Cryptic invited us over to have a long, hard look at their Champions Online. We had a good stare, talked to anyone who never actively hit us and came back and wrote up a full week of features about it, which I compile now here for the full-on RPG ultromegafeature experience.

• The Game’s Afoot: An overview of the game, what’s new, their aims and a first look at the Monster Island section.
• Jack Emmert Interview: Cryptic’s Chief Creative Officer talks about Champions aims, the learning curve and how MMOs need to grow for the future.
• George MacDonald interview: The designer of the original Champions roleplaying game talks about how it came about and the influence of one school of games on the other.
• Randy Mosiondz interview: Champions Online’s Lead designer talks about the challenges of Champions and how City of Heroes was the game which finally taught him to love the MMO.
• The Character Creator. Art Director Shayne Herrera explains exactly how Champions will redefine defining your characters.
• And we give away a Champions Skateboard. Without wheels. Hurrah!

Frankly, if you can find a more thorough examination of Champions Online elsewhere, you probably work at Cryptic and it’s your bloody design docs. Sez us, arrogantly.

Halfway through my time at Cryptic, we stop to gorge ourselves on takeaway Chinese. I find myself sitting alongside the worryingly silent Craig Pearson of PC Gamer, the ever-lovin’ Keith Cross of MMORPG.com and the charmingly self-effacing Lead Designer of Champions, Randy Mosiondz. Since he couldn’t run away as he had food in front of him, I figured it would be a good time to have a leisurely talk about the problem of flexibility in Champions, his biggest influences, the crossover between paper-games and videogames and… oh, whatever else we could yabber out before we ran out of fried vegetables.

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What’s that? Oh, my dear child. It’s a prize. Well, it’s something we’re going to give away to whoever wins a competition we set, which means it counts as a prize in our book. But what is it? And what do you have to do to win it? And how did I get it through customs into the country? The answers to all can only be discovered beneath this finely crafted cut…
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Shayne Herrera, Cryptic’s Art Development Director, has finished his presentation about the whole art side of Champions Online: its comic-shading approach which hybridizes trad-characters with cell-shading, tranforming comic-dynamic poses into action and masses more. I’m left with a single, burning question.

“Can I have an enormous head?”
“Like you do?”
“That was a set up.”
“Thankyou.”

It’s official. In Champions Online, you can have an enormous head.
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With twenty five years of history, there’s more to Champions than Cryptic’s forthcoming game. Present, and putting the game into its context, was original pen-and-paper designer George MacDonald. We grabbed an opportunity to chat to him about the history the Superhero role-playing game, the power of game mechanics to create emotions and how gargantuan Cryptic’s intellects are…
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If any single figure’s connected in the public mind with Cryptic games, it’s its oft-outspoken Chief Creative Officer, Jack Emmert. While he was particularly busy showing off his new child to anyone in the buliding, we managed to grab him to talk about the interface between online MMOs and Pen and Paper games, the biggest challenges of Champions and the sacred cow of MMO design that’s next for the slaughterhouse.
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Los Gatos is the Beverly Hills of The San Francisco satellites. It’s not just home of people who really fancy a posh ZIP code, however. It’s also Cryptic Studios’ base. The veterans of the City of Heroes games are giving their first, real public showing of now-to-be-2K-distributed Champions to a selected band of gentlemen of the press. For some reason, I was invited. Spooks.

Since I’ve interviewed anyone who didn’t actively run away from me, I’ve a whole week of content to amuse you. But let’s start a little more general than that. Here’s an Jack Emmert and John Needham quote-packed overview of their action-influenced take on the MMO game, Cryptic’s love of the Champions pen-and-paper RPG, the tranquil-yet-troublesome expanse of Monster Island and what they have planned after Champions…
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