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Xbox 360 Version of Champions Online Being Held Back By MS

Posted by Soulskill on from the ready-set-wait dept.

Tomorrow marks the launch of Cryptic Studios' new superhero MMO, Champions Online. It was developed for the PC and the Xbox 360, but the console version will be much delayed, according to Cryptic CCO Jack Emmert, because Microsoft is holding things up. "Microsoft's a big company, and they have to work out all the various issues related to MMOs. It just takes time for the big beast known as Microsoft to get moving. I really have no explanation other than that, because it's as baffling to developers as it is to everyone else," he said during an interview with VG247. The game itself is apparently finished, but Emmert isn't sure it'll even go live for the 360 by the end of this year. Square Enix developers made similar comments earlier this month regarding Final Fantasy XIV, which will be available first on the PS3 largely because it's taking a long time to work out how the game will interact with Xbox Live.

11 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Champions Online is a great game! by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    First let me start off with its strongest point: Avatar creation. The Avatar creation is very excellent. I've never seen one as good as this one where you can customize your character's looks. Many people spent over a half hour customizing their character in this tool. It is also a treat when you play the game to see new looks.
    There is a high degree of character customization. Out with the Tank/Heal/DPS/Ranged/PETS, in with do it all if you know how. Some people like to pick skills based on their character, but you can pick skill all across the board if you like.

    There is encouragement to do quests by a lot of experience in relation to grinding. You won't see much grinding in this game, but more of mission doing.

    I fought a Super Villian with my friend the other day. He had turrets and minions. So we killed the minions, then turrets, then one of us would block while the other fought the villian. If we took too much damage, we could scoot around the many walls in his chamber and heal. I'm going to upload Youtube videos when I get bored, but I'm not bored. I'm level 30, and haven't died. Level cap is 40.

    My last MMORPG that I really liked was Asheron's Call 1. I felt WOW was sort of a boring grind. Champions Online is a great game if your computer can handle it(need a computer in last 2 years with good video card). Finally: Flight + Ranged = New era of combat tactics. Super speed is really cool too, as if you go fast enough, you can run up 80% grade inclines too. I haven't tested out everything, but I really like this game.

    --
    God spoke to me.
    1. Re:Champions Online is a great game! by Morkano · · Score: 2, Informative

      It sounds like the GP hasn't played it, but I have. The character creation is better, but not by a tonne. Here are the key differences I noticed:
      1) Asymetrical choice for things like gloves, armbands, eyes, etc. You choose things that can be mirrored independantly if you want.
      2) You can save the costume and load it again later. I imagine it's a jpeg with some metadata, I haven't looked, but it's really handy. Similar to Spore
      3) You can only wear capes with tights or skin. No capes and armor or robot arms or anything like that. You can have wings and stuff with whatever though.
      4) Seem to be less choices for cool armor/skin/jackets.
      5) No auras
      6) Still buggy a bit

      So, it's a bit better for the asymetrics and costume saving, but there are a bunch of things that are worse. Like Champions in general, really. I had it pre-ordred, but I don't think I'm going to pick it up. CoH was a lot more fun.

      On one hand, you can try out a new power before you have to lock it in. On the other hand, you can't actually see what powers are avaliable later without having one ready to choose and going to the trainer. When you create a character you have no way of knowing what's in the future.

      The combat system is neat, having attack that gives energy rather having to stand around doing nothing. It's gives you an absurd amount though, you just stop your main for like a second or two and you're back to full. Not even worth worrying about for the most part.

      The UI in Champions is what really did it in. It doesn't have a compas icon on your minimap to point to any missions, much less the current one. Same for team mates. You can't set a mission to be the active one for the group very well. There really doesn't seem to be much point in grouping for the most part anyway, everything is just killing things outside with other people. Too easy to quest-steal. The few indoor missions I ran into were really short, like two rooms.

      I wanted to like it, I even thought about the lifetime subscription (you get a lot of benifits). I figured it was a sure thing as long as they didn't make it worse than the game they made before. They did. The whole time I was playing, I was like.. Why am I playing this when I could play CoH instead?

      --
      Victory or awesome!
    2. Re:Champions Online is a great game! by thesandtiger · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's better and worse.

      Better in that you have more different areas that you can change - face and body are much more customizeable, you can add more colors than COH allows, more material options, can even change finger/hand/feet a lot more. There is also the ability to change the "style" your character walks around with - in CoH, no matter how beastial you make yourself look, you're still mincing around if female, or sort of stomping about if male; in Champions, you can be "heroic" (kind of "Yeah, I'm badass"), average, or crouched around and kind of running on all fours like a beast. Also, the graphics are VASTLY superior to CoH.

      Worse in that you don't have quite as many options with regard to patterns or wardrobe choices as CoH does. But, I imagine that will be getting fixed pronto as they add more and more options.

      Overall, Champions is vastly more customizable, with the only shortfall being something that's obviously temporary, and not always in CoH's favor. For example, Champions gives you a LOT more non-human options, a LOT more options for various wing sets, capes to begin with, etc.

      I've made a character who looks EXACTLY like Marvin the Martian (pipe-stem arms, comically oversized head), another that looks pretty close to Bugs Bunny (Marvin needs a nemesis...), made another that looks like a zergling, and so on. SO much more potential than CoH has.

      The rest of the game is pretty fun, too :)

      --
      Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
    3. Re:Champions Online is a great game! by thesandtiger · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can double click on your quest and it shows you where your quests are by shifting your minimap. You can also hit "m" and it shows a larger map with the areas your quests are in circled in green - an arrow would be nice, but it's absolutely not necessary. I didn't play at all in the beta but got in with the headstart, and I have not had *any* problems figuring out where to go or what to do with quests using the built in features.

