City Of Heroes: Matt Miller Interview at Cryptic Studios

July 3, 2007 - Matt "Positron" Miller, Lead Designer for City of Heroes and City of Villains, has long been a respected spokesperson for Cryptic Studios's brand of original comic book action MMORPGs published under the NCsoft banner. We first met Matt when, at Game Developer's Conference in March 2006, he was enthusiastically demoing Issue 7's many innovations, from PhysX integration and destructible objects in CoV's "mayhem missions" to what Cryptic Studios calls "dynamic environments" - the ability for player actions to trigger fundamental zone changes for all players to see. Though many features have been added since that time, a tradeskill "invention system" and auction houses to name a few, the programming innovations brought about in Issue 7 paved the way for the game's lore to come full circle in Cryptic's latest CoV / CoH project - Issue 10: Invasion.

During a recent trip to northern California, I was invited to drop by Cryptic Studios for a site visit and tour through the new facility. In February, Cryptic moved into this larger building which had the interesting distinction of formerly housing the first Netflix distribution center. As Matt and other members of the City of Heroes / City of Villains development and support teams filed into the lunch room for a quick meet and greet session, I knew something was different about this crew. This was their down time, yet everyone was talking about different aspects of the game.

To read the rest of the interview on Ten Ton Hammer, click here.