No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

[Dr. Confoundo]

I went down to the Comic Con yesterday, and I was surprised that I didn't see a booth for the upcoming Champions Online game. There was a presence there for City of Heroes, and a big set-up for the DC Online game (which seems fun but light), but unless I missed it, there wasn't any Champions action going on. For a game that supposed to come out fairly soon, I was surprised to not see it there.

 

Were there any announcements on the main Cryptic boards as to why there would be no PR there?

[Steve Long]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Not that I'm aware of. As it stands Atari/Cryptic has just a small GenCon presence (that we sort of had to goose them into ), and no booth at PAX at all (just advertising and a big party).

 

If I had to guess, I'd say it had something to do with their game launching in a month and every single person being on serious "crunch time" to get everything done. But I haven't spoken with anyone at Atari about it so I dunno.

[Dr. Confoundo]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Seems like an odd choice to not showcase what will hopefully be the next big superhero game at the biggest comic con in the world, along with the dozens of other big video games of the near future that were already there. DC Online doesn't even have a release date yet, but they still had demos to show off.

 

Hopefully that doesn't translate into smaller sales.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

They seem to be taking a very low-hype approach to the marketing of the game. I hope not too low.

[GamePhil]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

They seem to be taking a very low-hype approach to the marketing of the game. I hope not too low.

 

I don't know about low-hype, the stairway at last years GenCon with the painting of Defender and Dr. Destroyer was pretty impressive.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Did the stairway make any grandiose claims about gameplay?

[ghost-angel]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Did the stairway make any grandiose claims about gameplay?

 

No, but the working demo booth let you judge gameplay for yourself.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Still, low hype campaign for an MMO. Extremely low hype.

[GamePhil]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Much as I would like an even playing field, not everyone can put the hype that a company like Blizzard or DC can. All things considered, they seemed to do pretty well.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Yeah. You're not following me. I'm not talking about Blizzard or DC here. I'm talking average for the industry. You don't play many MMOs or follow their development, do you?

 

Cryptic is taking a very low key approach compared to most MMOs, or heck, most video games. The good thing about this is that they aren't making promises they can't keep for the most part. That means they won't be dinged for failing to live up to the hype.

 

The bad part is, there are still a LOT of people who don't see how they've differentiated CO from CoH or WoW. They have a lot of interesting innovations in game, and they're keeping a lot of the great innovations from CoH, but they may not be doing enough to make people aware of them. By this stage in a game's development, there's usually a lot more info available on how the game plays.

 

All I'm saying is that they're playing it a little close to the chest. I expect a pretty huge info dump coming up as release nears. For example, one of the community managers is putting out detailed info on the power sets soon, just having gotten documentation from the devs.

 

Anyway, it's not a criticism of their approach, per se. I'm curious to see how the low-hype promotion works vs. the norm.

[GamePhil]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

Yeah. You're not following me. I'm not talking about Blizzard or DC here. I'm talking average for the industry. You don't play many MMOs or follow their development, do you?

 

And, with that comment and the assumption involved, I shall bow out of any continued conversation on the subject with you. The assumption that a different conclusion must mean ignorance is, for me, much like Godwin's law, so this thread for me is now over. Have fun.

[Pattern Ghost]

Re: No presence at San Diego Comic Con?

 

I was asking if you were ignorant, not saying you were.

 

Then again, if you can't support your arguments, have a nice day.

 

Edit:

 

And you know, I probably should have apologized for the poor choice of words, and corrected it to "Maybe I was being unclear..." which is more along the lines that I meant, but your condescending tone doesn't rate an apology.