Greetings, Champions! With the imminent release of the Power Armor review and The Invincible archetype, we’d like to give you a little backstory on what goes into a power review.

Power Armor is unique in Champions in that it can use multiple powers at once. Here we see Mini Gun, Micro Munitions, and the new Plasma Beam power being used in unison.

Why Power Armor?

Whenever we are deciding on what to do next, there are many factors. We always consider what the players have been asking for. Next, we have some brainstorming meetings and discuss what people want to do, or feel that we should do (player opinions are often brought up in this process as well). Finally, the current events of comic book culture can influence what we do as well. A certain movie MAY have gotten everyone here amped about working on Power Armor...

New Power: Plasma Beam. Plasma Beam cuts down everything in its path!

Where do we start?

One of the first things we do (after gathering community feedback) is sit down with everyone who will be involved in the review process (designers, artists, leads, programmers) and have a kick off meeting. I present my vision for the set, including any new powers or mechanic fixes I think it needs.

There is a lot of back and forth from everyone. Designers get really excited about new mechanics they want to implement. Artists get really excited about the FX they want to add. And the programmers and leads get to keep us all in check! But sometimes ideas are too awesome to be kept in check... The power “Fire All Weapons” exists because during our planning meeting one of our content designers shouted out “fire ALL the weapons!” And we knew it had to be done.

New Power: Fire All Weapons. Fire every weapon you've got! Unload everything you have... at any cost!

What’s next?

After we’ve decided on what new powers we’re doing, I start doing the full set review. I sit down with our balance spreadsheets and our in game editor and going over every line of every power. This serves a few purposes. First, it makes it easy to notice any glaring errors or discrepancies. Second, this is when we make our first pass at any buffs/nerfs we need to make.

This is also when we get the new powers in! They won’t have art yet but they will function mechanically. While I’m busy plugging away at numbers, the FX artist tasked to the review is off making pretty explosions! We’ll work fairly closely together to make sure everything lines up and everyone is happy with what we’re doing.

New Power: Tactical Missiles. Tactical Missiles fire from your wrist to obliterate your target!

Community Interaction

This is where it gets fun! Once we’re able to push that first build out to PTS (Public Test Shard) we get a ton of feedback. Players can provide tons of great info very quickly. For as long as the review process is in progress I try to be very active on the forums. Sometimes I will even hang out in an in-game chat channel so I can get immediate feedback while I’m working, or just chat with players to get a feel for how they think things are going.

Ideally we’ll get about a month of PTS time with 1 or 2 new builds a week. This allows us to iterate a lot on our planned changes and iron out any issues. We usually push the most changes on Thursday or Friday so we can have a nice full weekend of testing available (though we did miss one weekend due to hardware failure...) We work as close as we can with the community to fix and polish everything we can right up until the launch date. That date is fast approaching and I’m really excited to get everything we’ve built together out into the game!

- Matt “Akinos” Danuser