The Champions Online team has given us two great holiday presents. The first is the newest Ask Cryptic installment, where they discuss secret identities, character creation, audio, attacks, stances, Nemesis personalities and more. The most interesting question focuses on the creation of your Nemesis. After all, every good hero needs a villain. You can read the full Q&A after the jump.

There are a lot of areas where you influence your Nemesis. You choose his powerset, his costume, what type of minions he has and then the powersets that they use. For example, you could choose alien minions with darkness powers serving a Nemesis who has lightning powers. You do get to choose his personality: maniacal, savage, or mastermind are some of the current options.

The team has also posted its first video podcast, entitles "Day as a Dev." Watch it to find out exactly what the production team does on Champions Online. Or, as they put it, "In this video you get to meet the movers and shakers behind the games you love, find out how they work, what they care about, and how a game is born!"

In the past it was mentioned that we would have animated tails as costume pieces. Now, a staple of many strong tailed characters has been to use that tail as a melee weapon. As an obvious enthusiast of tailed critters, will there be a way to get tail based attacks into the basic powers such as a might based tail strike? What about other obscure melee attacks? IE: Biting, pinching (yes, pinching) 'cheap shots,' eye jabs, slapping, headbutts? (BronzeRaptor)

Currently all costume pieces are aesthetic parts of the costume, because we want players to visualize the kinds of characters they want – claws, fins, capes, any type of hero aspect, etc. In this case the tails are more of a costume part and not part of the core character morphology. That’s not to say we’re never going to have it. We’d love to put in these types of things, but it really depends on available technology. So, you might see them in the future sometime, but not right now.

Can we change the size or the age of the character by changing the costume? (I would love it if I could start with a young-like char and then change costume at lvl 20 and my kid becomes a man, like the first Robin/Dick Grayson that becomes Nightwing with more experience). (ThunderCAP)

You can do all that in character creation. There are morphologies for size changing and face types. When you make a new costume you can alter your physical experience as well. You can change your look and your physical size, so you can grow and age if you want. The only thing you currently can’t do is change your gender.

Will jetpacks have customizable exhaust: whether it's smoke, flames, plasma discharge, sonic bursts, etc.? (Captain_Intrepid)

While we currently do not have the ability to create custom effects for exhaust, we definitely want to provide players as much customization as possible. This IS on our list of areas to examine, as we’d all love to have a jetpack that has flames, or a cool tech glow, or steam-punk smoke coming out of it.

Having watched most of the videos from the alpha builds of the game, I became concerned (as have others) that the basic charge attacks might become repetitive after a while. I realize that build up is minimal to the larger attacks, but also wondered if there would be more variety in those build up attacks than what we have seen so far. Can we choose what our build up attacks will look like? Will the pattern of strikes randomize to keep it exciting? (Mikail)

This is actually a part of the revision we’re working on with our endurance system right now. First and foremost is to create a more compelling schema that moves away from spamming the “1” key in order to build your endurance. Hand-in-hand with this is increasing the number of viable options in combat per power framework and also giving each framework a unique feel. We want the different endurance models to vary gameplay based on the different endurance builders you’ve got. Players will know why they’d want to choose fire over ice over darkness over might. There will be a very distinct way that the powers interact.

How much control do players have over their Nemesis? They can pick costume, name, and powers, obviously, but does it go beyond that? Can we choose their animation set? Can we pick a style of dialogue, or write any of it ourselves? Not all archenemies behave the same way, and I'd really like to be assured the game will give us options to reflect the differences – some going after money, some with a personal vendetta against the hero, some just wanting to have fun, etc. (KelpPlankton)

There are a lot of areas where you influence your Nemesis. You choose his powerset, his costume, what type of minions he has and then the powersets that they use. For example, you could choose alien minions with darkness powers serving a Nemesis who has lightning powers. You do get to choose his personality: maniacal, savage, or mastermind are some of the current options. That will change his dialogue style. You won’t get to write his dialogue, but that choice will determine the type of dialogue he has.

How developed is the audio in CO? One of the complaints in CoH was that it was very lacking in the sounds and music department. Will there be looping music in zones? Ambient Sounds? Enemies grunting and howling when they're attacked? Voiceovers? (Progressman)

We’re paying a lot of attention to sound. In fact, we just tripled the size of our audio team. Right now we’re going through the entire game seeing where we need to add more ambient sounds or voice work. The music is awesome. All of the signature villains in the game have voices associated with them and all of the critters make appropriate noises: for example, zombies groaning and demonic wolves howling. We want CO to have the dynamic experience you’d expect from a superhero game.

For the brooding type of hero (i.e. the current James Bond), is there a way of having such a character that would slouch, glower, etc.? How about 'Emo' type characters? (Captain_Intrepid)

There are stances in the game that players can choose during character creation. The more of those we can add, the more ways players can be emotive. There are also moods you can set for your character, independent of stance. For every type of emotional response you’d like to portray, we’ll figure out some way to let you do it.

I would like to know how the control system will work in CO. I have a vested interest as I have “accessibility issues.” The old CoX control system was ideal for me as the controls are easy (basically, hit one button at a time and you're happy). With the ability to dodge and so on, I'm wondering how hard this is going to be to facilitate (it was one of the reasons that I haven't played some MMOs). I use a five button mouse as I find it hard to use a mouse and a keyboard at the same time. (umbralwarrior)

Ultimately, our goal is to allow PC gameplay using an Xbox controller in addition to allowing user customizable interfaces in which people can remap keys as they see fit.

Can you tell us if we will have secret identities in the game? (Ahalls25)

Secret Identities are going to be a growing part of the game, starting with special costume pieces and associated effects.

Will villains and heroes (such as Ironclad and Foxbat) have their own personal themes when they appear in the game? (Wobbley)

That would be awesome! We’ll look into it.