City of Heroes

[Local Hero]

Posted 21/06/2004
Source The Pulse

BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO

Rick Dakan didn't just work on the creation of the popular City of Heroes game, he's also one of the creators bringing the comic book to life each month. We spoke with him about the ins and outs of video game design and how the comics reflect life - or at least the life in the fictional world of Paragon City.

THE PULSE: For those who aren't really familiar with it yet, what is City of Heroes?
RICK DAKAN: City of Heroes is really two things. First and foremost, it’s a massively multiplayer online computer game from Cryptic Studios and NCSoft. Players create their own costume clad crime fighters and go smash evil in a massive city along with thousands of other simultaneous players. City of Heroes is also a monthly comic book set in the same fictional world that follows the stories of three relatively new heroes as they try and find their own way in this rather unusual world.

THE PULSE: How long did it take to get everything in place for this computer game to make its debut?
DAKAN: All told, from when we first started working on the game to when it shipped was just about exactly four years. And of course the work continues, as the game is constantly being updated and expanded.

THE PULSE: How did you come up with the designs for City of Heroes?
DAKAN: The original idea came to me when I was wracking my brains for something new and interesting to do in the online computer game market. Swords and Sorcery style fantasy setting have never held tremendous appeal for me and were already well represented anyway. I’ve always reacted more strongly to stories in settings I’m more familiar with. But at the same time I wanted a world where you could play someone cool and powerful and interesting. A superhero based setting became the obvious choice. It’s set in our world (sort of) but you can do ANYTHING, tell any kind of story and it fits with the genre.

THE PULSE: What look and feel were you going for with this game?
DAKAN: The one thing the was important to me and the rest of the design team was to take the setting pretty seriously. We didn’t want anything too campy or silly – the old Batman TV series was everything we didn’t want to do. I think superhero stories work best when they don’t wink and nod too much. The idea is already kinda crazy enough that if you start poking too much fun at it, it becomes difficult to tell gripping, effective stories or have interesting characters. At the same time, the team at Cryptic has also made sure it’s a fun, action packed experience – not some sort of dark, brooding vigilante simulation.

THE PULSE: How tough was it to make this game different from the typical games out there in look and design, but still hold something the typical gamer expects in its feel?
DAKAN: I think that the design team has done an extraordinary job finding the balance between comic book style action and adventure and distinctive gameplay while at the same time building on those elements that really work well in other online computer games (such as team play, character archetypes, shared experiences, etc…). I give them a ton of credit for this, as I think it was one of my weakest points when I was lead designer on the game. I’ve always been much more of a stories/background/characters person than a nuts and bolts design guy.

THE PULSE: How did you come up with the villains in City of Heroes? When figuring out how to populate the underworld of City of Heroes?
DAKAN: The villains at first, for the most part, just grew out of things I really dislike. I thought about stuff in the world or history that just really pisses me off and figured that they’d be fun to beat up on if I was a superhero. So hey, fascists. Everyone hates them (or should). Thus the 5th Column, our fascist criminal group that goes all the way back to World War II. Or greedy, manipulative corporations – the inspiration for Crey Industries. But then I wanted to add a bit of a twist – but in groups that had underlying principals that I agreed with, but who had taken them too, too far. So you have the radical environmentalist Devouring Earth or the anarchist/ Fight Club inspired Freak Show. There’s things about those groups I kinda dig, but they’re still bad guys. And of course there were the aliens – the Rikti, who have invaded and wrought tremendous havoc on the world in the months prior to the storyline’s beginning. They’re a bit of a mystery, and you’ll find out later what’s really going on with them.

THE PULSE: For the villains, did you just take a bunch of existing villains and alter them slightly for this new world or are they all all-new?
DAKAN: I always, always, always try to be as all-new as possible. Of course it’s impossible to be all-new. I’m always inspired by something. For instance, we wanted an asian-mafia style villain group, but I didn’t want to do just another Yakuza or ninja knock-off. Instead I based out group, the Tsoo, on Hmong culture (or my no doubt very flawed interpretation of it). Everything else about the group grew from that. I also try and make the backgrounds fairly deep. For example, the Circle of Thorns is our main evil magic-using group, but there’s more to them than meets the eye. They’re not at all what they seem when players first encounter them.

