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Review: Champions Online
Champions Online is Cryptic Studios' latest entry into the Superhero MMORPG genre, representing several years of advancement in game design both for Cryptic and for MMOs as a whole. It's no longer a new field, and there are now certain expectations about what an MMO should contain, and how it should play. Two major factors to a new game's success or failure are the standards they embrace and do well, and the ones they reject and do differently. Champions Online succeeds at adapting many established concepts, while still setting themselves apart from the typical swords & sorcery backdrop. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.
- Title: Champions Online
- Developer: Cryptic Studios
- Publisher: Atari
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Soulskill
- Score: 8/10
First, a disclaimer — MMOs are unlike ordinary games because active development never really stops. Bugs and gameplay issues, once identified, are almost always fixed — indeed, one of the traits that distinguishes a good MMO from a bad one is how well and how quickly the development team solves such problems. Thus, this review will not focus on the minor, easily fixable problems other than to identify them and perhaps point out what Cryptic has said about fixing them, where applicable. On to the game itself.
Champions gets off on the right foot with an excellent character creator. The depth and level of detail for all of the customization options exceeds any game I've played, and it's pretty simple to find and select the look that you want. If you're the type who enjoys making your character picture-perfect, you'll love it; matching a costume to whatever vision you have for a character is surprisingly easy. There are enough options that I really don't see any player characters who look alike — or few enough that I don't notice. It also allows the irrepressible creation of characters from other intellectual properties. It's something I've seen less and less as time passes, so I assume Cryptic is clamping down on it (as they should; Marvel already sued them for the same thing in City of Heroes), but it's occasionally hilarious to see Duke Nukem, Dr. McCoy, or a WoW Paladin out killing bad guys.
The customization continues beyond the character creator, too. Throughout the game, you accumulate various powers — these are your skills/spells/abilities, everything from laser beams to giant fiery swords to huge explosions. There are a ton of powers to choose from, and each has its own graphical effect. The nice thing is that you can modify the colors of the effect and the location from which they originate. My character's first ability had him shooting red laser pulses from his fists, which I changed to be blue lasers shooting from his eyes. It's a nice touch that allows even characters with the exact same powers to look different. Beyond that, as you go through the game you can get items that unlock more costume options.
There's a tremendous variety to the powers you can use, to the point where it's almost better to figure out what you want your character to do — drop bombs, sling ice shards, Force-choke — than to look at the abilities and figure out which are the "best." They're divided up amongst 18 different "frameworks," which are collections of similarly-themed powers. For example, the Munitions framework contains powers that involve shooting various guns, dropping mines, throwing grenades, and shooting rockets. The "Unarmed" framework holds different punch and kick attacks, and the "Fire" framework has — you guessed it — fire spells. You're not restricted to a particular framework, which is nice. You can grab all your powers from a single one, or go into a different framework for each power.
It's fun to have so many options, but almost overwhelming if you're trying to min/max your character. My recommendation would be to not worry overmuch about picking the absolute best power. With a few exceptions, they're pretty well balanced — as well as can be expected for a new MMO — and Cryptic is already making refinements. More important is to select powers that have different effects. They're divided up and labeled such that you know which are for close/ranged attacks, area effect attacks, crowd control, healing, summoning, or buffs. In many cases, it's pointless to get two of a particular effect, so you want to diversify. You get a new power every few levels, and they really add to the depth of the combat.
Your character gets stronger in other ways, as well. You get "advantages," which increase the effectiveness of your powers, but you're limited into how much you can strengthen any one ability. It's another level of customization and utility, and they make interesting changes to your powers. You're also heavily dependent on stats. They're somewhat arcane and unintuitive (Strength is obvious enough, but what would you think "Presence" does?), but you'll do fine with the understanding that you should pick two and focus on them almost exclusively, as they'll determine your damage output.
The fighting is done against individual enemies or, more often, small groups. The non-player opponents you typically fight are classified as one of the following, from easiest to hardest: Henchman, Villain, Master Villain, and Super Villain. There are also Cosmic and Legendary Villains, but those are rare, and usually require a team to defeat. A more typical group will have a cluster of Henchmen, or a couple Henchmen and a Villain. The Henchmen die in a matter of seconds, but the Villains take a bit more work. As they get more powerful, you'll have to put some thought into how you want to handle them; there's a lot of content you can solo with some strategy and perseverance. Many of the powers you use complement each other in fun and interesting ways. A lot of them have short recharge periods (cooldowns), which you can fill by using a hold (crowd control) or knocking your opponent back, which delays them for several seconds.
Combat is fairly fast-paced, and it can involve a lot of movement. It feels like a hybrid between an MMO and an action RPG. Most powers can be used while on the move, giving you the opportunity to close with your attacker or maintain range, or perhaps duck out of line-of-sight just after your ability fires. You can also Block attacks. In fact, it's crucial to block some of them. Enemies will sometimes charge up big attacks, advertised by a growing symbol over their heads. When you see this happening, stop what you're doing and block it, or expect to take some serious damage. Blocking adds more depth to the combat, but is slightly hampered by the controls.
Cryptic clearly put a lot of effort into building a good system for game controls and the UI. There are a ton of different options for movement, targeting, and camera styles; you can play it like a typical MMO, or a first-person shooter, or Cryptic's own superhero MMO concoction, and it's well implemented. Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of UI lag. Server lag has been almost non-existent — amazing as that is to say during the launch period of an MMO — but the responsiveness of the controls is probably the game's biggest technical fault right now. It can be frustrating at times to have your abilities not work as you expect because of this. There's enough of a delay after hitting the button that you won't be sure if it actually triggered the ability. Many abilities require a button to be held down, so if you press it again and then the original trigger goes through, you've wasted a cooldown. Pressing Block right after charging up a power will also sometimes clip the end of it, and cause it not to fire. I would attribute the majority of my deaths so far to the UI lag. That said, it's not game-breaking.
Quests in Champions Online are called missions. A lot of it is typical MMO fare, but not all, and the mission system is streamlined and unobtrusive. The game world has several large zones, with quest hubs scattered about them. You'll get your standard "Kill N of X" and "Collect Y of Z" missions. You'll also get quest lines that tell cool stories, if you care to read them. Cryptic has stepped up the convenience factor in a few ways. First, your map is always marked with the area you need to visit to finish the missions. In other words, no more "Head past the Valley of Ambivalence and to the northeast corner of the Forest of Mild Discomfort to slay Ted the Impaler." It's simply displayed on your map (and minimap). Finding new missions is easier, too. You can open the "Crime Computer," which will tell you where various emergencies (i.e. missions) are located, and mark those for you on the map as well.
