A Conversation With Bill Roper of Champions Online

I had a chance to speak with Bill Roper, design director and executive producer of Champions Online. Take a break from playing and check out what he thinks about the beta, the future of MMOs, and Darth Vader.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. I know you’re busy this close to launch.

No problem, glad to be here.

So, I think that maybe in gaming more than any other entertainment or art medium, first impressions mean a lot.  With an MMO especially, since such a large amount of time will be dedicated to playing the game, what do you think the first impression of a Champions player will be?

Trying to add a layer of simplicity before the complexity.

Champions is really, really deep if you want to go there.  It has a lot of sliders and bells and whistles and really provides even more than that, for players that want to be really elbow deep in the mechanics of the game.  The fact that you can choose from any power in the game when you’re building your character; The level of detail with powers and costumes and advantages and the way the upgrade system works.  Everything is really deep and allows for a huge amount of re-playability and customization to occur.

So we had to make sure that we weren’t overwhelming people out of the gate.  We put that level of simplicity on top. For example, you go to make a character and the very first step you’re doing is choosing from a power set, and those are really static, right? Or, you can customize everything if you want to.  You might have seen the changes [in the beta] where “Here are some kind of standardized facial options to choose from,” but you can press ‘Custom’ and BAM, there’s all the options.  You know, in the costume creator, one of the things that we didn’t get finished but are going to add is a collection of pre-made costumes to pick from. So that you can say ‘Ninja’ or, you know, somewhere you can start from.  It was on the list and it just didn’t make it.  We did a lot of work to add that simplification level, we want the first impression to be ‘Wow! Look at all these customization options, if I want them.”

And the tutorial is really set up the same way, right?  So we want you to feel like a hero when you’re in the game.  There’s a giant alien invasion, you’re out doing things, rescuing people, digging them out from rubble, getting medical supplies, you know?  You’re retrieving security codes and helping the police, and you’re being a hero.  And that’s the first impression we want to give you.

Do you think that the same holds true for the thousands of players who just finished up testing out the game in the beta?  It’s a beta, it’s an MMO, you know, so of course the first day was a little rough. What do you attribute that to?

No matter how much you test a game with closed beta levels of concurrency of players, and then bots (because that’s how we have to test for it,) there are things that happen that you can never test for when you then get a critical mass of actual live players that get on.  There are just things that you can’t predict, that you actually can’t test for, that you just don’t see until it happens.

Well, I know that there was some moving around of the XP scale based on new data collected in the last week or two.  People were concerned about that.

When you get close to launch, players start being concerned.  ‘Oh, you’re so close, you don’t have time to make any changes.’  The upside of a client server system that’s in an MMO, particularly here at Cryptic more so than anywhere else I’ve worked, is the absolute speed with which the team can make changes and get them implemented.

The big thing that we did was a big experience swing because it was really broken in the other direction. A lot of players didn’t see that because they hadn’t actually gained experience all the way to the level cap. Once we actually had a lot more players, even though they weren’t getting that high, we started seeing the curve really breaking. Even though we hadn’t opened the last two zones, Lemuria and Monster Island, we had players getting into the 30s.  It’s like ‘Yeah, you shouldn’t be able to do that,’ the curve was obviously really broken.  It’s not that we want to demand that players to go through every scrap of every mission to reach the level cap, but there should be an expected flow because all of the missions are designed to be fun, and challenging, and interesting at those levels.

The biggest thing you have to do when you’re piloting a ship this big is that you tend to have to make big course corrections.  I think the thing that players always talk about is ‘Well, why don’t you make smaller changes?  Just change it like a little bit, then a little bit.’  The only problem is, when you have a big ship, when you make a lot of small course changes you have to make a lot of them and it’s hard to see.  If I change it by five percent, it’s hard to see that correction, and when it’s a game that has the length of time that’s part of an MMO and the data we have to gather to look at those things… you really have to kick the wheel hard to port to see what the course correction is.  Which we did.  And then once we did that we said ‘Ok, great, now we’ve gone to far the other way’, and it’s an easier matter to kick the wheel back to starboard and fix that.  And once again that’s what we did.  We just pushed that change.

I feel really good about the changes we’ve made.

Is that the biggest lesson Cryptic learned over the last week or so of open beta?

