City of Heroes: Interview with War Witch

Holy Cow...Start Up The Super Car!

Once again, this hero had to dust off his spandex suit and take to the skies...erm I meant pack his gear up and pretend he was a reporter. The sun was shining when the family and I headed to Brighton. Ever since my editor asked me to go to the event I was excited. Having played the game and followed it from a journalistic perspective for sometime there was a definite buzz in the car which didn't come from any of my child's toys!

Secret Plans

It is not often in the UK that an MMORPG company organises a player event such as the one Ncsoft and Cryptic Studios organised on Saturday. The event coincided with the launch of their Good vs Evil Expansion Pack, which will be available soon on PlayNC Europe, this pack combines City of Heroes (CoH) and City of Villains (CoV) with an extra month of play and some fun toys. They were also celebrating the forthcoming patch Issue 8. If all this wasn't enough they re-activated all old European CoH/CoV accounts for the weekend.

Location Location Location

The venue for the event was Gamer Heaven in Brighton, which is best described as a hardcore net café with very comfortable executive chairs for each PC. Players of all ages who booked a ticket through the City of Heroes forums converged on this venue, with the hope of being either heroic or villainous. Evolution radio were also there, they broadcast to players of the game and I had an encounter with their DJ’s. Having threatened them with my camera they drew theirs with equal ability!

The Super Secret Guest

Unknown to the players, the European division flew in Melissa Bianco, she works for Cryptic Studios as a designer and her alias is War Witch. She is one of the big guns from the studio and a celebrity amongst the players. The atmosphere at the event was fun and somewhat hardcore, avid fans of the game huddled around War Witch to express their opinions and have a good chat! After her rounds and introductions we eventually sat down together on a comfortable leather couch and the interview began. Please note this interview is fairly in-depth, if you would like to find out more about the game please visit their official website.

Have you been to Europe before? What do you think of England so far?

I have been to England twice actually, I’ve been to London twice, I’ve been to Amsterdam once and I love it here. I actually wanted to come out for the fanfare last year but I didn’t have my passport ready so I couldn’t come. So when NCsoft called me to come out this year, I was "sign me up I’m there" cause I love England.

How important is the European community feedback when you are sitting at your desk designing?

Everybody’s feedback is important, I mean you can’t obviously make everybody happy all of the time but I do show up on the boards as you guys have noticed. Although I may not post as often as I’d like to I do like to get your feedback. European feedback is very similar to American feedback because everybody has kind of the same game play experience and the same issues that they have to deal with, so it is very important to me.

How important are events like today to people like you?

This is my very first fanfare the only other event I have been to is E3, which is a different kind of a situation. This is very important to me, its very fun for me. It’s so great to see all of the faces behind the names on the boards or the players because when your building a game all your kind of doing is well for me in particular I’m sitting in my cube in an editor populating a zone or writing dialog, coming up with a design document on something and you really do not get the actual impact of what you are doing until you actually meet somebody who plays your game.

Obviously I’m biased towards the game because I built it everyday but when you actually meet people who play the game there going to love stuff and there going to hate stuff and that’s just the way that it goes. When you actually get to meet people face to face this is when really you get to see who pays your salary so there you go.

How much involvement did you have with the creation of War Witch? If you had your time again would you choose a villain?

I had no input on the creation of War Witch actually War Witch was designed by one of our designers Rick Dakan. The way I discovered War Witch was looking through issue 1 of the comic book and I thought hey Green Hair she’s kinda got attitude I love her so can I be her please. They said okay and I said “whoo” I’m War Witch. So I didn’t create her I wish I had. Would have I chosen a villain? I think I could have created a really cool villain. But ultimately I would go for the hero just because I can be kind of villainous as War Witch because she’s kind of snippy so I get the best of both worlds.

What has been your hardest moment in CoH/CoV as a player?

As a player…probably ooo… I’m a very casual gamer I’m really not a hardcore gamer. I love to do thinks like. I mean I designed the Sewer trial and the Eden trial but I find that I’m a very impatient person and so actually getting together organising something, spending the time to get there, figuring out what your going to do and then actually spending several hours doing something like a Task Force. I can’t do it, I can’t.