City of Heroes veterans can rest easy; the missions are a lot better in Champions. Most of them are out in the world. Some are instanced, but there are varying objectives, and I've never been sent into the same building twice, except when it makes sense for the story. Another nice feature is that you'll occasionally stumble across a civilian being accosted by villains out in the street. If you save them, they sometimes give you a mission. You can also find missions just by moving around — as you pass by a bank that's being robbed, you'll be given a quest to stop it, without having to even talk to an NPC. There are several Open Missions in each zone, too. These are missions everybody nearby can participate in, and you get rewarded based on your level of contribution. Cryptic is still working the bugs out in a few of these, but they're fun, and they have an epic feel. You'll see even more impressive missions in dungeons and "crisis zones" — one multi-part mission has you join a team of prison guards attempting to lock down a jailbreak led by a boss with paranormal powers. You fight through levels of the dungeon, struggling to reach him, and it almost feels like playing through a section of F.E.A.R.
The open world zones are few, but large, and they contain content for multiple ranges of levels. They're divided loosely into neighborhoods, which you'll typically explore until you've exhausted all the missions (gaining a couple levels in the process), and move on to a neighborhood in a different zone. The neighborhoods all tend to tell a story, or a few related stories, which tie in to the overarching plot of the game. There are a couple smallish content gaps — early into level 31, I exhausted all available quests and had to grind out the rest of the level — but Cryptic has already acknowledged that they're pinpointing those gaps and working to fill them. My advice would be to take any mission given to you by a random citizen or object; the experience from these adds up quickly, and I probably wouldn't have been stuck if I'd spent a bit more time doing those.
The zones would take a long time to traverse on foot, but early on you're given your choice of travel powers, which make getting from one place to another much faster. The travel powers are actually a lot of fun, in and of themselves. You can get your standard flying power, or ride a sheet of ice, or use rocket boots, but there are more entertaining options as well. You can get Superjump, which lets you literally leap tall buildings in a single bound, or Swing, which lets you shoot a grapple upwards and swing as if from vine to vine. Oftentimes you're just shooting it into the open air, so it doesn't make much sense, but that's more than made up by how fun it is.
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers — the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
Now, that's definitely a poor decision on Cryptic's part, but it's not as bad as it sounds. First, they've already held a post-launch dev chat, in which they said they're going to revise upward the amount of money you receive from monsters and quests. They also indicated that retcon costs would probably be lowered. What's more, they've already issued one free retcon to all characters, and said they'll likely do that whenever they make significant changes to powers in a patch. One phrase they used was "targeted retcon," which would let players freely change a power that has been modified. While I was initially displeased that I couldn't fix mistakes I made when I didn't know how the game worked, it's good to see that Cryptic is already addressing it, and on multiple fronts. That speaks well toward the long-term health of the game.
An important aspect of the game starts at level 25 when you get to create your Nemesis. This is a super villain whose plans you constantly try to thwart, and who routinely sends his minions to destroy you. It's basically an epic series of missions that happens gradually as you level up. After you tangle with him for the first time, you'll occasionally be ambushed by his henchmen when you're off doing normal missions. Sometimes when you kill the henchmen, they'll drop notes that contain information about your Nemesis' plans, which you go on a mission to disrupt. Other times, the police or NPC superheroes will call on you to stop his latest scheme. It's nicely done, and it really adds to the feel that you're doing heroic deeds and fighting complex battles.
There is less focus on gear in Champions than in most other MMOs. You have nine gear slots, and your typical item will increase your stats and and your defenses. You generally want to focus on the two "Super Stats" you select early in the leveling process, since raising those increases your damage output. There are also items with other effects; some will replace or modify your powers, adding an ancillary effect and perhaps a new graphic. Equip-able items are categorized as Arms, Mysticism, and Science — these are the three professions. Each of them has crafting and gathering aspects. Unlike most MMOs, your profession skill doesn't increase much by making things or harvesting nodes out in the wilderness. Instead, you take items you find and "research" them, breaking them down into their components. This is cool because it gives you a ton of materials to work with, and makes it easy to catch up to where your skill level is supposed to be. You don't have to make two dozen Shoulderpads of the Useless that you immediately vendor. There is virtually no "grind" to the process, which is quite nice, and you can build yourself some basic gear and useful consumables.
There's still work to be done on the game, as with any MMO launch. Pet AI isn't working right, so summoned creatures will frequently run off and attack whatever the heck they want. Several buggy missions have already been fixed, but others are still broken. PvP is dominated by a few annoying abilities; nothing you can't work around with a semi-coordinated team, but a lot of people can't rely on that. There are a few places in the game that look like they're just waiting to be populated with villains and quests; hopefully that'll happen soon to fill out the leveling process. The downside right now is that you'll frequently end up doing quests a couple levels higher than you, which give you rewards you can't use yet. Endgame doesn't have a ton of variety; that's something they'll have to address fairly soon, once a significant number of players reach the level cap.
As it stands, I think Champions Online's success will be determined by where Cryptic takes it from here. The launch is solid, there's a reasonable amount of content, and the combat is a fun break from typical MMOs. When Cryptic actively developed for City of Heroes, they released 10 expansions and City of Villains in a three-and-a-half year period. If they can roll out content on a similar scale for Champions, while staying on top of balance issues and bug fixes, it will certainly find success. As it is, it's piqued my interest. It's no WoW-killer, but it's a fun, distinct game that will carve out a niche for itself.
I RTFR but did not notice mentioning of a monthly fee.
There's a tremendous variety to the powers you can use, to the point where it's almost better to figure out what you want your character to do -- drop bombs, sling ice shards, Force-choke -- than to look at the abilities and figure out which are the "best."
With the exception of the RP servers it is always about the best - even on the RP servers. At least with this (according to the article) the best can be remade to look like something else? So far the read sounds good - if they have a demo I will try it (my fiancee will kill me)
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Scuba Diving
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Am I the only one that sees the resemblance to MDK? No complaints here. A revisit of that series has been a long time coming.
I didn't particularly enjoy the tutorial, but once that's out of the way, things improved immensely.
...neither for fantasy MMOs.
I want cyberpunk MMOs.
Well, as a long COH fan myself, my own impression is more like "meh" somehow.
The good is that there are a lot more costume pieces, and, face it, if you were into COH, you like to dress up dolls. Welcome to the club, and remember that there's nothing wrong with that. Now let's sit our dolls together and have a tea party ;) More seriously, I wish more game had this much freedom in coming up with a costume. You can be anything from werewolf to elf to dwarf to orc to Superman to... well, almost anything you can imagine.
Also good is that you no longer have the horrendous waiting for endurance to refill that plagued the teen levels of COH.
The bad is... well, subjective. I can understand why they deviated from COH in some aspects, but I don't have to like it. YMMV.
For a start, yes, combat is fast paced, but it's also actually a lobotomized button masher designed for a gamepad. You only need an attack button and a block button.
Combat is simply an affair of starting your weak-and-often auto-attack, at which point your character will start madly pummelling on the enemy on his/her/its own, albeit not necessarily doing much damage. This however also regenerates your energy, so whenever you have enough of it, you hit your more powerful attack. When you run out of energy again, you let it on auto-attack again. It's really that brain damaged... err... I mean "casual gamer friendly" ;)
Yes, there is a block button too, and, guess what? You _only_ need to use it when you see that charging-up-a-power-attack icon above the enemy's head. It's not even the kind of block and counterattack combos in most action-adventures, it's really like one of those events like in console games where an icon appears on the screen and you have to push a button on the controller quickly. Until you see that icon, you can safely ignore the block button entirely.
