Massively^™

It's a pretty simple form of reasoning that seems to tie into the death of Marvel Universe Online. Champions -- the tabletop iteration -- was the first pen and paper RPG to eschew the dice-roll-stats for a point-based system instead. Champions also gave players near-total customization of their powers and for a company who's previous game's biggest player request was, "Custom powers please, please, please!?" This seems like a wise and calculated choice for everyone involved.

This isn't everything that seems to have drawn Jack Emmert and his team at Cryptic to the game. Nostalgia factor aside, it sounds like the goal is to create a massively comic book game that couldn't be done while under the constraints of a license like DC or Marvel.

A super-flexible point-based character creation system that will allow players to customize costume appearance, power appearance and to an extent the powers themselves. Players being able to name, power-pick and design their very own arch-nemesis. A world in which cities can be destroyed, heroes and villains are born and actually die as time moves forward. That's something that we just don't see being facilitated in a licensed superhero MMORPG where powers (and pretty much everything else) need to emulate the popularized characters.