Do you and your husband play together? And what do you play as?

Absolutely. Now granted if I’m on the computer all day at work I am not going to be playing quite as much in the evening. Whenever we play together I usually play a healing defender an empathy defender. We have computers that sit right next to each other so we can pretty much just yell at each other back and forth while we are playing.

What are your favourite power sets?

Empathy and Dark Blast.

What AT (ArcheType) are you thinking of playing next?

You know it’s so funny because I always go to the same one I always go defender for heroes or I go for a brute in villains. I love either being the helper class or I love being the one that just gets to beat the snot out of everything.

You joined Cryptic in 2002. Has the game developed on the design side into what you hoped it would be 4 years on?

Yes, definitely. We have grown as a studio since 2002 when I first got there, there were maybe twenty two of us and now there must be like seventy plus people there now. When we originally started when I came on board it was oh my gosh we have to get this game out get to work and a lot of it was flying by the seat of your pants.

As we have progressed a lot of it is all about documentation writing out what you want to do putting it through the channels, figuring out is this going to work is it not going to work getting all the other teams involved and following through on all areas. Its not like we weren’t organised before but everything is very detailed now.

What has been your proudest achievement that you were involved in with City of Heroes/Villians pre-issue 8 and with issue 8 as a designer?

Well lets see pre-issue 8 it had to be Striga. Striga is my favourite zone and I populate a lot of the city of heroes zones so I’m proud of all of that. But Striga was the zone when Archon Vos came on board Thomas Vos, we just started a whole different way of building a zone. We said you know what missions by neighbourhood so you’re not being sent to the other end of the zone. We got patrol technology so you have the council patrolling on the ground you had the sky raiders flying in the air. I got a lot of new animations for spawns so I have a lot of creativity in that zone that I really didn’t have the time for in the previous zones. We really had a lot of time for that one so that’s one of my favourite zones mostly because of just the standard that set with that one. And then anything going forward it was just a whole different way of putting it together.

In Issue 8 obviously I’m very happy with Faultline, Faultline was a beautiful zone but it was very difficult to play in. You know the deep crevices and you started in that zone at level 11 at best if you were a flyer you had hover so we actually bumped the level of that to 15 to 25 so we could get people with better travel powers. We basically, (I could go on and on about this) tried to make it a lot more travel friendly. Obviously it’s a very vertical and creviced zone but we actually filled in a lot of those crevices the zone was flooded there’s a story line with the flooding of fault line and we put in elevators like in Grandville except there construction elevators. I think there are 12 of them in the zone plus a lot of cat walks to get over those crevices. So it's a lot more travel friendly than it used to be and we added villain groups to it. We put in missions we switched it from a trial zone which is just large groups of villains to a city zone so now you’ve got an underpass to get there. There’s a hospital there now, stores, missions there obviously and even an entrance to pocket D.

What we also did was we opened up the dam. You could never get to the dam you’d go I can see the dam but you could never get in there. So we have opened it up and made it a hazard area so it’s a little tougher than the rest of the zone but it’s really cool. We also brought in a whole bunch of new villains. You’ll see Arachnos in there you find out Arachnos has been there for a little while and they have been sifting through the wreckage underneath fault line looking for technology that lord recluse can use.

So we also brought in the PPD, so if your going to bring in the PPD you have to have a donut shop so there is a donut shop with a big donut on top of it and longbow are there too. They have a small presence there but basically your trying to have the heroes patrol the area, I wanted to keep their presence small but enough to add a lot atmosphere to the zone.

Freakshow are there now, the Lost have made their way in and their presence is very significant. We still have the clock work and Vazihlok are still there but I think that you’ll find that it’s a lot more dynamic. I got to write a dialogue for it so you’ll see my signature dialogue in there. So there’s a lot more variety going you don’t just have a big clump of guys standing there waiting to beat the snot out of you so solo’ers can play solo’ers and small groups.

Sorry I really wandered on.

Prior to the launch of issue 8 I noticed in another interview that Jack Emmert said he was looking forward to Issue 9 could you expand on why the team are so excited?

