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Thoughts on the Midnight Hour.

Stratics chatted with Matt Miller about The Midnight Hour and his expectations for it.

Happy First Birthday!

MMORPG.com has posted a Q & A with Lead Designer Matt Miller. City of Villains reaches it's first anniversary today...

Tuesday, October 31st marks the one year anniversary of City of Villains. Launched on Halloween of 2005, City of Villains finally answered one of the players’ top requests - to be the bad guy. To commemorate this first annual milestone, we conducted our own Q&A with Cryptic Lead Designer Matt Miller (Positron).

Q: What are some of the most valuable things that you have learned over the first year of City of Villains?

Get clicking to read the answer to this and many more questions. Do you enjoy City of Villains? Share your adventures with us in the Ten Ton Hammer Forums today!

Updates and New Products Discussed

GameSpot has posted an interview with Mathew Miller, Cryptic's Lead Designer. Find out what they were able to learn about the upcoming expansion and more!

GS: How crucial is it to bring in new customers to the games? Is it a viable business model to focus primarily on the existing core user base, or should online games of these sort constantly be performing outreach for new users?

MM: I think that new customers never hurt a game, and we are constantly doing free trials and the like to do just that. Converting a new customer to a loyal one is the real magic. I love it when players find a "home" in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, make new friends, join a supergroup, and make a ton of alternate characters.

Keep reading to find out more! Have you joined the growing community here at Ten Ton Hammer? Its easy, just take a moment to register and then head over to the forums and share your thoughts with us on this and all your favorite MMOs.

You would think that the job market for bad guys would be saturated in City of Villains.
OGaming has posted a City of Villains Interview featuring Jack Emmert.

"It’s good to be bad in City of Villains, the latest MMO masterpiece from developer Cryptic Studios and publishing partner NCSoft. After decades of begging, fans can now literally hop into the cape and tights of a twisted mutant, degenerate sorcerer or evil mastermind at will. "

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at OGaming.
Still yearning for more?

• More City of Villains News

Another Q&A from Cryptic's evil lair
Jack Emmert, "statesman" emeritus and creative director for Cryptic Studio's City of Villains, answers a cornucopia of questions (hey, it's November, right?) from MMORPG.com about the infant super-baddie MMO.

MMORPG.com: What sort of costume goodies are you planning to add for City of Villains in the future?


Jack Emmert:
We’re planning on adding trenchcoats to both games…eventually. Many other things to come in the future as well.

Put on your tights and fasten your utility belt, it's time for another City of Villains interview at MMORPG.com.
Related links:

• Other City of Villains news.

Jack Emmert's villainous plans revealed to the public at last!
It's launch day for Cryptic Studios' City of Villains the standalone dark-side sequel to superhero MMO City of Heroes. Producer Jack Emmert tells of the rather substantial differences between the two games, from the dingy feel of CoV starting zones to the design of a self-important villain as opposed to a group friendly hero. I wouldn't cram all this into a snippet unless it gave you a glimpse of thought cryptic has put into this game:

Comic book villains, however, are more selfish and individual-oriented. They don't always turn to their teammates for assistance. Instead, villains exploit one another to the greatest advantage. We scattered some new powers into the Archetypes and gave each villain a special inherent ability to set them apart from the heroes. Brutes are all about melee damage. A Brute's Fury ability means that the more damage he takes, the more damage he gives. But a Brute can't control aggro as well as a Tanker and he lacks the resistances of a Tanker. The Brute relies on offense rather than defense. So he doesn't fit into the "meat shield" MMP role. Instead, that's ably filled by the Mastermind. This Archetype summons minions to do his bidding. The Mastermind sends his lackeys into the fray to absorb the initial strike, then lets his teammates do the rest. A Corruptor, on the other hand, has some buffing and debuffing abilities, but he doesn't compare to the heroic Defenders. His key ability, Scourge, comes into play when victims are low on hit points. The lower the hit points of a target, the greater the chance a Corruptor can score a devastating blow. In combat, the Corruptor acts like the ultimate scavenger. He skirts the periphery, helping his teammates with buffs, and then swoops in once an opponent is injured. "

The rest of the City of Villains interview is available at Jive.
Related Links:

• Other City of Villains News
• City of Villains "Launch" Interview at GameSpot

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, especially if you own City of Heroes.
GameSpot has posted a City of Villains interview featuring Jack Emmert focusing on his final thoughts as the game ships.