What disappoints me more seriously is the reduced customization in the actual powers. It's like the new costume pieces came at the expense of the customization of the actual powers.
E.g., in Champions Online you will never ever have more than one passive power. So you slot a regeneration or dodge buff in it, and that was it. There is no minmaxing, no "do I get Fast Healing too, or stick to Integration", none of the other things that actually made builds unique in COH. In the defense aspect, the characters aren't even uni-dimensional -- which would imply a continuum of possible values, even if in just one variable -- they're zero-dimensional.
Attack too, has been turned from something where I actually had to manage chains of attacks and mixes of cooldowns, to a 1-button masher, essentially.
Yes, it has stats, but not only they're unintuitive in what they do, they're unintuitive even after you figured out what they do. E.g., Strength affects your melee damage, yes, as you'd expect, but actually the effect is capped so brutally and early, that you can pretty much ignore that stat entirely. Counter-intuitively, as a melee character you actually benefit more from dexterity. And even in the "Strength == more melee damage" aspect, it's not as simple as you'd assume. E.g., the ego blades are based on another stat, not on Strength.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "it's crap" or anything of the kind. It just feels... "meh". Believe me, as a bored COH player I was waiting for CO like the fundies await the second cumming of Christ. Maybe that was my mistake.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Last I read is that is was not based on the HERO system so where is the appeal other than making the characters look different?
Also, considering their first week live saw massive exploits of stupid features, think entire groups stun killing everything which conveniently rewarded full experience regardless of player level because of an update not made properly. Throw in that many groups used this to max level nearly instantly before Cryptic shut it off but left all the exploiters with their gains. Apparently they went to the Turbine school of "Exploit Early Exploit Often".
Top it off with FOTM (think mini maxing) character types and if you want to succeed do you have anything but to be the same build as others - all you have is the choice what color your powers/outfit are. If you don't choose right your stuck, retcon is too expensive and that is it, your done. Roll again the spec that works and pray retcon (or whatever they call it) comes soon enough so you can play what you wanted to play.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
A lot of MMOs don't allow you to have travel "abilities" until you get up there in levels. Champions Online lets you have them at level 5. Basically, once you are done the tutorial, you go and "level up", and bamf, you're flying/skating/hoverboarding/webslinging/etc anywhere you want.
:)
Also, their pre-order offered discounted 6-month subscriptions, and a lifetime (200 bucks) subscription. If Champions lasts more than a year, you've saved yourself a decent pile of money if you're a regular player.
There's no level limit for joining a supergroup (the Champions version of a guild/clan/etc.), you can join one at level 1.
Cryptic has taken their experience in creating City of Heroes/City of Villains and created a highly polished and very playable MMO. Yes, there's the familiar grind and questing, but it is much more player friendly.
IMHO and all other disclaimers apply.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of UI lag. Server lag has been almost non-existent â" amazing as that is to say during the launch period of an MMO â" but the responsiveness of the controls is probably the game's biggest technical fault right now. It can be frustrating at times to have your abilities not work as you expect because of this. There's enough of a delay after hitting the button that you won't be sure if it actually triggered the ability. Many abilities require a button to be held down, so if you press it again and then the original trigger goes through, you've wasted a cooldown. Pressing Block right after charging up a power will also sometimes clip the end of it, and cause it not to fire. I would attribute the majority of my deaths so far to the UI lag.
Uhh, sounds like it's server lag where the server authenticates the buttons you press... (It is checking if your cooldown is off before allowing you to do it client side) I've seen this in plenty of MMOs.
Trying to say there is no "server lag", but there is "alternative" lag is a bit misleading to those who don't understand it.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers -- the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
This is huge. I remember playing Diablo 2 early on, and everyone was making a sorceress and loading her up with Blizzard, a level 24 spell. It was ridiculously powerful, and poorly balanced, and the first patch which came out a month later nerfed this skill into the stone age. In other words, not only was it less powerful, it was now less useful, because the skill above it, Ice Sphere, became the more powerful and useful spell. So now everyone with Blizzard was not the best Sorceress. this pissed off thousands of players who spent their time building a character they liked. Blizzard called this skill "broken" and passing it off as a a bug fix, trying to contain the outcry, but that of course didn't help. Gamers see thru BS like this, a nerf is a nerf.
Now, You can actually test and work with a power and get to know it and understand it before you commit it to your character. And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I liked CoH, but it didn't have the depth I was looking for in a "pay to play" game. I'd probably try this game out...but I'm an Apple user now with no PC or Windows Partition and that won't change anytime soon...so I guess I'll stick with WoW...
Ave Molech Setting
There's not even enough content to cover leveling, as you pointed out earlier in the review. Want to make a new character? Forget a different starting area... you're going to be doing all the exact same quests over again just to make your levels. This is not even mentioning the fact the quests are nothing but "go X kill Y collect Z", where the only variation is whether the "kill" or "collect" steps are included. There is no other gameplay. There's nothing else to do. Even the "large" areas are deceptive... maps appear huge, but you quickly find the screen going black and white long before you reach the edges, leaving only about 2/3 of the actual visible area open. Crafting is a joke, PvP is pointless, and the writing is bland. I don't think I'd qualify this as "reasonable" in the content department.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Is the UI customizable (like WOW) or fixed (like COH)? Wow spoiled me for MMOs - I want to be able to customize it as I want it.
Does it follow the Champions ruleset or completey dumbed down (like COH which was also supposedly based on Champions)?
It's a tutorial. They need to teach you the basics of the game so that you don't wander around not knowing how to do anything. At least in this game they make it like there's something BIG happening - because you're a super hero already - rather than CoH or WoW's tutorial zones which were pretty much "Oh, hey, dude, great you're here - wanna pick up my drycleaning for me?"
In this tutorial, I:
1) Ran into a burning & invaded building the cops wouldn't to retrieve sensitive data, beating up aliens by ripping a streetlamp out of the ground to use as a weapon
2) Did a lot of "good deeds" - rescued civilians from under giant chunks of debris, rescued a cat for an old lady, fought off invaders to get medical supplies, and helped a tourist get his stuff back
3) Rescued 2 superheroes who had been captured or otherwise incapacitated
4) Fought off an enemy invasion and protected a primary defensive system until it was repaired & ready
5) Personally fought room by room through the Champions' HQ to launch the defenses, defeating a really big boss in the process
(and, of course, learned about the game mechanics)
Contrast that with WoW where I... Brought a hot drink to someone, beat up some boars for scraps, picked some flowers, and generally was treated like a child. Or City of Heroes where I... Beat up 5 people infected with a virus, and then beat up another 10 or so to get the formula for the cure, but really, I didn't need to, because the NPC I rescued seemed more than capable of doing that.