Issue 9, Positron did a letter on the boards and basically Issue 9 is about inventions. That’s going to be a big thing for us. I’m looking forward to that too.

Can you expand on how inventions will affect the game what are you looking at? Will it be pretty much like temporary powers now?

You can create costume pieces and temporary powers really the best one to talk to would be positron, he’s spear heading that whole project. My involvement in inventions is basically having a place to sell so things. So that’s my end of the deal but he’d be the one to talk to more about that.

One of the themes of issue 8 seems to be rewarding long-term players with various funky upgrades for example wings? How are you planning to expand the content for newer players?

That’s a good question. The thing with veteran rewards is that it is basically meant as a thank you, so if you have put your time in it’s a thank you. With new players what I did was I went back to some of the old zones that we had already done and I went back to the first 5 zones and kind of gave them a face-lift. When we first created City of Heroes we had maybe twenty animations to play with and so it’s like “oh another purse snatching oh another purse snatching”. So I went back in there and I said lets give this more atmosphere, I’m really big on the atmosphere. It’s not just what you fight but what is going on around you. A lot of the stuff that I did was very functional so things like pulling spawns away from mission doors, adding new encounters that were kind of unique and interesting. Just to give it a big WOW factor so when you first lit up the game you go “oh wow” this is really cool look what they are doing and then hopefully that will engage people to keep playing and check out all the other stuff that they could see.

When I played City of Heroes as my Scrapper I was one of those players who avoided the fault line. Was it a priority to re-vamp this zone and can you name others that are on your hit-list?

A small giggle You know what we did some data mining and said what are the zones that aren’t getting played. Faultline was a big one and since Faultline is right in the 11-20 range lets take a look at this one and so we said lets make it more functional lets make it more interesting and lets make it more fun.

Like I said visually it is a great looking zone but playing it was a little bit trickier because of all the deep crevices and all the large groups, players just really seemed to migrate to city zones so that’s why I did that. As for are we going to re-tool other zones, yes!

Can you expand on which?

No but I’m going to allude to it, it’s got a very important role in advancing a story line. Nice and Cryptic for you, hey guess where I work!

I have noticed "special" events like this weekend’s re-activation and previously "double xp". Is there anything on the design side being developed or in issue 8 which you feel would attract more subscribers?

Lets see, Issue 8 we have the police band missions, which are kind of like the hero version of the newspaper missions the broker missions and obviously fault line. We have the safeguard missions which are I don’t want to say hero equivalent of mayhem missions which were all about destruction and evil whereas the safe guard missions are all about oh stop the villains from destroying paragon city property or stop them from robbing a bank. So it’s a very kind of a OOO tense way to keep the villains from getting away with what they want to get away with, to stop them from knocking over the bank or whatever. I think those will be interesting too those should be fun and of course they span the level ranges so right from the beginning you can play them and I think that will be pretty cool.

The Extras

There was so much going on at the venue sometimes it was hard to keep track. There was a level 1 race across dangerous grounds and the first player to reach the goal received their choice of 3 prizes. The hero prize included the Good Vs Evil pack, Lineage 2 and Guild Wars. They then ran a similar race for the villains. There was a charity auction and players could bid on all sorts of crazy items including a very special Korean package of the game! There was a fair bit of laughter at the event and a good time was being had by all.

The Wrap Up

This publication may not do justice as to how passionate, enthusiastic and caring Melissa was of her game and if she was representative of a Cryptic designer then I believe some fantastic things are to come in City of Heroes and Villains. After the interview we chatted for a small while and shortly after that I left the event. I’d like to thank the NCsoft team for their hospitality and Melissa Bianco. To the left is a rare picture of Bridger demonstrating the hula-hula dance or is he just reaching over handing out a prize, I'll let you decide.

Any gamer would thoroughly enjoy City of Heroes/Villains and I highly recommend the new Good Vs Evil pack. Sometimes players forget that MMORPGs are supposed to be fun. I know first hand that this game has fun by the bucket load and with designers like Melissa behind the wheel things will only become more exciting.