Champions .... Who ?? City of Heroes is here to stay, alive and kicking ! So we told with Senior Lead Designer Matt Miller and Lead Designer Bruce Harlick, about the past, the present and the future of the game ...

 

GS: Issue 14 and 15, and now the new : Power Spectrum. The game is still very “alive & kicking” .. It’s always difficult to implement new contents without upset the gameplay. What are the main problems to do that, the guidelines to have in mind to make the right thing?

Bruce Harlick: It’s always an interesting and difficult decision process that’s behind what goes into each issue. We start out with a big list of things we’d like to do and then have to scale it back according to our available resources. We want to include as much as possible in each issue.

Matt Miller: We carefully budget each free expansion that we make. We know how much art time or programming time or design time we are going to have and try and cram as much content as possible into them. For Issue 16 it was a little different. Power Customization is something that we’ve spent several issues worth of development time getting implemented.

GS: Going Rogue will be a paid expansion. With Champions Online around the corner, why the old subscribers should return to CoH spending money instead to play the “new contents” of the Cryptic title? What will be the impact of GR to the gameplay, community, perception of the game, in your thought ?

BH: Going Rogue is going to add a very interesting morality component to the game play that should keep our players engaged in their characters’ stories. While we will have some competition out there, I think our current players are going to be very happy with what we’re going to give them in the boxed expansion. And we’ll have a good shot at gaining new players as well.

MM: We hope our subscribers never leave! I know they are going to want to check out the “new shiney” but City of Heroes will be adding tons of new content in the coming months with Issue 16 and the Going Rogue expansion. Even if players do go check out the competition, I know they will still enjoy the features we are adding to CoH with every update.


GS: September will see the release of Champion Online, an immediate competitor for CoH, but also NCsoft will put on the shelves his new “champion”, Aion. You know that MMORPGs players used to try different genres, so, in many ways, the same NCsoft title will be a challenge for CoH. What do you think about the upcoming releases and the MMO market panorama?

MM: We welcome the competition, it spurs us on to make sure we stay ahead of the pack in terms of features and content.

BH: I agree with Matt; competition in the superhero genre will keep us on our toes!


GS: Have you ever thought about a City of Heroes 2 ?

MM: We’ve thought about City of Heroes 2 ever since we released City of Heroes. Right now the technology doesn’t exist for what we really want CoH2 to be though.

GS: Free to play and micro-transactions seem to be become very popular also in the west. DDO and Turbine have chosen this new business model. CoH and f2p could be an option for you the future?

BH: I think it would be very difficult to transition CoH over to a free-to-play with micro-transactions model without changing the way the game plays. We like the way the game works now and wouldn’t want to change it to support a free to play model, but then again, you never know.

MM: We currently have some microtransaction content on top of our monthly subscription, but it’s mostly costume pieces and emotes. More social bonuses than anything. The players seem willing to put up with this level of optional content as microtransactions since they can take it or leave it and not really affect their gameplay in any significant way.


GS: What are the choices/decisions you have made for CoH that absolutely you wouldn’t commit again during these years, if you could come back?

MM: Epic Archetypes probably. They are a cool bonus, but I think that the time we devoted to them could have been spent elsewhere and had more of an impact on the larger game population.

BH: Not planning for expansion from the launch of COH. The original design made it very difficult to expand the upper end of the game (raising the level cap) and if I had to do over again, I would definitely making raising the level cap an easier thing to do.


GS: Five years in retrospective question n. 2 : Did there be some particular anecdotes to tell about the develop of CoH (game and further updates) or about the any other aspects that you remembered?

MM: I really wanted a mission in Ouroboros (from Issue 11: A Stitch in Time) where you went back to Brass Monday in the 1930’s version of Paragon. Turns out it was going to be an insurmountable amount of art work to “de-modernize” our Paragon City maps, so my dream of fighting alongside the original Freedom Phalanx was shattered. Someday though… someday.

BH: I wanted Horatio to be guarding the Omega Team time capsule in the Thus Spoke the Reichsman Strike Force from Issue 15. It would have been fun to let the villains kick the snot out of my alter-ego. However, we decided we didn’t want to spend the resources on Horatio for what amounts to an incidental fight. I’ll find some way bring Horatio out of the retirement in the future. 

 

GS: What we can expect from NCsoft for CoH in the future, after Going Rogue?

MM: More free expansions! We really want to make sure we get three free expansions out per year, because our players deserve it.

BH: We want to make certain the future issues revisit some of the current story lines, add new story lines, and add fun new systems and game play to the game.

Thx to Matt and Bruce for the interview.