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No-one without a red name on these boards knows what that contract contained. I suspect - given that NCsoft was the big partner to the indie Cryptic - that it would have favoured NCsoft. Emmert may have been the face of CoH, but there were also NCsoft producers in senior positions involved with development (Brian Clayton?). NCsoft collects the money and is likely (I don't know for sure) to have a large influence over the development budget. There would be some sort of revenue-per-player deal that probably covered salaries, but Cryptic would need to go to NCsoft and ask for money for future development.

According to Emmert, CoV brought in only 60k new subscribers. At the time - and this is critical - NCsoft was pouring a lot of money into Tabula Rasa and weren't hesitant in cutting down any title that wasn't making the desired money. CoH/V got caught up in that trap. TR was going to be the 1m+ subs title for NCsoft, so CoH/V's almost 200k players were small beans in comparison.

Cryptic had (or Paragon Studios, for that matter) little say over what NCsoft does. For instance, I don't think they wanted NCsoft Europe shut down and their European personnel let go, but that happened anyway.

The intricacies of MS and Cryptic is also a grey area, but I understand that MS eventually wanted a guarantee that ChampO would sell over 100k units on the Xbox 360 plus 30% of the sub fee in royalties. So that was the end of trying to develop a MMO for the PC and Xbox 360 platform and a lot of wasted development time.

All that said, Cryptic now isn't the Cryptic that used to be. I understand around 30% of Cryptic's current full-time employees worked on CoH/V at one time or another, but there has also been significant growth (around 200 full-time employees now) and changes. For instance, Micheal Lewis, one of the Cryptic founders (along with Dakan and Emmert) is no longer the President - he's ceded to current CEO John Needham. It's split up into an 'engine' team (who work on developing the Cryptic Engine and toolsets) and then separate teams for each game, plus those working on projects for Atari.

Thank you - I'll give that a shot.

Neither director is really known outside of certain film / geek circles. If anything, Wright has more geek cred for "Shaun of the Dead" than anything Vaughn's done before "Kick-***".

For the comics: both are obscure to the mainstream. Neither had the fan base to really see either film profit just on word of mouth from them. I'm comparing them as new comic IPs that were released within a reasonable time frame but had markedly different financial results (and I really see "SCvsW" as the easier sell to the market). I can't say for sure exactly what the differences were in success factors for each film, but their outcomes have been very different.

Did it though? CoH had a very smooth launch, but attracted a lot of criticism about lack of content, gaps in level content and lack of endgame (plus no PvP or crafting or rare loot). CoH's character creator was seen as its sole redeeming feature by a number of testers / early players.

The MMO industry has advanced very quickly in 6 years and WoW pretty much sets the baseline expectation. And the industry is now moving away from the sub model and towards F2P options, which further wrong-foots dev studios who thinks a player base is going to pay $15 a month just to log into the game.

My psych called me funny. But she wasn't laughing at the time.

You can make the same argument for "Kick-***", which has done much better business than "SPvsW". Nerd lead, niche comic, not-quite-mainstream director.

I can't point at all the factors that separate the two films, but I do think "Kick-***" had a much clearer marketing campaign, whereas "SPvsW" made the film look like an indie romcom. Plus "Kick-***" has much better foreign takings (although yes, it has been out longer).

Just looking at the film posters, "SPvsW" looks like a stoner comedy, where "Kick-***" looks like an action superhero film.

It's a fairly significant change to how characters are built and there will be consequences as a result of those changes.

We don't know what those consequences may be just yet. On a per character basis, inherent Fitness looks positive, but there may be some negative outcomes at the overall level. We'll have to wait and see what happens when inherent Fitness goes into public testing.

I'm not sure if Veng is the best example, but the query is sound: what is the impact going to be when players have to choose something to replace their current Fitness choices? What is the common wisdom going to be?

Veng obviously hasn't been that popular since players could no longer stack it, but perhaps the new thing becomes everyone choosing Leadership (Tactics, Assault, Defence) to provide stacked team buffs. Or maybe there is some APP / VPP power combo that offers the best solo and / or team utility. Now, there may actually be issues with players already reaching softcaps, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know they've reached such a cap - it'll become an issue of what powers are considered to be good 'fillers'.

This is going to be the interesting outcome - what is going to fill in these newly created gaps and how it impacts on how CoH/V plays. Although I think the aim was to speed up the pre-Stamina journey, the full impact is more likely to be seen in the lvl 40+ game when players have their final powers to choose from.

... and then there is I20, which could contain something as radical as "pick any powers you want!", plus Incarnate slots.

Because he's a stalker who invented the nuclear bomb to deal with his mother issues, I believe.

No, but the devs want GoRo to be a special experience that gets people excited about CoH/V. Since the powers were the pre-order bonus, they were no longer 'new' by the time GoRo came along.

The pre-order bonus could have been some emotes or costume pieces - it still would have served as an extra for those who paid their cash early but kept the attraction of new powersets.

... with grown men crying over how Lucas ruined their childhood?

The issue isn't price, it's value. Lvl 1 - 20 are the quickest lvls to get through in CoH/V and for some people are the least enjoyable due to the lack of travel powers until late and then issues relating to stamina / endurance and attack chains.

I feel I got much greater value from CoV than I can see in GoRo, despite paying twice as much for it. In fact, I even feel I got more value out of some of the Booster packs, which cost less than GoRo, because the features appealed to me more.

Not in the movie versions of them. The film version of "Spider-Man" has Peter Parker as a bit of a klutz who still gets the girls, "Iron Man" has Tony Stark as a charming jerk who is always right and the "X-Men" films generally ignores the world around the X-Men (outside of a deleted scene on "X-Men 2" where the X-kids go through a museum, iirc).