We found a lot of things, definitely the experience curve was big.  We found some bugs that were impossible to find before [we reached the size of open beta]. The PvP queue server was a perfect example of that. So, we had our closed beta, and yeah we had a lot of people who were helping to test, but we only had about 100 or 150 people tops queuing up for PvP.  Worked great, it was fantastic.

(Then) we hit open beta and suddenly we had over 1,000 people queuing for PvP.  And that’s when we realized that our PVP server was written more vertically than horizontally.  If you think of it like wanting to get into a concert, it’s like ‘Yes, there is a really big line, but we only really have one door to go through.’ And we get you to that door as fast as possible, but when when there’s a line that long, people have to wait.  And we realized that it wasn’t doing what we expected, which is that when you see that there is a big line you just open more doors.  It wasn’t a problem that we’d seen before, but once we suddenly had that many people actively doing something, you realize ‘Oh, wow there’s a bug.’  It wasn’t giving us the expected behavior we tested before (in an environment that’s imperfect.)

The other big lesson we learned was how excited our players are. We have a fantastic community, they’re really passionate, they’re really excited for the game.  Even through the open beta process (which is a time when players could sit back and sort of say ‘I’m just gonna screw around for a week,’ we had a good mix.  There were people in there who expected us to be perfect and didn’t realize we were in beta mode, but we also had players in there who were still giving us quality bug reports and quality feedback, and not just rabble rousing or gloating.

So, about three years ago Marvel Online had been announced as being under development by Cryptic.  It was then canceled, and Cryptic started developing Champions Online.  At least some of the development team is the same between those two products, and I’m curious: what, if any, ideas also came over from that project?

Not ideas as much, I mean, the thing that’s transferred over … maybe some of… well, the Marvel IP and Champions are so different.  Not even from an IP standpoint. I wasn’t here then, so you know, from what I’ve gleaned and from having done this on other projects before, with Marvel you’re working with an IP holder, a licensor, right?  They have certain restrictions they’re going to place on you (and) they have certain requirements they’re going to place on you.  They have certain desires that they have about how they want the game to feel, and because it’s an extremely well known IP, players also have desires and wants and expectations that are tied to those characters they know, for example.

I honestly think that the huge upside with Champions is that, one, there are hardcore pen and paper gamers who know the universe – and there’s a massive, gigantic, rich universe for us to draw from which really gives us a foundation as far as fiction and lore – but no one knows the characters that well.

And this is always the example I like to make: So, if I’m fighting next to some top, iconic super hero from Marvel or DC or something, right? Who has saved the planet 100 times, and I’ve been reading this stuff, and it’s like ‘How am I helping this guy?’

I understand that completely. I played DC Universe Online back in February, and I noted that I felt like I could never make a dent in that universe.  The demo of that game ends with a fight against Doomsday, and the developers want you to be excited: “You’re fighting next to Superman!”  And the thing is, yeah, I’m fighting next to Superman.  And while it isn’t to the same degree, I feel like there is still some of that in Champions. For instance, everyone in the game is heralded as the savior of Millennium City because of their actions in the tutorial. You can still feel like “just another most important hero in the universe.”

Well, I think that tying into that is how well Champions’ Nemesis system works. I’m designing a villain that I’m fighting. This villain hates me. I am the most important hero to that villain.

Yeah, and I think that was actually by favorite moment of the beta was… you know, during the closing days of the beta you raised the cap to level 40 and started a giant invasion of Millennium City.  And yeah, I fought some of the massive Destroid robots, but then I went over and made my Nemesis (since that’s locked off until you reach level 25, and none of my characters had reached that during the open beta.)  And I fought through the very tough Nemesis mission.  Then 20 minutes after finishing that I’m back on the streets battling more robots, and suddenly some NPCs yell out my name and some death threats from my Nemesis, and they attacked. And there was this three way battle between the Destroids, my Nemesis’ minions, and my character.  And in that moment the world around me as a player fell away and I was in my character’s head, thinking, you know, “This is just great. This is wonderful. There are giant robots attacking me, and now this.”  That’s an impressive moment.

Yeah, yeah.  And to get back to…  The biggest advantage we got from moving from Marvel to Champions was that we could complete reset the concept of the game and put hyper customization at the core of the game.  And that was never really conceived for Marvel, and it’s so key for Champions, even the pen and paper game where you can take it a step further. You can even design individual powers, not just pick powers.