" City of Villains, the stand-alone follow-up to last year's online role-playing game City of Heroes, will arrive in stores next week. And as its name suggests, this is a game in which you'll be able to create your own supervillain, whom you can adventure online with while living a life of crime, which is diametrically opposed to all the heroic deeds you did in City of Heroes. On the eve of the game's arrival, we caught up with Jack Emmert, creative director of City of Villains, for some final thoughts on the game. "

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at GameSpot.
Related Links:

• Other City of Villains News

Zeb tells all, details at, well, right now.
MMORPG.com has posted their final interview in the series with City of Villains designer David "Zeb" Cook. The interview touches on PvP and sidekicks. Adam West denied that there was any sexual tension between himself and Robin, before switching to this:

"Here in the final part Q&A with David "Zeb" Cook of Cryptic Studios, Neil Thompson wraps up the interview with a few more questions. City of Villains is due out on Halloween. " 

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at MMORPG.com.
Related Links:

• Other City of Villains News

Evil-doer tells all.
MMORPG has posted a City of Villains interview, featuring David "Zeb" Cook of Cryptic Studios. How long before some nitwit complains that their son or daughter robbed a bank because they played City of Villains?

" Here in the second of our three part Q&A with David "Zeb" Cook of Cryptic Studios, our writer Neil Thompson asks him five more questions. " 

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at MMORPG.
Related Links:

• Other City of Villains News

I just want to know if we'll see the insidious death devices with long timers that the hero invariably escapes from!
PvP zones in City of Villains, the stand-alone sequel to the comic bookish City of Heroes, will be handled in much the same way as in Dark Age of Camelot; you must be of a certain level to enter one of the 3 PvP zones. This and more goodies from "Zeb" Cook, producer of this very much anticipated year-ender.

"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.'"

What else will we see in City of Villains? It's time to click!

Questioning the bad guys.
MMORPG has posted a City of Villains interview with Zeb Cook of Cryptic Studios. We couldn't find any super-villains to talk to, so we just made this up:

" How will people who own both games be able to get missions in the new areas? For example, are there contacts in Paragon City that are only available to people with both games? " 

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at MMORPG.
Related Links:

• Other City of Villains News
• The Home For Cartoon Villains

Superhero Interrogation.
Boomtown has posted a City of Villains Interview featuring Jack Emmert. It's a good read, covering a lot of ground in a dozen or so questions. We were informed by Atomic Betty's agent that she would not be available to quell the villains in CoV. She is busy chasing a talking cat across the galaxy. They did proclaim the following:

" We smuggled some kryptonite into the food for lead villain at Cryptic Studios, Jack Emmert, and in his weakened state he revealed lots of information... "

You can read the entire City of Villains Interview at Boomtown.
Other Links You Might Enjoy:

• Other City of Villains News

Mean and nasty, coming to a screen near you.
GameSpy has posted a City of Villains interview featuring Zeb Cook. Magneto assured us that the following was true:

" Zeb Cook's been a lot of things during his years as a game designer. He was one of the TSR guys responsible for the Planescape setting, and when he moved to the video-game world, he worked on a number of high-profile projects like Fallout 2 and Blood & Magic. One thing he's not, though, and never has been, is a mean-spirited guy. That's why it was so strange to find him at this year's GenCon gaming convention chuckling evilly and waxing poetic on the virtues of being rotten. "

You can read the City of Villains Interview at GameSpy.

Maybe their tights are just too tight?
GameSpot has a City of Villains interview posted featuring Jack Emmert, the creative director on the game. The Rhino charged into our offices and smashed them to bits. In the rubble we found the following:

" It's good to be evil, or that's the lesson that NCsoft and Cryptic Studios hope that you'll learn later this year, when City of Villains launches. This follow-up to last year's online role-playing game City of Heroes will twist things around a bit. Instead of creating a unique and powerful superhero and saving the world from destruction, you'll create a dastardly supervillain who is looking to become rich, powerful, and infamous. You'll not only battle computer-controlled opponents, but you'll also get into scruffs with other villains, not to mention those meddling superheroes. City of Villains is currently undergoing its beta test for the November launch, so we caught up with Jack Emmert, City of Villains' creative director, to learn more about what you'll be able to do in the game. "

You can read the entire City of Villains interview at GameSpot.