I suppose I should say something about Champions Online
…since I’ve been in the beta for a few weeks (I got in on via one of the random website sign-up competitions thing, I think around the 5th) and beta is winding down today – it may already be over.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take any badass action screenshots to show off , so you’ll have to enjoy exports of some of the costumes I was playing around with.
Warning 1: I may make comparisons to WoW. This does not imply that I think this game is in any way a serious competitor of WoWs, just that the influences are very clear (although it’s not like WoW invented questing, etc.).
Warning 2: Not counting the 40 bump, my highest character was 21, so I’m not talking about the high-end game (if it exists).
So. What’s the game like? Well, it’s exactly like WoW & CoH had some dirty, but satisfying sex and that sex resulted in a glossier-skinned and very attractive bastard.
<Of course it’s a bastard – games aren’t allowed to get married yet!>
No matter what they say, they’re not breaking any molds here, rather they are synthesizing a new mold from WoW’s outdoor quest-grinding feel + CoHs indoor instances & super-powered abilities – but slightly better on both parts.
I mean “better” in that:
- I found the CORE of the power system (if not the implementation) to be a significant upgrade over CoHs in that it may allow for powers that look and feel better than CoHs.
- I found the quests to function almost identically to WoWs, but slightly less annoying – perhaps due to the early availability of FAST travel powers.
- The core of the character creator is also better than CoHs – but the functionality is not quite there yet. CoH recently added costume “presets”, and I think those would be very useful for CO, mostly because it’s hard to find matching sets for some of the costume pieces. A lot of them are there but say, only available in a certain shirt setting, or whatever. I’d like to be able to select say “all samurai gear” or whatever and start from there – like you can on CoH (now, not at launch). Hopefully they’ll add this soon.
- I think it goes without saying that the character creator is so far beyond WoW’s that a comparison isn’t even valid. The comparison that does become relevant is the extent that gear changes your appearance in WoW, and if THAT holds up. To me, it doesn’t, because it was such a huge, huge, huge pain in the ass to get matching gear in WoW (especially say, raid gear) that I just abandoned trying to make my guy look cool and went with the stuff with the biggest #s. I like that my appearance isn’t tied to my gear.
There is also an inventory system that’s a pretty rough crossing of the two as well: able to enhance specific powers or groups like CoH, but with the added stat juggling and targeted gearing from WoW. Note that the only visuals gear seems to change is your power effects – equipping a flaming blade will allow (but not force) you to change your sword into a flaming sword, for example.
In general, I’m tired of inventory systems – CoH’s minimal gear system is about as much as I want to deal with these days, and CO’s is more intensive than that in some ways (ie you’ll need to do certain quests, unlock certain perks, etc. to get certain items – not true of CoH). However, I’m coping with it just fine so far – I put minimal effort into picking my gear, and seem to get a decent return out of that. We’ll see how the end game gearing is – I only made it to 21 on my Power Armor guy, and the game will go to level 40 at launch.
The user interface is also much better than CoHs – its most direct and obvious ancestor. Windows resize and move easier (in general), each can be resized individually via a really handy on-screen interface-editing interface, chat window functionality is much easier to customize, etc. There are still some annoyances – dragging powers from one button to another seems to work about 15% of the time, for example, but I assume/hope those will get ironed out with the live launch.
Is it fun?
Yes, it really is. Some of the powers suck/are broke/look really lame (*coughWristBolterscough*), but there are enough that are awesome for you to spend time on 3-4 characters while they fix the stuff that is not yet awesome.
The first time I zoomed around through Millenium City in my jet boots I thought to myself “Wow, this looks really, really good.” If you have the right graphics card & monitor set up – it looks really, really good. My laptop theoretically has about the same video card as my desktop, and a higher resolution monitor, yet the game looks much better on the desktop. Not higher quality per se, but the “comic booky-ness” look better – there’s a black outline around the avatars or something. I can’t explain it, but you can see the difference. I’ll see if the screenshots come out any different after launch.
Is it ready for launch?
Kinda. Sorta. I have to think there’s gonna be a few good internal patches before they launch, because the build from yesterday still had 90% of the advantages (things you use to make your powers better) missing their text. Not to mention the generally large amount of bugs, incorrect text (things labeled as toggles that aren’t – the Supernatural “incarnations” for example), and balance issues.
Basically, I think everything felt pretty ready except the powers system. *gulp* Yeah, that’s kind of the meat of the game isn’t it?
Melee damage is massively less than ranged damage. What? Yeah I know, I think it was an accident and it will get fixed though. Maybe they’re trying to turn the paradigm around? Who knows, it’s not working though.
Melee offensive passives are nigh-useless because you’re a glass cannon (shaped like a person) ramming your head (see – that’s why you’re shaped like a person, because otherwise you wouldn’t have a head and my silly metaphor would fail) into a hammer without your defensive passive. You can only run one or the other… Plus, most of the offensive passives really don’t give you that much at all, especially compared to say, quadrupling your survivability.
Pets suck. Really, most of them just plain suck. Some of them look cool (golem, munition bots sorta), some look really crappy (wolves). One or two of them are useful – hell, half the players will probably take the stupid heal-bots. But most of them aren’t. The tier 3 sorcery pet does less damage than the THREE temporary zombies you can summon at tier 2. Sure, it has a special ability, but in the time you drained end back from it, you probably could have killed something.
And there’s more of course – but don’t let it get you down, really – because:
Sadly, no one ships a “ready” MMO. No matter what they say, I haven’t seen an MMO that launched “ready” yet. Usually takes at least a few months. Hell, the MMO may have started shedding users already by the time it really hits a “ready” feel – see CoH for example. CoH is, I think, the best it’s ever been, right now (and especially after i16), yet I suspect their subs are at a very low point. I know it’s frequently difficult to get a group on Pinnacle. It took so many twists and turns along the way, ironing out serious balance issues that players had grown accustomed to, that it drove away a decent amount of users, or at least that’s what I suspect.
Where will Champions be in 3 months? Probably where it should be on this Friday (launch day), I suspect. But, you know, for an MMO, it’s still pretty “ready”.
Oh, hello, the beta is still running – the devs just left it up for us to mess around while they ready the live build. I have to say, the devs (some of them the same devs from early CoH), have been pretty good so far.
So I grabbed a couple screenshots, enjoy (click to embiggen):
This one is of a bug in the training area (hint: the giant, relatively featureless female avatar should not be that big):
Some shots of town & some Power Armor powers:
The (inevitable?) end-of-beta-giant-robot-attack:
And here’s a shot with the UI, if you’re into that kind of thing:
[...] to use it. Some players use that flexibility to make sheerly hideous characters, but also to make a wide range of pretty good looking ones too. Most people rate ChampO’s costume creation system as one of its successes. However, [...]