Champions Online Interview
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Strategy Informer: What would you say were the biggest challenges you encountered while making Champions Online?
Bill Roper: I would say definitely the biggest challenge was being able to create the technology fast enough to do what we wanted to do with it. The toolset we have now is great and Cryptic has a concept of having core tools and a core platform that all the titles use. So the great thing about that is, when we come up with a request for our game programmers to have new technologies built; that goes into the core technology pipeline. Star Trek Online gets to benefit from that and it's the same thing if STO comes up with something; that becomes available for us to use and becomes another brush for us to paint and make the game with. Probably the biggest thing is having more ideas than you can actually get done, because we can only do so much stuff.
It's been really great talking with any of the guys working with it, like Sean who's over here with me, he's like, (man, I can't tell you how much different, how much better the game is since the last six months.) And it's because all these tools are now there and they're mature and they're done, which allows the designers to be more and more creative and do things they weren't able to a year ago when they were making stuff.
What's also a big deal for us and what we're doing right now - is when we have players in the beta programme and every time they finish a mission, a pop-up comes up that allows them to rate the mission, so they can tell us, was it easy, was it too hard, did it make sense? Then there's a comment box where they can type in feedback, which we then process to give us a ranking of the most popular and least popular missions. Everyday, we pull the bottom twenty-five missions and go through them, polish those missions and make them better. It's actually a really great feedback system that allows us to go back and polish a mission from maybe a year ago and polish it using the tools we have now. Probably the most difficult part is having the design ideas outstrip what you can do early on in the project, but by the end of the project we have all the tools to get all of those things polished up.
