When I was away to deal with my family’s business I had the thought to take a laptop with me. For some reason I’ve always found it calming to play an MMO and chat with my guild mates. I have to thank Cryptic for providing me some entertainment while I tried to not think about funerals and burials. During my time in Ohio I probably spent about eight hours playing the Champions Online open beta (this doesn’t count character creation) and thought I’d write up my opinions. I do want to stress that this is not a review and is based only off beta. I will provide a review at release.
One of the aspects of Champions that I was looking forward to was the character creator. I had heard all sorts of positive feedback and just had to get my hands on it. City of Heroes had somewhat prepared me for a truly in depth character generator but this went above and beyond. For an hour I tooled around with my character’s look only to realize I had missed the drop down tabs that added even more customization. When I found this tab I mentioned it on twitter. To quote Syp‘s reply: “Your life as you knew it is over” and he was right. You can pretty much make any character you could conceive. I wanted an angel so I made an angel. After that I felt like a werewolf and made that too. Dresden wanted to be William Shatner and made the Shat (and chose ego powers). There just isn’t anything like it out there and I was blown away. I still get caught up making new characters and costumes. To me it is worth buying the game just to make everything I’ve ever wanted and take screen shots.
Eventually I did make it into the game and I have to give a hand to Cryptic for their ability to make it readily available to everyone. I was running Champions Online on an out dated non-gaming laptop over a poor DSL connection. To put it into perspective I couldn’t get Lord of the Rings Online to run smoothly and it is an older game. Despite every single character looking different CO just seemed like it would run on and on.
Game play is pretty decent and has a few legs up over CoX. Each power set offers what is essentially an auto attack. No longer do we have to just continuously press the basic attack to fight. You can turn on the auto power and then plan the use of your other more devastating attacks. CO also adds an additional aspect by having a simple but effective loot system. Characters can find or craft offensive, defensive and utility items that will enhance their statistics or replace a power. In all there are nine equipment slots (three primary and six secondary). Unlike CoX you’re also not locked into a power set. If you want to completely re-specialize you can do so! If you’ve got the money you can go from a Human Torch on Monday to a Spider-Man on Tuesday. You’re also allowed to try out a power before you commit to it. That for me was a huge gift.
When it comes to the general system of how the game works, it is very much on rails to begin with. You go through a tutorial and then a scripted zone before you’re let out into the free world. It is a lot of fun the first time around but I wish you could some how skip it for each additional character. Much like most of the MMOs on the market, Champions is a quest grind game. You do get experience from beating up villains but most of your rewards come from doing errands for NPCs. At least these errands are usually “save ten people” instead of “go pick ten apples.” Some might enjoy this but as I’m sure you can figure out from the recent blog posts of mine, I’m sort of done with that style. I just want to go hunt down super villains and beat them up for fun and profit.
Now everything in an Epic Slant write up can’t be good. There is a strict policy here on that! I haven’t played Champions long enough to really notice any major issues since I was only in the open beta but I do have one that annoyed me. As it currently stands the game’s quest NPCs seem completely incapable of handling the attention of more than one PC. It is nightmarish. On numerous occasions I’ve simply had to leave and go do something else because too many people were trying to activate the same NPC to update their quests. You’ll also have a situation or two where one quest (like curing animals of the plague) nullifies another quest (rescuing hikers from the plague animals). If you do the former the latter doesn’t update. It was quite annoying to me and I hope they get it worked out. I got fatigued with doing the killing portion only to have rude_new_hero_McGee jumping in at the last second, talking to the NPC and breaking it for me. Why can’t we both talk to him or her? I’m certain Cryptic will address this, though.
All in all, given my limited experience with the game thus far, I have to say I like it. It doesn’t feel like a game that I as a raid and gear focused guy could stick with for more than a few months, but that it is fun. Each time I logged in I enjoyed myself and felt compelled to come back. I will certainly be purchasing Champions Online and I recommend others that don’t mind a more casual MMO do the same.
All characters are © 2007 - 2010
Cool micro review, it actually got me interested.
I was going to install Champions beta, but I installed the beta for Fallen Earth.
I haven’t put enough time into it to warrant a review. The two are coming out around the same time so it’s going to be a hard choice.
I enjoyed CoH, and it’s a great change of pace, however, I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic settings.
The character customization sounds great btw.
I’m glad you liked it. It was pretty short and I kept it to the basics. I never want to make a judgment on a game that isn’t out yet.
For some reason it seems to be getting a lot of negative press out on the blogs but it is actually decently fun. I don’t see it as a super long term game for me but it is one I’ll buy.
I enjoy the character creator so much I can play with that for the cost of the game! I’ll be doing a full review later though!
I have to say, I actually put about a weeks worth of time into the beta, and for the most part Ferrel, I agree with your assessment. I would also like to add that I participated in the End of Beta event, the “extended” End of Beta event, and the “yeah, we’re gonna turn of the servers eventually” End of Beta event. I was able to bump 3 characters up to level 40 and spec’ed out a couple different power sets, my first lvl 40 I focused basically on one tree, the character was cool, but where I felt the fun really shone was in taking complimentary powers from other sets, i.e. mixing and matching Power Armor and Gadgeteering, or Power Armor and Might.
I’m still trying to make sense of the plethora of stats, because they almost all seem to help/do something different and only a few specific powers will utilize an increased primary stat for more damage. I do know this though, endurance or recovery are pretty handy.
I really really really really love the Powerhouse advancement system. My first character was pretty jacked up because I really didn’t understand how it worked, the remaining 5 I spent almost as much time trying out powers, (especially travel powers) as I did in the Character Creation, but when I left I was pretty confident I had a power I would enjoy for the next X levels. Quick sidenote, when I had a lvl 40 with around 11 or so activatable powers (I had a couple different defensive passives), I basically used all of them, depending on the situation, nothing I picked really seemed useless, which was great, because it seems to me a fair number of other games as you level you may just out grow certain powers unless you spend precious spec points on them to make them comparable to later level powers.
I also created a couple different Nemesisesseesse apparently starting at lvl 25 you create one. But you don’t just create the character, you pick the look of the henchmen (from a wide variety of types), the power set of the henchmen, the demeanor of the villain, then after all those choices its back to the character creation screen and there you go, whip up a good bad guy, because you will be introduced to them with a nice little group quest, I’ll let you guys find out more details about that later, because its pretty cool.
All in all, having enjoyed CoX somewhat, but feeling like it just “didn’t do X right” I think CO will be a decent improvement on the Superhero MMO theme, and I might add when turned up a bit, and with the black lines drawn in, the comic book look is pulled off incredibly well. So much so that for the first time, I actually made a superheroish looking superhero, instead of some evil looking sumabitch that was inexplicably helping people. I will be buying this as well, and playing for a little while, at least until Borderlands. Its good clean non WoW fun, and really isn’t that what counts.
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