In all those tutorials you learn to play the game, so the only distinguishing things are the game mechanics themselves and the story behind them.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
will shoot sonic shockwaves from his butt, along with an area of effect incapacitating cloud.
Actually, COH already had that, sorta. You could copy a character to the test server any time you wished and any number of times you wished. So if you wanted to test your next choice of power or your respec, you already could do just that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Champions - Where we pretend to do more before 9 a.m. than most people actually do all day!
Bark less. Wag more.
More like a strong 6.
I wanted to like the game, I really enjoy the Champions role playing game.
While there is some nive costume making, and some of the visually effects of the powers are extremely cool.
The game becomes boring pretty fast, and the 'comic book' effect on the art is just plain irritating.
I could play it for longer then two weeks. I was just bored.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would never hire this guy. The industry is barely a decade old and according to this guy there are paradigms that have been established that hold forever. Apparently, this guy has not heard of creativity and innovation. Why is there something rather than nothing? Those that know the answer are the ones that will create new paradigms. Too bad some people can't see farther than their nose and make so bold and naive claims.
If anything wanted me to quit the game it would be the way they handle retcon simply because you can hose a character fairly easy when choosing skills.
They give you out a testing room (which is nice) but its just a bunch of high level dummies which in no way show how the skills will turn out in real game play.
So now you need 20 gp to revoke all the skills you took after that and thats usually way more than you will ever see in 6 months of game play and now you have to redesign your gameplay around the mechanics when you feel like it might be worth re-rolling the same damn character.
Heck... Re-rolling is often faster.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Does anyone know how closely this MMO corresponds to the book based RPGs by the same name? I seem to recall that the character power creation scheme was interesting.
In order for an online game to thrive it needs to fill a niche and fill it well to retain customers, revenue and developers. It sounds like it is 99% the exact same game as City of Heroes, and will have the same problems as CoH as well. How is it different from other MMOs? How is it better? This review is very fluffy and is afraid, unwilling or unaware to answer the most important question:
Why should someone play this game?
Does it seem to anyone else that the graphics engine in this game already seems extremely aged?
I understand that MMOs have a longer development lifespan than most other kinds of games, but it seems like they started off with a crappy engine, threw some cell shading onto it, and then said "Ok, that looks decent enough, on to the rest!" It may also be an issue of not seeing the graphics in motion or something, but by and large, from the screenshots I've seen, it just seems like some crappy texture work with lines around every outlying polygon.
Again, I don't mean to nitpick, but you'd think that in today's cut-throat next-gen MMO development environment, they would have put a higher emphasis on better graphics.
They certainly aren't the first nor will they be the last MMO maker to say that rebalancing (which is what nerfing / augmenting is) is going to occur during the lifetime of a game. And they also aren't the first to allow people to change their skills when rebalancing occurs. WoW routinely refunds all of your talent points and gives you a free respec when they do a major change to a character class.
Ha, nice :)
But it *is* a role playing game, so pretending is kind of the point. Really, all games now are more or less "press buttons at the right time" so what is there to it other than the pretending?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
You can actually test and work with a power and get to know it and understand it before you commit it to your character.
Kinda.... you can't test all powers unless you get someone else's help. The only powers you can really test on your own are basic damage powers.
How many different characters can you create? Where do you get the lifetime subscription? (I don't see it on the website.) Is this a game even an 8-year old can enjoy? And most importantly, how large can you make the female Champion's breasts?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Once the game gets to MMO, it's no longer a role playing game, no matter how much you or I would like it to be.
It's a smash fest with a shiny grab with a bunch of assholes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Contradictions and free passes galore. I've worked as a game reviewer and this has all the hallmarks of a rookie trying to cover a massive title like an MMO. Major UI lag, poor quest structuring, lack of starting areas, etc. yet all is forgiven each time and the game still pulls away an 8/10? 7/10 maybe would be a truer reflection based on the text given here, max. Some of the issues raised can be fixed fairly easily via patches, some may be more laborious, but once they have been addressed then maybe an 8/10 is more in order.
People underestimate the time required for even modest length titles, and MMOs often take weeks of play - not levelling or playing for fun, but dedicated review work where many characters are created and every nook/cranny/feature is tested - and obviously if the reviewer is sitting on a lvl 31 none of this was done. Slashdot has always failed miserably on game reviews and I think it is one of those things better left to the places that do them best.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Actually, it's good to see I'm not the only one.
And I don't think it's just the engine.
When I put the biker vest (as a random example) on a character in the old COH, I can really see the wrinkles and whatnot on it. In CO it just looks a lot more bland and smoothed out, in between those cel shading lines.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Heh. So, I'm complaining about the difference to _COH_, and your conclusion is that it's about it not being like _WOW_? Well, that's certainly a new kind of troll. The kind who can't even read.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The whole look and feel of CO makes it seem like a title designed to be played on a console, not a PC. I was severely disappointed in this title, despite being a big fan of COH/V, because it felt like nothing more than a simplistic console product, aimed at the ADHD crowd. You never seem to stop fighting, everything is a distaster happening now, the whole world is full of a new criminal every 20 feet etc. The simple UI for attacks and blocks was also unimpressive.
I am not a console player, I like complex games and I like the control to be had from a mouse and a PC-oriented UI. This game seemed to lack that in spades. It felt like I ought to be using a console controller and I just couldn't shake that.
Now I admit I have a bias against consoles. I have played a lot of them and always lost interest in short order. As a result I lost interest in this game as well, without ever making it out of the tutorial.
I would give it a 3/10 personally. COH was brilliant and I will likely return to playing it at some point, but this simply failed to make the grade.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I'm enjoying the game immensely, but I've seen no mention of the game's most glaring ommision, if not what might actually kill it: Total lack of LFG support.
Getting out and meeting other players is what MMORPGs are all about. To support this, modern games all come with some kind of built in interface to help players looking for groups and groups looking for more players meet up. Champions has...nothing.
In a way, it is actually worse than you might imagine. At least in most games you can fall back to spamming global chat with "LFG" messages. However, Champions' shard design means that any such message will only go to the 40 or so players who happen to be on your shard. There could well be 20 people sitting around waiting at the entrance to some group quest and spamming zone chat for teammates, but they will never meet up if the game happened to put them all on different shards. What this means in practice is that groups are very rare. I have seen a few supergroup-tagged heroes running around, but they are a minority. If you want to find a good group, you will probably have to find some offline way to meet up with them. The flip side of this is that once you do find some friends to play with, meeting up with them couldn't be eaiser. Since there are no servers, you don't have the situation where friends get stuck with mains on different servers, or have to develop chars (perhaps the same char!) on different servers so they can play with friends and with their guild.
You also don't have to do silly things like write down your friend's alt names of a slip of paper to keep track of them all, and add all 30 of them to your friends list. Characters are designed using a "Toon name@account name" format, and adding the account name as a friend (or guildmate) is sufficient to get all of their alts, now and forever. Chats work the same way. You don't have to care about servers or alts; if a friend is playing the game, you can find out and chat with them.
