Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Randy. For the uninitiated, can you give us an idea of what Champions Online is all about?

Champions Online is an action-heavy superhero MMORPG set in the modern world. Players can create their own superhero from a wide variety of power, costume, and animation choices. Players face a wide variety of threats ranging from alien invaders to evil geniuses to giant monsters, and travel all over the world from shining Millennium City to the underwater depths of Lemuria. You can team up with your friends to form super groups and take on even greater super-powered enemies.

From a design standpoint, how much does it help using an established license over one where you basically have to make everything from scratch? Is there a drawback?

There are actually three categories: building from an established license that somebody else owns, building from an established license that you own, and building from scratch. We’re in the middle category; Cryptic Studios purchased the Champions property from HERO Games and has been using that as a framework for Champions Online. It really is the best of both worlds: we have a very rich game universe to draw upon for ideas but we don’t need to go through extensive approval processes and costly revisions that licenses owned by third parties sometimes experience.

We’ve since licensed Champions back to HERO Games for continued development and work closely with them as both games develop. They’re a great bunch of guys who are always full of amazing ideas on how to integrate the games more closely.

Can you explain the real time combat model? How is this different from what MMO fans are used to?

We wanted Champions Online to be more action-oriented than your standard MMO. Superhero comics are all about fast-paced battles between heroes and villains and we wanted to capture that feeling. You’ll never have to worry about getting stuck doing nothing during a battle – you always have a power that you can use to build your energy levels and you can always actively try to break out of holds.

We’ve also minimized the use of recharge timers; you’ll still have some of these for your big powers, but for the most part if you’ve got the energy to pull off an attack, you can do it. We’ve also incorporated a lot more movement and reaction mechanics into gameplay – blocking boss attacks or dodging out of the way, the use of attack power-ups on the battlefield, and run-and-gun style attacks.

Obviously in a game like this people will want to customize their characters as much as possible. I know Champions has a robust character creation tool – can you explain a bit in detail about the process of creating your alter ego?

As most of our play testers can attest, building a character in Champions Online is almost a game unto itself. You can spend hours tailoring your avatar to the exact specifications you desire. Starting off with a male/female body base you can modify the basic size morphology of your character to adjust height, muscle definition, and body mass, and apply detail to neck width, shoulder width, chest width/depth, arm length, etc. You can apply a stance to your character that allows you to select anything from heroic poses to beast-type movements. You can even select the default facial expression, from calm and pleasant to grim and determined.

You can go on to the costume itself which is broken up into head, body, upper body, gloves, and lower body – each of these categories have a number of sub-categories allowing you to select from an incredible amount of options. For example, just the head category has a master sub-category that includes heads & hair, full masks, hats & helmets, full helmets, hoods, monstrous, bestial, insect, and cowls & short hair. Under heads & hair you can then select head wear, hairstyle, eyes, eye accessory, mouth accessory, top accessory, side accessory, and eyebrow. Each of those sub-categories of costume pieces has a primary and secondary color plus two detail colors!

You can of course modify your powers as well. Some powers allow you to hue-shift their colors and emanation points (do you want an eye beam or fist blast?). Other powers allow you to slot in different types of weapons that change the look and function of a weapon, like swapping out an auto-pistol in favor of a laser pistol or swapping out a katana in favor of an axe. The possibilities are vast!