Every MMO design team has a wizard turning balance knobs and experimenting with the magical formulas to make gameplay both fun and challenging. On the Champions Online team, that wizard is Chris Matz, better known as Ame on the CO forums. He's one of the more active developers on the boards, keeping a strong hand on the pulse of the player community to get a feel for what the players think about new gameplay changes.
Recently we got to sit down and have a chat with Chris, and he leveled with us on everything from the new heavy weapons powerset to the uses of Teleportation in PvP to the upcoming Void Archetype, which will be hitting the live CO servers next week.
Hit the jump to read the full scoop!
Massively: Can you tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Cryptic?
Chris Matz: I'm the lead systems designer for Champions Online, and that means doing a whole lot of things with the various systems: powers, items, critters, everything on those three main topics primarily. The majority of my work currently is heavily involved in powers directly and the new Archetype system, and the other people on the team are handling a lot of the other issues. We all dabble in all of those things, though. Champions Online Gold While each of us might have a slight expertise now, we're all trying to make sure we're all aware of everything that goes on with our systems.
I assume that, because you're the lead, you oversee a lot of the changes that go on with the various other systems too?
Yes, I work with the content team and the art team quite a bit; when we're working on new powers, I work with our effects and animations team, and when we're working on new lairs or adventure packs, I work a lot with the content team.
First, I want to talk about the new two-handed melee set. Can you elaborate on that, and maybe give us an idea about how it's going to feel?
Well first off, it's not going to be a two-handed set, per se. We have some limitations with... well, since our character creation system is so open with how you can shape your character with long arms, short arms, little tiny stubby arms or whatever, actually making it always a two-handed-looking attack is something we can't guarantee. And so, what we're doing is a big weapon. Crazy-oversized, you know, large swords, axes, maces kind of thing. And there are going to be some attacks where you're definitely going Champions Online Gold to be using your full two hands. Some of them will just be swinging a crazy big heavy sword, and you're just so powerful so you can handle that with one hand.
It is a considerably slower-feeling set, and I don't mean that as in "it takes a really long time to do things," but we want the weapon to feel like it has weight and is heavy and has heft to it. And so the animations have some real weight in them, and so you can say, "Man that sword took him some serious effort to swing."
We've translated that to, in the mechanics side, making their activate times a little bit longer, so instead of the typical half-second or lower activate times on the Martial Arts blade attacks, you'll see more two-third-second all the way up to like, .83 seconds, and this allowed us to have bigger animation for these attacks.
It's a pretty full-fleshed set. It's going to be in the Brick meta tab, so it'll have some shared powers with Might, and it will be able to use the Unleashed Rage tier 4, and we'll be making sure that all those interactions work. There will be some new interactions, of course.