No, gamers call anything they perceive as a nerf a nerf. Even if the nerfed thing was obviously spectacularly broken.
I remember back when I played UO, the devs released a tame that a) anyone could control, and b) was equivalent in combat power to tames that normally required a fair amount of taming skills (I.E. would normally pretty much require a dedicated tamer). Within hours of the release the devs stated that it was broken and would be fixed - yet, when they did a week later, the cries of 'nerf' were spectacularly loud.
Read it carefully, remembering things that were said in previous paragraphs and it quickly becomes clear that the reviewer WANTS to be positive. A deadly sin, a reviewer should always be neutral.
Easily fixable bugs are okay? If they are easy to fix, then why haven't they been fixed?
He has to grind between content and as you say, there is a reasonable amount of content? Didn't the reviewer say at the beginning that this ain't the dark ages anymore, MMO's have been around for a long time and dev's should know better now.
CO is Yet Another MMO that doesn't innovate as much as try to chase the twitch/PvP crowd, or worse the console crowd. Others have complained about how simple the game is to play, almost as if designed for a gamepad. No kidding, the game is going to the 360.
As I like MMO's a lot I have spend a lot of time thinking about MMO's and frankly, I think the drive for both twitch and PvP are hopelessly flawed for an MMORPG.
Why? The proof is in other games.
There are TWO games we play often and more importantly for LONG times, long past their graphical lifetime.
The first are the multiplayer FPS. I have long since grown past it, but you didn't play Quake for the pretty graphics, you played it for the instant hard action. But these games all have one thing in common. You are equal. Think about it, everything about multiplayer FPS games, tries to balance the players to extreme, often by simply making them exactly the same, or by playing both sides of the battle in turns.
Why is the RTS Starcraft so loved? Because the sides are superbly balanced.
But this goes against the heart of a (western) RPG, to build your own character, different from others. In a game like Neverwinter Nights, you get to choose from several classes and it is very clear that not all are equal in combat. Dungeon and Dragons Online even warns for this. Some classes are harder to play then others. How do you balance completly different classes with totally different roles? You can't.
This is like starting a game of counterstrike, and one side is given pistols and the other machine guns. Ouch! But an MMO never forces you to switch side and the session never ends. In multiplayer FPS/RTS any advantage you do take, ends at the end of the session.
There are however other games we play for long times, but these games tend to be more about strategy, development. Slow process where we carefully plan our actions. Wether that is an empire building game or the sims or a strategy or a (civilian) flightsimulator, in these games we have a set of skills/capabilities and the game is to learn them and how to use them best. Wether that is sorting our what sims need to do what to get all the stuff done and still advance, or plot the course of an aircraft, or direct a battle doesn't matter. These games are NOT about twitch, they are about tactics, stategy and thinking.
WoW and EQ and all similar games are like this. You have a character, you learn its skills and then you use these skills. It ain't about twisting and turning but using the right skills at the right time. Twitch is NOT what is needed here, it only distracts.
The proof is in Champions Online "block" skills. As another poster has explained, it has nothing to do with blocking, let alone predicting when an enemy has to be blocked. A meter is displayed, when it is full you should have pressed a button or you take a massive amount of damage. Bugs (mentioned in the review) or design mean your actual skills are interrupted while this is going on. Gone all your plans, all your tactics. And it goes on constantly. The combat quickly ends up as nothing more then pressing your cheap attack, power attack when you got power and BLOCK whenever the light comes on.
But isn't that fine for dozens if not hundreds of console action games? Yes, but those games ain't player for hundred of hours. Action games come and go very quickly.
MMO's shouldn't. They are very expensive to develop so a publisher needs the kind of a
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
C'mon. I'm sure the MMO is nice and all, but give credit where credit's due. Champions and the HERO system games are very good RPGs. I still have a huge collection of d6's from that... Who doesn't love the uber-villain with a 300-point VPP who puts it all into 8d6K+AP+IKB, ... am I wrong?
Actually, from what I can tell, they mostly borrowed the name and a concept or two from Champions and that's about it. Not much of the ACTUAL Champions game is found in the MMOG
So says you. This might shock you, but there are people who experience different things differently.
I generally hang in game with a decent bunch of people, and don't experience much of the assholery. Maybe try finding a different bunch of folks?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
You know, the whole "nerf" thing isn't just used to piss off gamers, sometimes it is really used to fix broken things. Everything you described about the Blizzard spell sounds like it was broken. Not "broken".
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I nerf is anything that changes an aspect to a game in which it lowers its power. Blizzard WAS broken, you stated it yourself: "It was ridiculously powerful". If something is ridiculously powerful then it is more then likely too powerful, hence broken. This is why you think it was a BS nerf. Now the players who did not make the sorceress and had to play PVP against them with more balanced skills see this as a bug fix, because it gave them a better chance. In Champions if they change something in a way you dont like you can retcon, same as respecing in wow, but a lot more expensive.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I'd be curious to hear what players of the old pen and paper RPG version of Champions think. The best part of the game was the separation of game mechanics from character type. It sounds like CO got that part right. The differences between normal, killing, no normal defense, and ego/psi attacks also made for interesting character variety. Combat in the original RPG was somewhat tedious and arithmetic-intensive. The review mentions "killing" henchmen. One of the hallmarks of the RPG were characters with "Code Vs. Killing" psychological limitations. What world would accept superheroes who casually walk into a fight and kill their enemies?
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
There have been similar solutions in other MMOs where characters affected by a nerf were offered a limited time opportunity to re-assign skills, powers, etc...Although, in a game like COH, where so many items and enhancements are geared towards certain skills and powers and can only be acquired through play, this remains an imperfect solution. However, those who are affected by a nerf should ask themselves, "Do I really want to play in an unbalanced game where everyone eventually chooses 'the combination' because it is hands-down better than any other possible build"? Ultimately, that is fun for neither those who benefited initially from the unbalanced characters or those who all create new "uber-build" characters with the unbalanced skills and powers.
Thanks a lot Microsoft.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Foxbat doesn't count as a hero, unless I somehow missed a quest. :P
Ezekiel 23:20
I thought the intro level for WoW was perfect. Enough repetition to allow yo to figure out how to manage your toon, yet not enough to bore you, and not so dangerous that you found yourself dying over and over and becoming frustrated. I remember the first time I played, I was completely sucked in and went 4 hours or so before I forced myself to quit playing. Of course, in the months to come, this self control was completely lost.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The writeup reads like ad copy. I've been reading about CO -- I haven't played it, mostly because of what I've been reading -- and from all reports it's nowhere near as appealing as Soulskill makes it sound.
