Interviews

Cryptic’s ‘Zeb’ Cook chats about the PvP, the balance between good and evil and the excitement surrounding City of Villains
By Michael Lafferty

"We had to make it fun, first and foremost, to make it a really viable product" 

“There is no law!” …

Well, there sort of is a law, but it is the law of Lord Recluse, the most powerful overlord of the villains that are at the core of the new NCsoft/Cryptic Studios title, City of Villains. The title is a stand-alone massively multiplayer game, in essence, but even so, CoV overlaps with its famed counterpart City of Heroes in numerous places.

Due to release on October 31, City of Villains offers MMO gamers the opportunity to jump into the role of a villain, to rob banks, steal powerful artifacts, create supergroup lairs and indulge in player-versus-player combat with not only other villains and villainous groups, but with hero groups from City of Heroes as well. 

NCsoft held a launch party for the title on the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco bay, and several of the Cryptic masterminds … err, development team members were on hand – including senior staff designer David “Zeb” Cook, who served as design manager on CoV.

In the eerie and almost horrific isolation ward off the cell block infirmary, GameZone.com caught up with Zeb to chat about the upcoming title.

Question: When you went to create City of Villains, you were really treading ground in the MMO genre that had not been touched on before. What did you feel you absolutely had to do to make this a viable product?

Zeb: “We had to make it fun, first and foremost, to make it a really viable product. After that, specifically with City of Villains, you had to make people feel like they are a villain but at the same you don’t want it to be this random chaotic psycho-killers-in-the-street kind of thing. We really wanted to make them feel more like a comic book super villain. That was really a big aspect of it.  

“Part of it was giving them more feeling that they were controlling their own destiny. A lot of times – in City of Heroes that is very easy, you’re a hero. People yell for help and you show up and solve the problem. With the villain, it’s a little bit more like ‘I want to get involved in things, I want to create problems.’ So we tried to figure out ways to make that happen a little more.”

Q: There must have been fine line between creating a character that was evil, and one that was too evil. 

Zeb: “There is always a trick to balancing that – what’s pushing the envelope too far. Unfortunately we had a couple of things – 1. It had to work to work with City of Heroes, obviously, and you needed to have the same game rating as City of Heroes. So that sort of defined some of it. And I came from working Dragons and Dragons, with TSR, roleplaying games for like years and so doing that kind of stuff is kind of like second nature to me anyways. ‘Yeah, you can do that, but that is right out’ kind of stuff. Plus you factor in the goal that you want to be a comic book villain and you look at what comic book villains do, and they are not mugging little old ladies on the street corners, that’s not what the players really want. So you want to give them the bigger schemes. They want to take on the Statesman, so we wanted to give them that opportunity.”

Q: I believe that when you talk about heroes, the status level of the hero is proportionate to the level of his or her adversaries.  That had to apply to villains as well.

Zeb: “And we use that a little bit and play on that in some ways. A lot of things like your cape mission, you have to earn your cape as heroes. Well, why do villains have to earn their cape? It’s all about ‘hey, look who I took down,’ so we are using that sort of thing. And we know our players want to go up against those named heroes we have in City of Villains, so we are making sure they get those opportunities. That’s really what it is all about – you want bragging rights.”

Q: The new draw-down menus, enabling players to preview costuming changes before actually wearing it, is a great idea. What inspired that?

Zeb: “People were spending a lot of time in character creation and when you have a list of 50 objects … we are always looking for little ways to make people’s game easier, more fun, more entertaining. If we can do those, yeah, we want to do those. It was just one of those things that the artists looked at, and the interface designers looked at and ‘hey, we can do this,’ and we had a little time, it suddenly appeared in.”

Q: Obviously, with CoV being a stand-alone product, not everything is going to bleed over into CoH… 

Zeb: “There are things we wanted to make available to everybody – the bases, obviously the PvP zones are shared between the two. But one that everyone always wants to know about – all these new costume options we are giving to villains, ‘ooh, will I get those for my hero character?’ No, you are not going to because we want villains to look and feel like villains. And we want heroes to look and feel like heroes and we want them to look different. And so there are separate sets of costume pieces that don’t cross over.”

Q: When it comes to the PvP zones …

Zeb: “We’ve got three PvP zones at launch and they are essentially regular zones; they are not quite as big because you want to concentrate the action down a little more, but in each one there is a completely different kind of gameplay that is going on. So, for Siren’s Call, for example, in that one is it a pure hero-versus-villain one, all the villains are working together, all the heroes are working together and it’s a street war. There are spawns, there are mobs that are in there, and your gameplay is to go down and actually get involved with the street battles and help your side win. And if you have to do that by taking on another player – good.” 

Q: What will prohibit an upper-level hero from going into one of these zones and just beating up on the lower-level villains? 

Zeb: “We were very worried about that. One of the things we do is in all of the zones, they each have a bottom level, first off, so you can’t enter the zone until you are a certain level. So you will have at least a certain base-level in powers. And then what we do, once people are in the level, and it’s partially to deal with the high level versus the low level but it is also to deal with the broad range of characters versus the mobs that are in there, is that we sidekick and exemplar people all to the same level. So if you go into Siren’s Call, you are going to be level 30, you are going to be functioning as a level 30 character. If you are below level 30, you will be brought up to that level; you are obviously not going to have all the powers. There are still going to be obvious advantages for the higher-level guy, but it’s going to be a much more even thing. And the other thing people really have to understand about PvP, and in a game like City of Heroes and City of Villains, is you want to find yourself a good team to go with." 

Q: From the feedback you have received, are people really excited about the whole idea and structure of City of Villains?

Zeb: “We are getting a lot of excitement. The beta testers, they are in there, they are playing it, they are reporting bugs, they are helping us make it better, but there is a lot of excitement and interest in it too. They are having a good time. The forums of the people who are not in the beta test, they want to know everything now, they are dying to see the game. There is a lot of excitement and I’m excited about it, too. It’s really great to be working on a triple-A title.”  



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City of Villains (PC)