The systems of battle in Champions Online

by Eliot Lefebvre Nov 10th 2009 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Super-hero, Game mechanics, Endgame, Champions Online

We've been getting a generous look under the hood of Champions Online courtesy of designer Brian Urbanek, with the second part of his system-focused developer diary now available. The first part covered the progression and improvement of a player's heroes, while this diary focuses on the mechanics of that ever-present diversion in almost every game -- combat. As one can imagine, with a game whose systems are based on a tabletop roleplaying game dating back more than twenty years, there are a lot of numbers and expressions to be thrown around.

Urbanek explains, in detail, how the team set up values for stats and durability with some baseline assumptions. They knew what they could expect for an "average" player to do in terms of damage-per-second at high levels, and they had some idea of how long they wanted each fight to last (the time cited is twenty seconds). From there, the diary goes into the balancing and scaling factors needed to ensure that players and enemies both are dealing reasonable damage and surviving for the preferrable amount of time. If you like numbers and systems, or just a clearer picture of how Champions Online works, this diary should be perfect for you, with promises of still more to come down the pipeline.

Tags: bill-urbanek, champions-online, co, combat, cryptic, cryptic-studios, developer-diary, endgame, game-mechanics, mathematics

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ToyChristopher said on 11:54AM 11-10-2009

Reading this dev diary had me checking multiple times to see if it was really about champions online.

Joiry said on 1:13PM 11-10-2009

I'm all for devs sitting down to do some serious math on how their game systems work. Too often the numbers seem to be the result of back of the envelope guess-timations.

But, this system strikes me as ending up as an over-designed system, one that is too brittle unless you design your character pretty much into their margins. Even tho there's a lot of fudge factors (or perhaps because?), the end results seem a very specific design your build has to fit into.

Psychotic Storm said on 6:08PM 11-10-2009

Bingo and that is what the dreaded 1/9 patch did, it killed the weak but until then survivable builds.

You can have a funny and background based character in CO, but you have to work your stats for it.

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