The UI is generally described as 'horrible' and 'clunky'. The launch was moderately poor, with a variety of huge early nerfs that caused a minor player revolt. The central mechanism of combat -- attacks that build endurance, so that you can power up to larger attacks -- appears to have basic flaws, in that combats are repetitive clickfests with little strategy. (Yes, even since the end building 'attacks' were changed into toggles to make it feel less tedious.) Ranged characters have overwhelming advantages compared to melee. And worst of all, the open world missions are an invitation to griefing -- your hero might have to queue up in a line to defeat an enemy and finish your mission, or you might get your enemy down to a sliver of health only to have the kill -- and the mission -- stolen from you by another player.
A side issue is Cryptic's attitude in and out of the game. Deceptive recruiting on the City of Hero forums, astroturfing fan sites, and a character in CO that shouts, "You are as boring as competing MMO!". Unethical companies like that are not ones to whom I want to give money.
I'm glad people enjoy CO, but let's be honest about its status in the MMO world. Its poor launch and failed, regressive mechanics mark it as a new second-tier MMO. If it is meant to be WoW in tights, it might be barely suitable to those who crave that sort of thing. If it is meant to be a followup to CoH then it fails, as the original superhero MMO is a more evolved, superior game.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
You misunderstand. What the GP is saying is that CO is the first to let players try out a new skill/spell before committing to its purchase, not that they were the first to do balancing acts or to offer free respecs after major changes.
I was being nice; I have a soft-spot for geeky guys who are completely out of their depth.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
That's on the house. Further truth fixes will be billed at $1/word.
That's not entirely true; you can test crowd control powers, damage mitigation powers, and self-buffs, too.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
As a Champions player, I can tell you there are places in the game where role playing is going on. They have built several clubs and other areas for players to gather and roleplay. They do a much better job promoting the RPG aspect of the MMORPG game (notice the last bit... its RPG, stands for ROLE PLAYING GAME) than a lot of other games.
What it boils down to is, you play how you want to play.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
The difference between a free respec in WoW and a full Retcon in CO is that in WoW you're switching different abilities within the same class. After the respec your Rogue (or whatever) is still basically the same character it was before. In CO a full retcon allows you to change nearly everything about the character. The dual wielding sword fighter can suddenly morph into a ranged caster, a healer, a tank, or whatever.
The last new character I played in WoW (before quitting yet again) involved doing generally nasty stuff like killing innocents and destroying cities, ending with you attempting to destroy Light's Hope in Eastern Plaguelands (a battle you can't win) and fighting of the boss's from Naxxramus (a battle you can't lose).
Granted, this is only for the newest "heroic" class: Death Knight, which required you to have a level 55 character already. So, you were expected to know most of the game mechanics already, and this just introduced your class's abilities and generally explained how a Death Knight became part of the Alliance/Horde in the first place.
Of course, Blizzard just wrote themselves a blank check when it comes to starting areas with the new expansion... all the areas from the original (pre-expansion) game are being redone. This includes starting areas. Oh, and this change affects everyone, not just those who buy the Cataclysm expansion.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Cell-shading... No thanks.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Um, I can't think of any game - ever - that doesn't fall under the header of "Press buttons at the right time".
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Oddly enough, my copy arrived today, so I've just played through the tutorial. It was slightly less smooth for me.
The first problem was due to billing; after feeding the serial number into the registration form it asked me what subscription type I wanted: credit card or gamecard. There was no option for 'my copy came with a month's worth of time and I want to see whether I like it before giving you my credit card number'. I eventually had to make a transatlantic phone call to tech support in the USA to get that sorted out. Poor, Cryptic. Very poor.
The second problem was the 10-minute load time. No, not kidding, it sat there at the loading screen for ten minutes. I've only played it once so far, so I don't know if it's going to do that every time or whether it's just the first time. Either way it's not a good first impression.
The third problem was getting the graphics set up. I have a 2GB Celeron D 3.2GHz with a 1GB GeForce 9500GT graphics card. Not the latest hardware, sure, but still perfectly reasonable, and it'll run WoW at 1440x900 with all the settings on max. Even with the resolution cranked down and all the settings on minimum, Champions would still chug periodically, and the graphics quality is comparable to World of Warcraft. In particular, loading geometry would cause it to slide-show for a few seconds. Getting out of the starting zone improved things a lot, but it still feels very sluggish. What's more, there wasn't any attempt to autodetect a sane set of, er, settings --- out of the box I was getting a 1fps slideshow.
Once into the actual tutorial --- yes, the tutorial is indeed very cool. There are some sections where you're obviously being led around by the hand. Fighting through the Champions HQ was more like following Defender around through the pitch black corridors (level design tip: always provide enough light to see the walls by) until he led me to the next plot coupon. But there's a lot of very nice touches; such as the instanced victory parade for you, just you, where all the people you rescued are in the audience making apropos comments (and the guy who's supposed to be going on holiday is dashing off in the distance, late for his plane). That's cool.
In general I like the idea of the action-packed tutorial. It was certainly fun. OTOH it was also overwhelmingly busy. The WoW tutorial starts you out with an almost completely blank screen which gradually fills with elements one by one as you learn about them. In Champions, on exiting the tutorial at level 5 there's still lots of stuff on the screen which I don't recognise (and the tooltips don't help). I think on the whole I prefer the WoW approach where you at least get a quiet area where you can practice walking before having to take on the alien horde.
After a couple of hours the gameplay is still unfamiliar, but my first impression is that it's much less smooth than WoW. Little things like when you rotate the viewpoint with the camera and then press 'walk', your character takes a couple of paces in the wrong direction before turning --- I fell off a couple of things because of that. The autotargeting is a good idea; if you press the 'punch' button and nothing's targeted, it will autotarget the closest item. OTOH if you've been using a ranged power on one target and another one jumps you in melee and you start hammering the 'punch' button, nothing happens other than 'target out of range' appearing in tiny letters until you reach for the mouse. All this stuff needs polish.
The actual UI is clunky and unintuitive and can be largely summed up with the phrase 'Comic Sans'. Everything has a tooltip, but they're uninformative and take far too long to appear. At one point one of the NPCs tells me to press 'i' to bring up my inventory. Well, 'i' doesn't work because I picked the Fantasy keybinding set rather than the Champions keybinding set. Having different keybindings available is a very nice feature --- but it would be nicer if the docs got updated to match. I still hav
Both of those sound better than FFXI's tutorial, which consists of:
<< Welcome to <servername>! >>
According to update notes, apparently they added a tutorial NPC on Sept 9, 2008 (the game came out on May 16, 2002), but that was a little late for me to experience it.
Sturgeon was an optimist.
That was the entirety of my point, that without pretending, any game is just pressing buttons at the right time.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
In fairness to the WoW contrast you made, WoW did rethink their starting quests when they introduced their new hero class (death knights). In your first 5 levels (which go by ridiculously fast compared to the very old days), you invade a well defended village, get a free mount to take you places as fast as those areas allow, accumulate powers at a phenomenal rate, and slaughter the elders of a large and well defended town. All while helping the (arguably) most powerful NPC villain in the game, whom you eventually betray.