Well, and speaking to the table top stuff, I’m curious to know how you feel and how much you know about D&D 4th Edition which has… well…

Yeah, yeah, and it seems like it’s built to be MMO. A mini-size MMO.

Right. Meanwhile the Hero System based Champions table top game isn’t.  It’s still a hardcore tabletop roleplaying game, even though there would be some obvious cross-promotion.  It seems like there are some shared ideas, art assets, some branding stuff, and some of the fiction – but the game isn’t shared.  There are different rules and mechanics. Do you think that the separation there is the way it should be? Hardcore pen and paper stuff versus more casual video and computer games?

I think there’s room for both, there can be a wide variety.  If you want hardcore, crazy, bean counter MMO you can play EVE Online.  It’s a massive graphic spreadsheet almost, and that takes nothing away from the game.  I play EVE, it’s very cool, it’s extremely hardcore, right?  But you can also jump online and play casual games, get your Bejeweled fix.  And I think table-top games are the same, you can certainly sit down and play a game of Munchkin, or you can play a game of Champions.

I think that the difference is that in the scope of the size of that market, there are more players that appreciate the difficult mechanic.  They push for that.  And that [hardcore mechanic] is a huge strength that the Hero System has.  It’s all about “What do you want to make? Here’s how you make it.”  The Hero System is about more than just the Champions.  There’s the new Hero games core set, and then the new Champions set. I think one of the things that they’re doing that is really cool is that they’re going to say “Hey, if you’ve played Champions Online, here’s how you build the power set players. Here’s how you would build Flame Strike”, right?  “This is how those powers are constructed.”

Actually, even knowing your background as a table-top player, when I first saw you attached to Champions, I thought “Wow, after Hellgate, which is really dark, Bill really went to something bright and colorful. That’s weird.”  But then I remembered about Flagship’s game Mythos which is a lighter fantasy game, and in general your history of bouncing between Diablo and Warcraft.  Is there a reason you cycle between the two?

It is really a great way to keep refreshing that palette.  I started on the Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans at Blizzard when I entered the games industry and the thing that was always fun about the Warcraft games was that even though there are these gigantic epic struggles, it was presented really colorfully and filled with lots of tongue and cheek humor to keep things light.  It’s a very fun universe, and then Starcraft was a darker mix of that but still had its humor.  Then you look at the Diablo games and you see.. well, you know it was really nice to be able to go back and forth between those. Hellgate was pushing a very dark near future and we wanted to create a sci-fi fantasy blend, one that even had little slices of horror thrown in.  And it was definitely a dark world.

The big swing that I have loved doing is working on a superhero game.  Not working on fantasy or sci-fi.  It’s something else.

Champions is definitely a game that, in tone at least, taps into something childlike, or maybe just nostalgic.  For fear of insulting writers on the project, I won’t say that the narratives are “uncomplicated,” but they certainly have a lot of old school comics black and white in them.  These are the good guys, these are the bad guys.  One of them is named Dr. Destroyer, right?  He’s bad.

Yeah.

And you compare this to those other superhero games out this year, Infamous and Prototype, which are dark, gritty affairs and have supposedly blurred moral lines. Add into the mix what BioWare is doing with choice and branching paths on their new Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic.  Will any of that bleed into Champions?  Will there be choices in Champions in the future?  Do you think that sort of choice belongs in MMOs at all?

I definitely think that there is a great place for that, the thing that’s hard is presenting those things.  How you’re getting that across to the player, and more importantly to a lot of players.  To me, the great thing about a single player game is that you’re crafting an experience that can be extremely cinematic.  You know exactly what a character is doing at any given time, you know that they’ve followed this path.  A lot of single player RPGs tend to be very “I’m driving you down this one path,” where as an MMO’s players tend to go all over the place, break the rules, do things in different order, and improve their characters.  It makes it really challenging.

I do think that there are ways within missions and things to allow choices, and that’s something we’re definitely going to be exploring where there’s a branching storyline and it allows players to get to a point and say “Do I want to do A or B?”  We brought a little of that in Hellgate, basically when you went turn in a mission you’d completed you could (report to) the guy who actually gave you that mission, or here’s someone else that’s interested with what you just went and got.  We had a lot of plans for that we didn’t really get to.

I think that it’s something… it’s a neat way to go.  The biggest challenge with it is that every time you branch like this, every developers faces this, you’re now making more content.

Right, and more content that you can’t be sure the player will ever see.

