Interesting news, heroes, but first a bit of history: City of Heroes/Villains was originally developed by Cryptic Studios, and late last year it was sold to NCSoft, who was the game's publisher. Cryptic was instead going to focus on a new MMO designed around the Marvel universe, which is somewhat hilarious given the fact that Marvel sued Cryptic a year earlier because you could give a guy claws and name him Woolvereene. Anyway, Marvel and Cryptic settled the lawsuit and later joined forces to develop Marvel Universe Online. And somewhat unsurprisingly, it was announced earlier this week that the Marvel MMO is canceled; presumably because it's nearly impossible to break into the MMO market which is dominated by an 800-pound gorilla called World of Warcraft.So what's the important news? It seems that Cryptic is not scared off by WoW, nor do they need Marvel's support. Instead, they have announced Champions Online, a new cross-platform superhero-themed MMO. Not much is known yet, though some things can be guessed. It's likely that they are salvaging what they can from the canceled Marvel project. Additionally, the title points to a possible collaboration with Champions, a pen-and-paper RPG. The archetypes definitely seem to mirror those from City of Heroes, so the conjecture is not far-fetched.The real question is what the game will be like. Will it be WoW in tights? Or will it be essentially City of Heroes 2? Personally, I'd hope for the latter, though copying WoW doesn't seem to have hurt LotRO too much. We'll find out more next week, but we can still speculate. And most importantly, if it turns out to be like an updated CoH, would you want to dust off your costume and explore a new city? Let me know in the comments - meanwhile, I'll be patching up my cape.News
Re: Your tights
Posted 2/14/2008 3:03 pm by Crazy Vincent
Interesting news, heroes, but first a bit of history: City of Heroes/Villains was originally developed by Cryptic Studios, and late last year it was sold to NCSoft, who was the game's publisher. Cryptic was instead going to focus on a new MMO designed around the Marvel universe, which is somewhat hilarious given the fact that Marvel sued Cryptic a year earlier because you could give a guy claws and name him Woolvereene. Anyway, Marvel and Cryptic settled the lawsuit and later joined forces to develop Marvel Universe Online. And somewhat unsurprisingly, it was announced earlier this week that the Marvel MMO is canceled; presumably because it's nearly impossible to break into the MMO market which is dominated by an 800-pound gorilla called World of Warcraft.So what's the important news? It seems that Cryptic is not scared off by WoW, nor do they need Marvel's support. Instead, they have announced Champions Online, a new cross-platform superhero-themed MMO. Not much is known yet, though some things can be guessed. It's likely that they are salvaging what they can from the canceled Marvel project. Additionally, the title points to a possible collaboration with Champions, a pen-and-paper RPG. The archetypes definitely seem to mirror those from City of Heroes, so the conjecture is not far-fetched.The real question is what the game will be like. Will it be WoW in tights? Or will it be essentially City of Heroes 2? Personally, I'd hope for the latter, though copying WoW doesn't seem to have hurt LotRO too much. We'll find out more next week, but we can still speculate. And most importantly, if it turns out to be like an updated CoH, would you want to dust off your costume and explore a new city? Let me know in the comments - meanwhile, I'll be patching up my cape.Crazy Vincent posted:2/20/2008 3:06 pm
Voodoo Extreme has the scoop on the new game. Sounds like it will be like City of Heroes, only better in pretty much every aspect: broader character customization, a more developed storyline, real time combat(!), and more diverse environments that actually change based on the story! Check out the game features page for more info, but damn it sounds like they are fixing just about everything that I thought was wrong with CoH, and improving everything that CoH does right! Color me excited.
Erock posted:2/21/2008 12:34 pm
I don't know about this one, I like the way COH had more of a realistic look. Champions looks too comic book like, kind of like that Freedom Fighters game I accidentally bought. If COH goes under, they should open the game servers up to everyone to play with their heroes again, so all the time and money invest has not vanished.
Crazy Vincent posted:2/26/2008 1:23 am
I figured I'd post some more about this game, since it sounds so awesome. First, you should check out the teaser video if you haven't seen it yet. Frankly, it looks like they have a little work to do on the style, it doesn't really seem cohesive yet. It looks like they took City of Heroes and added an edge outline pixel shader. Graphics aren't everything, though, and the gameplay sounds solid.There is a great article that goes into some detail about many of the features that have been improved since CoH. Also, there is an interesting interview with Jack Emmert from last week's GDC. It is a postmortem of sorts where he reveals some of his feelings about City of Heroes/Villains and discusses some of their successes and shortcomings.There is actually an entire section dedicated to Champions Online over at Massively, so if you want to find out more, head over and check out some of the other articles.