I really don't see anything new or impressive coming out of CO, including this whole retcon (Warhammer Online has always done this too, btw) and "epic tutorial" thing. Although I am definitely glad other games are picking up on these properties that gamers want to see in their MMOs.
Most of the things you describe can be reached through the options menu in game (hit escape until a menu pops up, just like in WoW). I agree some of them are poorly labeled - but keybindings is it's own tabular section in the options pane.
Here is something for some of your problems:
1) Tooltips can be set to appear instantly. They are, initially, set to a 1 second delay. There's an option - I think under interface - for "tool tip display delay" or something like that. I set mine to zero, and the tips pop up right away. Found it by mucking around with the interface.
2) There may be a way to have it automatically change targets to the guy hitting you in melee when you were shooting someone else, but this behavior in CO is exactly the same as the behavior in WoW. If you have a ranged mob targeting you and you hit a melee distance attack, it'll say out of range, so you'd have to handle it how you handled that situation in WoW. There are some control options that you can change around, but they take a bit of fiddling. I completely redid my controls to be more like a shooter, and I use a 360 gamepad with it and it's very easy to do.
3) UI and camera lag: I keep on hearing about this from people, but I don't experience it. My system isn't all that high end (2.8gz Wolfsdale, nVidia 260 card, 2mb ram, xp sp3) so I don't know if it's the specs or the OS or what - I just haven't had a problem with the camera not turning quick enough or anything like that.
4) The loading screen - was it patching? You may have been verifying files or something. It shouldn't take that long in future if it's patches, but then, maybe it will - you might have a lot of cruft on your system and are experiencing choked memory, perhaps?
Generally, the performance has been improving steadily with patches. I haven't had any negative issues with the performance - it was good enough for me at launch, but it's gotten a lot smoother since, which is gravy.
Graphically, at reasonably low settings, yes, it looks about as good as WoW. I have it running at nearly maximum settings and it looks phenomenal to me - MUCH better than WoW does in pretty much every way. If you can swing it, check out the 260 - it's a decent performer at a pretty reasonable price. I think a lot of the things you experienced in the tutorial might have been things you could change - boost the alpha (the rooms weren't dark for me, though somewhat shadowy, given that many of the lights had been shot out) and I'm also using the better lighting options, so maybe that changes a lot. I get around 30-40fps steadily, regardless of where I am.
On my roomie's machine, she runs it like a slide-show, though she's got 2gb vista, I think an 8800gt or possibly a 6800gt - it looks about as "good" as city of heroes on her computer, and she's getting 15 or so FPS. She says she's about due to get a new machine (or upgrade various components), and for less than $500 she's going to have a system a bit better than mine when she's done.
Good luck, and hope your performance issues get resolved, or that you at least have fun :)
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).
This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.
The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:
1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.
In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance). These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution later.
The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...
2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.
It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working. When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken, and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.
However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence. Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process. Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may have been that there was deep design work
Out of their depth? Have you SEEN what that ping-pong ball can do? If he was a bit more focused, it wouldn't be Dr Destroyer we're worried about.
Ezekiel 23:20
1: Fugly. However, I'm prepared to put up with fugly if the gameplay is there.
1.1: Fugly in a way that interferes with gameplay. This I'm NOT of a mind to ignore. Ever.
Essentially, two of the major graphical advances being touted with CO (over CoH) were:
A: Cell Shading
B: Depth of Field
Guess what two of the most frequently turned off effects are.
A: The Cell Shading outline (makes the game somewhat less fugly).
B: Depth of Field (it interferes with targeting almost anything beyond melee range).
Pardon me but WHOOPS! The two "big" features (graphically) and people are turning them OFF to play in an acceptable manner?
2: Teaming is pointless to the extent that you could say it's discouraged.
Basically, unless you gimp yourself in-game, EVERYONE is a "tankmage". The game doesn't really scale the difficulty of missions to properly account for a team. There's no real in-game benefit to it. You don't make more "money" and don't get more XP than running the same thing solo (due to having larger pools of enemies).
3: It's a console button-masher. Sure, their XBox port got delayed more or less indefinitely, but the console fingerprints are all over this. Sorry, but I haven't been into button mashers for years (due to CTS). Even though you can auto your endurance-builder attack, it's still annoying.
4: Wow, eight whole alt slots (16 if you bought the lifetime sub). Sure, to someone fresh from another MMO where you get ONE character per account, this may seem generous. But, even Cryptic admits that, having studied CoH extensively, most players there had an average of SIXTEEN alts. Comparatively, CoH gives you a starting allotment of 12 characters PER SERVER. There are 11 US servers (plus the Test machine).
11x12=132
Moreover, you gain character slots as veteran rewards (keeping a continuous subscription), and can purchase more as well. This gives you up to 36 alts per server.
11x36=396
This essentially allows you to try any and all crazy builds in the game. Without risk of having to bump a well built character elsewhere to make room for it.
Moreover, for several issues now, CoH has had dual-builds. In other words, your toon can have a build designed for one thing, then swap out to another build with a different set of power choices and enhancement slotting.
5: Play is completely repetitive. You run through it once and you're pretty much done with the game. Yes, it's going to take time to fill more content, but even CoH had pathing for various origins so that it was nearly impossible to have a single character who had run EVERY mission/mission arc in the game.
6: Deceptive recruiting and marketing.
Needless to say, a certain company tried to utilize a former partner's/competitor's community forums to recruit people for their games. This left something of a bad taste in the mouth of some.
Also, less than a week (one day) post launch, there was a massive nerf of powers, XP earnings, etc. Now it's possible to RUN OUT OF NEW CONTENT IN YOUR RANGE to level on. This means you have to repeat things and grind to make up the deficit.
There was another row over their offering of lifetime and six-month deals to bring people in the door. They said nothing about limited quantities, and only placed a time limit on when these packages would cease being offered. Then, almost two weeks to the deadline, they announced that they were "out of lifetime subscriptions".
???
I can see the marketing angle of this. They want to make sure they don't sell too many of them and hurt future profitability. However, they should have been up-front about the fact that they were offering limited quantities.
7: Not-so-micro transactions. This, in and of itself isn't inherently evil. CoH does it for boosters and expansions. My gripe is simply how miserly the initial offering of CO was compared to what you're going to be expected to buy later on.
8: Customer-hostile support. Started way back i
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
City of Heroes where I... Beat up 5 people infected with a virus, and then beat up another 10 or so to get the formula for the cure, but really, I didn't need to, because the NPC I rescued seemed more than capable of doing that.
They added that NPC to the tutorial a few years after initial release of the game. It used to just be you (or you and a few teammates you picked up in the zone) in there. I couldn't understand why they added the NPC and then realized that someone probably complained about the tutorial being too difficult or something. That's about when I called it quits for MMOs. They start out great and then quickly start dumbing the game down to the lowest common denominator practically handing you everything on a silver platter and players STILL complain things are too hard. WoW was the worst for this.