      Quest/kill stealing is not a problem... everyone who does a reasonable amount of damage to an opponent will get credit for it. I've never once lost a quest to someone who "kill stole" or whatever.

      You can also see "future powers" I believe by having it show "unavailable" powers in the power list. I am not 100% sure, but I think I remember doing this - it made things a lot easier.

      Honestly, it sounds like your problems with the game stem more from not knowing the UI than the UI itself; there are weak spots, to be sure, but the things you mention are, by and large, not actually insoluble.

      --
      Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
  2. Re:So many typical /. MSFT haters here... by TiberiusMonkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Made up statistics for the win! Seriously, three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies and statistics. Yours is one of them. Or do you really think half of the Xbox 360s in the world really don't work?

    Then why is Microsoft still in business? How much money do they have?

    Type "50% xbox 360 fail" into Google. He didn't make anything up, that's not a world wide number, but he didn't make anything up. Oh, and I know about 7 people with a 360, every single one has had his die and one of them lost over 6 of them in the space of a year. And to the anonymous poster above you, the very LEAST they can do with that sort of fail rate is what they have been doing.

  3. Re:So many typical /. MSFT haters here... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, the 360 is a "success", but also has terrible flaws. For one is its 50% failure rate (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/17/game-informer-xbox-360-at-54-2-percent-failure-rate/ http://kotaku.com/5339555/report-xbox-360-failure-rate-over-50-percent http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/24/microsoft-responds-to-xbox-360-54-2-percent-failure-rate-report/ ). While XBL is fine for gaming, buying stuff with "Microsoft Points" is odd, unlike Nintendo Points or buying gift cards with Sony, theres no easy way I can find out what everything costs in US dollars. Etc.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  4. Sony - Exert Online Control? Are You Joking? by MediaStreams · · Score: 4, Informative

    What delusional fantasy world are you living in?

    Sony has an online service that is more like the open PC gaming online model than any other console manufacturer:

    * Free online play for all non-MMORPG titles

    * Dedicated servers

    * Open to mods and other free content from developers

    It's Microsoft with the absurd grip on their online service that is continually causing developers nightmares in dealing with. It took Epic a half a year to rewrite/work around Microsoft's online service's restrictions to get the latest Unreal Tournament out the door after it had no problems whatsoever with PCs and Sony's PS3.

    And these problems Microsoft is causing for Cryptic Studios is just the latest in other MMORPG developers before them.

    1. Re:Sony - Exert Online Control? Are You Joking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      The lack of a 'dedicated server feature'? It's entirely built-in to the 360's matchmaking system to support dedicated servers. In fact, they have explicit support in the system for weighting dedicated servers higher than player hosted ones, if the game wants to make use of it. I believe it was Bungie that had a talk on it at a recent GDC.

      That a lot of games don't have them, you can blame the dev's for, not Microsoft. They just make it not suck to not have them. And I think games like COD4 and Halo3 prove that you don't necessarily *need* dedicated servers for a great online experience.

      As for the PS3, Epic still had to make you put the maps on a memory stick to get them onto the system, you can't just download them via the game or the PSN store, because Sony didn't allow for that rather convenient feature. It's a half-step in the right direction, nothing more, as long as we need to use a memory stick to get it on there. And at least Microsoft hasn't retroactively added Ads to a paid product (yet).

      You can hate Microsoft all you want, but at least get your facts straight.

  5. Re:So many typical /. MSFT haters here... by VGPowerlord · · Score: 2, Informative

    As far as I know, items only sell for the following amounts:

    200 points is $2.50 (Indie games have this price)
    400 points is $5
    800 points is $10
    1200 points is $15
    1600 points is $20

    and the amount of points you can buy at a time:
    500 points is $6.25
    1000 points is $12.50
    2000 points is $25
    5000 points is $62.50

    I think that covers all the major amounts.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  6. Re:There's more on the table here than money... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's also Final Fantasy XI (PS2 and Xbox 360) and Everquest: Online Adventures (PS2), both of which are undeniably MMORPGs. Granted, that's not a very long list.

    The main problem has historically been that you really need a hard drive to support an MMORPG. FFXI on the PS2 came with one to install in your PS2--in fact, it was the only way the PS2 HDD was ever released, and FFXI was the only thing on the PS2 that ever required it (and damn near the only thing that even supported it). EQOA tried to just use the memory card, and suffered badly as a result. Classic Xbox was the only console of that generation that had a hard drive as a matter of course, and they didn't seem to be too interested in RPGs. In the current generation, both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 come with hard drives out of the box, and the Wii supports SD cards, but there's still some inertia, which may be starting to be overcome just now.

  7. Re:How unacceptable of Microsoft... by sorak · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...to actually require the developer to deliver a complete, bug free, enjoyable gaming experience BEFORE they ship it instead of sometime in the indefinite future.

    1

    CO is a very good game, but it's undergoing nearly nightly changes and by the developer's own admission the support for a gamepad controller is only half-baked at the moment.

    So no way in hell is the game complete enough to pass the standards of any console game company,

    2

    let alone Microsoft which has some of the highest standards around.

    3

    The standard PC philosophy of "just ship it, we'll patch it later" will not fly in the console world, even if the console vendors are open to the kind of ongoing incremental enhancements that MMOGs are known for.

    G.

    Congratulations, you have just earned 3 irony points. You are 12 away from advancement.