Tour: Prowling Cryptic Studios

Straight Outta Frisco
You may wonder what an Apple Store is doing in the Silicon Valley town of Los Gatos (pop 28000). There it is bold as brass, just down the road from Pizza My Heart and the local watering hole, Carrynations. If you need further direction, it’s a couple of blocks over from the facing dealerships that sell Bugatti Veyrons and Rolls Royce convertibles (as well as comparatively tame Lamborghinis and Lotus rides). Just be sure to dodge the handy pet dishes of water left out for thirsty canines.

House prices around here are high. Locals guesstimate a three bedder can set you back around $SU1.5 million, which makes it kinda weird-yet-appropriate to find Cryptic Studios nestled in an industrial park in the town’s outskirts. After all, this place is kind of isolated, and living expenses would not be cheap. Then again, the chance to work with some of the best MMO talent the Western world has to offer is a strong draw. And that’s why we’re here – to check out Champions Online, the cross-platform massively multiplayer game the Cryptic team are developing.

The CEO sets the scene
After a few introductions are made Cryptic’s CEO, John Needham comes out to talk shop. Unlike the other guys (and they’re all guys) we’ll meet, Needham is the least “Cryptic”. He’s all business, and even though he’s dressed down, he’s decidedly Zegna to the director’s Abercrombie & Fitch.

That’s not to say Needham is some slick operator who doesn’t know his MMO. He came to Cryptic from Sony Online Entertainment and is a highly respected industry figure. He tells us Cryptic are moving to a full-service model – not just making the game. The breakdown between Cryptic and 2K is (in some ways) similar to how Blizzard interacted with Vivendi. 2K handles distribution and marketing, Cryptic develop and maintain the game, and also handle customer service and billing. The company’s track record with City of Heroes and City of Villains is something we will hear cited frequently by Cryptic’s senior team an with good reason – it’s obvious they’ve taken a lot of lessons from there and applied them to Champions Online.

Needham spends time talking about the broadening the platform for MMOs. Console focus is one of the company’s core values and beliefs, he states, backing that up later by stating Champions is the first MMO natively developed for consoles.

Oh one more thing: he also mentions Champions Online is under a year from launch. Worth noting, that.

On with the show
One of the directors took the assembled throng on a rapid tour of the Cryptic facility. The surrounds are not up there with the idealised cultural melange of say High Moon Studios in San Diego, but there’s a few cues that this is not just another generic office environment.

For starters, there’s the cubicle system. An ornate array of sliding panels and cubbyholes links pods together. The “walls” of the cubicle helpfully accept whiteboard marker, so the assorted designers, coders and storytellers have no excuse not to communicate as well as potentially deface their work area. It’s a pretty cool way of moulding an office aesthetic away from a production line mentality and towards the grown-up kid’s bedroom look that seems to find favour with many developers.

There’s still plenty of focus going on. A big pair of signs list BUGS FOUND and BUGS ZAPPED (the score was 3421 to 2734 respectively) and a lengthy project timetable outlines key milestones, just to remind workers to keep their eye on the prize.

A quick swing by the operations and executive support area reveals a Fallout 3 poster (/cheer) and more heads down on the task at hand. We’re also given some insight into how Cryptic develops new concepts. If someone in the company has a bright idea – the past tools and codebase the company has developed and the talent on site allow them to throw a few bodies at the idea and flesh out some code to get the concept up and running. The team then decides if it’s a goer or not.

Finally, we’re told Cryptic are currently working on two secret projects. One I’d hazard a guess at being is the Star Trek MMO, which Cryptic has not confirmed (yet) but loads of reports on the internet indicate it’s a done deal. The second? Anyone’s guess.