through and are gaining levels you also start getting Advantage points. Advantages are basically ways that you can augment powers that you have, and there are usually numerous choices of different ways to go with each power, but you can only put two Advantages on any power so even that way there will be differences in the same type of power.

So I think that’s pretty cool. You may have two heroes that have taken Chain Lightning for example, but one guy’s is coming from his palms and is blue and he’s just cranked up the damage with two Advantages while another player may have gone through and got it firing from a piece of chest armor that he’s got on and it’s yellow because it’s a different kind of electricity and he’s got the Advantage so it jumps to more enemies. So you can even see where within the same core power there’s big differences by the time players get through with building up their character.