Cryptic Studios, which is now wholly owned by Atari, has announced that its superhero MMO Champions Online has been delayed and now has a release date set for September 1 2009. The game was initially scheduled to come out on the PC on July 14, which is also the national day of France (someone is bound to find a connection between the two).

Champions Online is set to offer players the most customizable superhero creator available at the moment. The game is based on the Champions pen and paper game system and the developers are saying that the world will be vibrant and interesting, with public quests in which any player can take part at any time and with a complex and interesting back story that should help players invest time in their characters.

Bill Roper, who is one of the producers on Champions Online, stated that “It is critically important for an MMO to be as good as it possibly can be at launch. Through our constant dialogue with our vocal and supportive community of beta testers, we quickly realized that in order to implement certain features that we all considered important the development of Champions Online would require more time. So that's what we're going to give it.”

Roper knows how disastrous a bad launch can be for a MMO, as he has worked on the doomed Hellgate: London, which suffered from teething problems and was ultimately closed down.

Atari recently announced that it would not be attending the E3 trade show held at the beginning of June. One of the reasons the company advanced was its preoccupation with the release of Ghostbusters and Champions Online. It would have probably been better to announce the delay and then show off something related to the MMO at E3, if only to keep public interest up until the fall release date.