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Planetside used to have the same thing where you had an instanced virtual shooting gallery and could try out any item/weapon without needing the skill for it
On the flip-side, it is possible to completely screw yourself over if you pick powers that don't synergize well. If, for example, you are a primarily ranged character (force bolts or something) but you take a melee energy builder attack (the basic attack that powers up your other attacks) you will probably not have much fun because you have to zoom in to build energy, then run away to fight at range. Or, you might make a "glass cannon" build - all offense with no defense. In the first 10 levels or so, you probably won't notice a lack of a passive defensive power, but very quickly after that you'll slam into a brick wall where you are repeatedly killed because mobs scale up under the impression that you will be a bit more well rounded.
I personally would have never played WoW if respecs cost me 1000 gold. You just gave me all the reason I need to never play this game. Most players aren't devs, didn't play in the beta, and really have no idea what skills are useful. How are people supposed to know which powers synergize never having played the game before?
Also, the utility of powers will change as you encounter different challenges or levels. The old version of Spirit Tap was great for my low level Priest, but once I hit the level cap (and even long before that) the skill was almost completely useless, and of course I wanted to respec to Blackout instead.
This system you keep apologizing for seems bent on punishing noobs for making mistakes that they had no way of knowing they were making. Most people don't do 80 hours of research and interviews with top players before attempting to play a video game. Another thing that makes no sense: respecs cost 280 days of play time or free at the next big patch? Yeah, it all makes perfect sense now.
You sound just like the Everquest devs shooting down all the petitions to make the game suck less to play because it didn't fit their pre-conceived notions of how long it was supposed to take to reach level 50.
Ah, you're right - I remember why they added the NPC: it was when they added in the ability to rescue "allies" so that was a demonstration of it.
The best thing about the COH tutorial is the ability to skip it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
But can I crank up my Presence stat and force my enemies to surrender just due to my shear godliness?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Let me just deposit my two cents, here, and make sure that I'm understanding what people here are bitching about. *Clears throat and gets onto soap box*
YOU ARE PLAYING A FUCKING HERO. What the hell else do you expect to be doing as a HERO? Should yahtzee be involved? How about tea with grandma? NO! You're a fucking hero. The only things heroes ever do is beat some ass, retrieve stolen/rare items/hostages or otherwise armageddon-inducing weaponry, and occasionally cry at night with or without your hot significant other who occasionally gets kidnapped. THAT'S IT. Oh, sorry, forgot one. A Hero will also (depending on the circumstances) delve into discovering their mysterious past, known to practically everyone but them.
If you're looking for something bigger, I mean, maybe you should shift into some other kind of genre. Because when you break it down, that's what you're doing in every mmo. Kill, collect, grind, customize. That's the formula for every MMO; its success is just in the way of how the developers vary the formula. Sure, you can say story has something to do with it. But I know plenty of people who are in ridiculously lore-heavy games, and they click through virtually every ounce of story because your objective will show up in the log. I'm not saying that's what the majority do, but all one has to do is compare the numbers of an rpg server to a pvp server(s). Just saying. *Hops off soap box*
This game does a handful of things very VERY right. And the rest are bland.
The good.
1- All Servers connected... no more 'oh, you're not on my server' nonsense. This needs to be copied and used in any MMO from now on (or ongoing ones)
2- Naming System... have any name you want (with your account label on it to keep it seperate). Brilliant on two grounds... no more XXXSp1d3rm4nXXX characters, AND no more people making alts to be anonymously annoying. Have the name you want. There should be a way to hide the "@acct" thing, unless there are more then 1 of them in chat... or maybe have it be on mouse over only. However it's done, I want this in all other MMO's
Other then that, it's CoH 2, and will likely just steal enough customers to hurt both games, but not really get anywhere. The game itself is just... dull. I've seen people bitching about character slots... what on earth would you need multi-characters for? Pick whatever powers you want and put them on one char... take every op power, use it till they nerf it, then respec to the new flavor of the month. I could see leveling 2, MAAAAAYBE 3 characters... 8? what's the point, they barely have that many power sets, and consitering by top level you HAVE to use 2 sets (not enough powers in one tree to JUST be electricity or something). You'll use all the sets you're even slightly interested in within 2 or 3 chars tops.
Other games need to eat this ones brains to gain it's two good points, but avoid it's attempts at content. The game is just - dull -
1. Far from fugly. Not fantastic, but it's ok
1.1 I'd like to know how it interfered with your gameplay
I play with Cell Shading, cause it give a "Comics" feeling, and Depth of Field (without targeting problem. I can easily target from afar to find boss in mob cluster, with Flying I feel like a bird of prey.
2. You obsiouvsly have only played Beta. People almost always ask for help when they go fighting master-vilain or huge cluster of henchmen. Passive defenses have been nerfed to oblivion, DPS focused character can't tank 6+ henchmen anymore.
3. Action-oriented game. 'nough said.
4.First real argument. Ok, 8 slot sucks. But there multiple builds. You get the second one at lvl15 and the third one at lvl20 I think.
5.True. Not enough quests, game is very repetitive if you're playing it for the second time. They're working on it.
6.Ahah ! Who cares except CoH fanboy ?
Lifetime subscription returned after 24h because people complained.
7. No reql content is out yet, how can you judge something that doesn't exist ?
8. Awesome customer support ! They screw up sometimes, but always try to make things better.
Dev often comment their decisions on the forum and they listen to the community.
9. True. PvP sucks right now.
1: It's my opinion. Nothing more.
1.1: Depth of field turns everything beyond about 5 feet in front of you into a blurry mess. I'm sure I could bind something to grab an enemy target but..
2: Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Closed Beta, Open Beta. That was enough for me to decide not to give Cryptic my money. Global nerf bait and switch after the fact is not a reassurance, but merely one more reason to avoid the game for now.
3: I'm sorry, mashing buttons till something falls down isn't "action oriented". It's button mashing. Nothing more. That's like labeling a wild burst with a machine gun "precision fire".
4: The others weren't arguments. They're opinions.
4: And if I don't want to rebuild an existing character? What do those alt builds get me then? 8/16 vs 132/396? Contest? What contest?
5: I know they are working on it. It's the bugbear of all MMO games. No publisher is EVER going to produce enough content to stay ahead of their voracious player base. However, the game's problem came about because of a badly executed confluence of content planning and badly timed nerfs.
6: Someone who knows what "ethics" are without having to search Wikipedia for it.
7: They've made their business model with CO unambiguously clear.
8: I'll just say your experience is vastly different and leave it at that.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Eve is tiny. Meridian 59 also still has an audience, as does UO and the original Everquest.
Champions Online did NOT aim to be a niche game. It aims to compete with the big boy. I would say boys but there really only is one.
In my opinion it will quickly fall down to be another also ran.
If your goal is 300.000 subscribers, then getting 300.000 is good especially if you keep growing slowly. That is what Eve does.
If your goal is 1million+ and you get 300.000, then it ain't good. That is what I think CO is going to do.
Ask SOE about this, they are very experienced with the process.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.