THE PULSE: How did you design the background for the world of the game?
DAKAN: One of my main inspirations was the history of comic books itself. If you read through the history of Paragon City (where the game and comic takes place) you’ll see that it mirrors what happened in comics. So first you have kind of low-power pulp style heroes fighting gangsters and what-not in the 20’s and 30’s. Then the heroes all go off to war to fight the Axis in World War II. Then, in the sixties it’s this kind of mad time of wild super villains and cool silver-age vibe. In the eighties things get dark and gritty with drug addicted heroes and hard core vigilantes. In the nineties things start to become more global and corporate interests get involved. And then the aliens invade. Of course all this was just a framework to build on the story elements and characters I wanted to set up for the modern-day game setting.

THE PULSE: What were some of the most tedious of details to getting this game created?
DAKAN: I’m sure I was lucky enough to miss out on all the most tedious stuff. I know the design team and the QA department spent a long, long time balancing and tuning the gameplay and I had no part of that. I can’t claim the badge of honor of having been involved in too much of the tedium. I give all that credit to the Cryptic design staff because most of it happened after I left.

THE PULSE: What were some of the other challenges you faced working on this?
DAKAN: Well, it really was a massive undertaking and, quite frankly we started out in over our heads and didn’t know it. But luckily we had the talent and time to grow into the project, to hire more people, and to generally get more professional about the whole thing. There were definitely growing pains, but it all seems to have worked out in the end, although I’m pretty sure the current Cryptic team is twice what we originally thought we could do the game with.

THE PULSE: How did you go from doing designs on the game to writing the upcoming comics series?
DAKAN: Well, I still do work on designs for the game, although in a much more limited capacity than I once did. When I left Cryptic it was with the understanding that I would still be doing a lot of writing and background design for them. At the same time, I started my own little publishing company called Blue King Studios. This was originally intended as a way for me to publish some comics ideas that I’d been working on in my spare time while at Cryptic. Then I pitched them the idea of doing a monthly comic based on the City of Heroes game. We’d done a one shot promotional comic before that I’d written, and I had really enjoyed that. NCSoft and Cryptic liked the idea and we went from there.

THE PULSE: Whose idea was it to give everyone playing the game a free subscription to the comic and does the comic subscription last for as long as someone is subscribed to the game or do you get more than one issue per monthly subscription? How's that work?
DAKAN: I don’t really remember whose idea that was exactly, but it came up very early in the discussions with NCSoft and we all agreed it was a great idea. Basically, everyone in the US who subscribes to the game gets a free, bonus subscription to the comic book. As long as they’re playing the game, the comic keeps coming to them each and every month. This gives us an opportunity to touch base with the players in a more physical and visceral way than purely over the Internet and lets us explore the world of City of Heroes in different ways from how they experience it online.

THE PULSE: How do you decide how many copies of the issues to print - how much of an overprint are you doing for the potential new game subscribers each week?
DAKAN: Well, we over-printed pretty heavily on issue 1, because we weren’t sure how many subscribers we’d have in that first month. Now that the game’s been going for a month, it’ll be a little easier to figure out how many to print each month. Basically, each issue ships twice a month, with the list of recipients being pulled from everyone who’s playing the game up to the day before the labels start getting printed and put on books for mailing out to customers. The second shipping is for those who’ve come in later in the month.

THE PULSE: How did you get Brandon McKinney on the art? What was the process like to get him working on this series?
DAKAN: Getting Brandon was one of the happiest accidents of this whole thing. I had pretty much put the deal together but didn’t have an artist. I remembered that a friend of mine I’d lost touch with knew some comics folk but I’d lost her contact info. I then remembered that she and Warren Ellis used to write back and forth, so I just e-mailed him. Keep in mind, he has no idea who I am. He e-mailed me right back, but didn’t have anything more recent than what I had. But I thought “Hey, Warren Ellis just answered my e-mail. Cool! I’ll bet he knows some artists.” So I e-mailed him back and told him what I was working on. Coincidentally, he’d just had an e-mail from Brandon (who did the art for Switchblade Honey) saying that he was looking for work after having just come off a concept art job at EA. The rest, as they say, is history.