Yeah.  In fact you’re making content that you know the player won’t see if they only play one character.  And I think that’s the biggest challenge, there’s this level of expectation about how much time a player can put into an MMO.

You’re already dumping 50, 60, 100, 200 hours into a single character, maybe more.  Do you really want them to have two dozen options where they’re missing that content completely?  I definitely comprehend the challenge of it.

And I look at like KOTOR on the console (Xbox).  If it took me 35 hours to complete the game, but I knew there’s another path, yeah, I might go back and invest another X number of hours to see the other path.  But if I’ve built up a character in an MMO, and I’ve invested a couple hundred of hours, or more, if you look at some MMOs it’s like, ‘Wow, am I really going to go back?’  And from a content creation standpoint, you’ve had to create content to get players to spend you know, 100 hours on your level cap.  It’s like, how much more do I have to create…

Is it another 100 hours?  Is it another 25 hours?  Are they going to resent me if they have to replay the same 75 hours to reach that different 25?

Exactly.

It’s been crunch time, so I know you’ve been busy, so let’s do a quick lightning round, then I’ll let you get out of here.

1. Favorite Super Hero?

The Tick.  I love the Tick because he’s light hearted.  It’s so well written, with such a good sense of humor.  It had a great world it created, I always liked the fact that the Tick was the nigh invulnerable… It took a lot of the things you grew up with and knocked things on its ear.

2. Favorite power in Champions Online?

Bullet Ballet – the munitions set’s gun kata.  It’s this spinning dance kata.  We did the munitions set and it was initially really military based. But then the animation guy said, “You know what? This is a superhero game. Even if you’re a guy using guns, it gonna to be crazy, over the top.”  When I saw that power for the first time, I thought “Wow this is the best thing of all time.”

3. Favorite Film (with or without superheroes in it, your choice)?

Wow.  With or without?  Wow.  That would take me forever to answer.  I’m a total movie buff, I probably own like 2000 films.  But… one of my favorites, and people are torn on this, is… I really liked Unbreakable.  It definitely was a super hero movie, but you didn’t get set up for that.  I really appreciated how they built that character and built that world, I always wanted to see what happened next.

4. Favorite Villain in any format and genre? It doesn’t have to be comics, or movies, or games.

Since my youth, since the films came out, I have been a massive Vader fan.  I love Darth Vader, I love how they created that character.  I will jump on the bandwagon and say my youth was destroyed by the three prequel films.  Only because.. that was the Anakin Skywalker story, and the first three were Luke’s story… and I was just disappointed because it makes Vader sort of a pussy.

To quote comedian Patton Oswalt on this topic, “I don’t care where the stuff I like comes from, I just like the stuff I like.”

The thing that is interesting though, if you look at the original trilogy, you follow the Luke’s story from being a farm boy to this bad ass Jedi. A nd you’re like “Wow, that’s an awesome three film origin story.”  And I thought “Oh, the new films are just going to be this great three film origin story for Vader,” and just, wow… He was a whiney little bastard.  Even when he becomes Vader, he does the “Nooooo!”  He’s so not as cool as I thought he was.

5. Two parter: Fortress of Solitude or Batcave, and where would you build your secret base?

Fortress of Solitude because… wait, actually.  You know.  Batcave.  Because Fortress of Solitude is cold and out of the way.  I like the idea of the subterranean, hidden… but still in the city Batcave.  And I’d put it underneath the mansion which I’d obviously own at that point.

6. Last one, and this last one is for ten points.  What’s the name the protagonist of BlackThorne (One of your first titles with Blizzard. You worked on the music, I think?)

Kyle… His name was Kyle… something.

Wow, yeah, that’s right. Nice memory. Thanks very much Bill, you’ve been great. I’d love to hav-

You know… I know his name was Kyle… Now you have me racking my brain for his last name.  Man.  I think it starts with a V… I can’t remember.  It was… Varos or Vlaro… or..

The internet says Vlaros.

There you go.  Vlaros!  Man, Blackthorne was his nickname.  But I remembered it was Kyle.

That was like ten years ago.

More than that! I did the music for the PC version for it, and it was already out on the 32X, so that must’ve been… 15 years ago.  It’s amazing I can remember anything that long ago at all!

Thanks to Bill for taking time out of a busy schedule to chat with us. Check out Champions Online, and stay tuned to OLC for our review in the future.