Champions Online/Hellgate: London Interview

MTV Multiplayer has kicked out an interview with Bill Roper, in which they discuss both Champions Online and Hellgate: London.

MTV Multiplayer: How’s the console development coming for (Champions Online)?

Bill Roper: We’ve got it running on Xbox [360]. But to a degree, it comes down more to the business side stuff. There’s no technology-based reasons we couldn’t be playing [PC] at the same time with Xbox right now. We definitely want to be on consoles. It’s easier to move to Xbox than PS3, but we would love to be on as many places as possible. I think that consoles are ripe for a good MMO, just in general. And then superheroes, the genre is just doing so well. .

It’s just going to be getting the license . Obviously, we [Cryptic Studios] were just acquired by Atari. So that changes all the publisher relationships and the distributing. So on our end, we’re just like, (Great, we’ll make it for whoever we get to make it for,) and hopefully that’s everybody.
(…)
MTV Multiplayer: Now that you’re at Cryptic, what was your biggest takeaway from the (Hellgate) experience?

Roper: Cryptic, fortunately, is in a different situation, especially since we’ve been acquired by Atari a company that is very much dedicated to shifting into an online focus and an online mentality, wanting to be in the MMO space and online space. And they’re looking at the expertise of Cryptic and what they’ve done before to be able to do that, which is great.

For me, what I’ve learned I really learned a lot from how to interact and not interact with the community, how to look at business models, just different ways of making sure you have enough support for the game before moving on. I don’t think I’m necessarily in all those areas teaching these guys [at Cryptic] anything; they’ve done it before. But it’s more of just refinement and iterating on those systems. And a lot of it too is working really closely with Atari and kind of educating them on that stuff because it’s a totally new area to them. But that’s one of the reasons why I think the acquisition makes so much sense. It’s where they want to be and it’s where we can help them get to.