THE PULSE: What's the first arc about?
DAKAN: The first two arcs are each only two issues long. I wanted to get going with some fast-paced stories to introduce the characters and the world. In the first arc, two of our three main characters, War Witch and Apex, are already working together as a team. They appeared in the promotional comic we did a couple of years ago as well. They met our third main character, Horus, when he comes accidentally crashing through their apartment window. This heroic trio goes on the hunt for a mysterious figure names Vahzilok who’s making zombies and stealing body parts from perfectly healthy people to help keep his rich clients alive forever. As this unfolds we get hints about the three heroes and their secrets, particularly Horus and War Witch, who’re both hiding things from their teammates.

THE PULSE: How did you decide which characters to include and what to focus on for the story?
DAKAN: As I mentioned, two of the three characters were ones I’d developed in the first promotional comic we did. I wasn’t a big fan of the third character I’d come up with for that story, so I replaced him with Horus, who’s much more interesting. I picked a villain that players in the game get to fight relatively early on in their game-playing experience so there’d be a sense of familiarity there for the readers. Of course the villains they fight in the second arc, the Carnival of Shadows, aren’t even in the game yet, but they’ll have been recently introduced by the time those issues come out.

THE PULSE: With over 150K people playing the game, it doesn't seem like you'll be lacking heroes. But just how will you decide which heroes from the game to include in the comic?
DAKAN: Well, I’m sure the process will evolve, but right now, I sort of leave that up to the NCSoft customer service folks to pick who gets to appear in the comic. How they make that decision is really up to them, except I provide them with certain basic criteria. For example, I might need a hero that uses magic or one that’s part of an established team to fit into the story in the right way.

THE PULSE: What does the "creator" of said "hero" get if its used in the game?
DAKAN: Whatever vicarious thrills come from seeing your character in print.

THE PULSE: What have been some of the best parts about writing this series?
DAKAN: It’s my first real comics job (it helps that I’m the boss and could give it to me), so that in and of itself is pretty exciting. I absolutely love writing it and I think it’s getting better with each issue as I get to know the characters better. The most fun is trying to come up with new spins on the old superhero themes. For example, right now we’re doing a story arc about Apex serving jury duty on an all-hero jury. That’s not something I’ve ever seen before, and it’s been a blast to write. I hope to keep doing stuff like that more and more.

THE PULSE: How has working with Brandon been?
DAKAN: Working with Brandon has been really great. We hit it right off, which is lucky. He’s very easy to work with and very professional. Plus he’s excited as all get out to be working on a superhero book. We’re having a blast, and I’m having a fun time coming up with new things to challenge him with each month.

THE PULSE: Who else is working on City of Heroes?
DAKAN: Moose Bauman, who’s worked on Green Lantern and Action Comics among other titles, is doing a bang-up jobs on colors for us. Neil Hendrick, who’s part of Blue King Studios, does the lettering and layout. He’s also writing a comic called Boy and Robot that we’re going to publish later this year.

THE PULSE: Why should people check this out?
DAKAN: People should check out the game because, quite frankly, it rocks. There’s nothing like it out there. I’ve never enjoyed MMORPG’s like Everquest, but I love playing City of Heroes. As for the comic, they should check it out because it too is not quite like much else out there. We’re telling a, hopefully, unique kind of superhero story in a relatively new and unique setting. The goal has always been to make a comic book that appeals just on its own merits, and I think we’re doing that. So hey, check it out!

THE PULSE: What other projects are you working on?
DAKAN: Well, I mentioned Boy and Robot that Neil’s working on with a really talented local artist named Austin McKinnley. I’m also workings, slowly but surely, on a comic called State of Fear with another local artist, Augi Schmitz. Finally, we’re doing a full text comic-book adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which we’ll hopefully be ready for release by early next year.