So before the GamesCom madness starts I thought that I’d write my own preview based on my time in closed beta as well as what little I had a chance to try yesterday. As such, since the game still hasn’t launched yet, things are still subject to change and are, obviously, purely based on my own experiences and perceptions.
A small warning, this preview turned out to be massively large.
[b:31yyciin]A New Superhero MMO[/b:31yyciin]
Many years ago Cryptic Studios pretty much created a new genre of MMO when they launched [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heroes:31yyciin]City of Heroes[/url:31yyciin]. Though never a massive success it did well enough for itself and was quite enjoyable. No surprise then that several new superhero-based MMO projects started up, including one based on the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Univers ... e:31yyciin]DC Universe[/url:31yyciin] and one based on the [url=http://www.zmogo.com/video-games/marvel ... /:31yyciin]Marvel Universe[/url:31yyciin].
That last one was, in fact, what Champions Online was originally intended to be until deals fell through and Cryptic decided to change it to Campions Online, basing if on the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_ ... 9:31yyciin]Champions[/url:31yyciin] license instead. Still, considering that they created City of Heroes (and its evil twin sister [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Villains:31yyciin]City of Villains[/url:31yyciin]) and similarities between those games and Cryptic’s new game abound.
So much so in fact that it would not be unreasonable to call Champions Online “City of Heroes 2.0”. Next to the superficial similarity of both being a superhero MMO made by the same developer the character customization is similar, there are a lot of similarities in abilities, there are similarities in missions, etc. As much similarities as there are however there as at least as much differences as well. One could wonder if those similarities aren’t just due to it being the same genre and developer, but one would have to wait to see what the other superhero MMOs do to determine that.
[b:31yyciin]Character Customization[/b:31yyciin]
As with any MMO one begins the game with creating a character. Right from the start Cryptic shows why it has made a reputation of giving players some of the deepest customization systems ever. Character customization alone could be a place where one can spend hours and hours creating all kinds of interesting, yet very different, looking characters.
The first choice that players will have to make is not regarding appearance however, but regarding what powers your hero will start with. Players can pick from over a dozen power sets, ranging from use of fire, use of gadgets or guns, swords or other forms of melee, to telepathy and sorcery. This choice will give you two starting powers as well as starting stats, but players more familiar with the game mechanics may create their own package and select starting powers from any set as well as a configuration of stats. But more on power customization later.
Once you know what powers your hero starts with the visual part of the customization begins and here one can easily spend an hour or more getting things just right. After selecting male or female you start with customizing your hero’s face. Here one can select one of the pre-defined heads, or go into a [i:31yyciin]lot[/i:31yyciin] more detail with a wide variety of sliders to change everything from the lips, the nose, the ears and the general shape of the head. This is followed by the same process again for your hero’s body where one can select either one of the pre-defined shapes or go into a lot more detail with all kinds of sliders. And the variety one can achieve is astounding, from spindly to big and muscular. The only interesting note is that for females the breast slider always seems to be maximized by default no matter which build you pick (or how often you press the ‘randomize’ button).
And yet the real detail doesn’t even begin until after you’ve shaped a body. Players of the “City of” games might be familiar with this as you can now go through your character from head-to-toe, selecting items and colours for numerous parts to make your superhero costume. The choice here can almost be too overwhelming as you go through all the possible choices, selecting colors, and mixing and matching. Angels, demons, fairies, robots, cowboys, spandex-wearers, anthropomorphic characters, and so much more is possible here. Many games claim unique customization, but in the end all character really end up looking sort-of similar. But not so in Champions Online where two characters will truly never look alike unless purposely made to be so (or by sheer one-in-a-million fluke).
Luckily for those who just want to get in and play there is a randomization button which, when pressed, gives you a random configuration of items. Many of these will look quite bad, but they can offer as inspiration or one can just keep randomizing until something that suits you appears. And what’s more, one can then go in and manually customize further or lock certain parts you’re happy with before pressing randomize again for the rest. In the end everyone should be able to get something they’re happy with, regardless of how much effort they spend. And as an added bonus things like capes (and a wide variety of wings) are available from the start instead of behind a level 20 quest (as in City of Heroes).
Once your superhero has a costume there is yet one more step to perform by selecting a general mood and stance for your character. The mood changes the facial expression from kind, determined to aggressive. And the stance changes the posture of your character as well as how they walk. The bestial stance in particular makes this noticeable as it will make your character crouch low to the ground when standing and run on all fours must like an animal. Pick a name and your hero is ready to save the world from evil.
All that, and we haven’t even entered the game itself yet.
[b:31yyciin]One Server For All[/b:31yyciin]
Which seems like as good a time as any to bring up Champions Online’s server architecture. Where most MMOs have a multitude of servers and you have to select which one to play on, keeping you confined to the community of that one server and having you hope that either you can get your friends to play on that server too or change and leave the friends you already made on the server behind, Champions Online takes a different approach.
In Champions Online there is only one, world-wide server. Gone are the days of trying to agree on the same server to play on, gone are the days of being unable to play with your friends across the Atlantic without importing another copy of the game (and creating a separate account), gone are the days of being faced with the choice of leaving your friends on the server behind and starting over on another or being disabled from playing with friends and family already playing on another server. With just one server you always know that the people you want to play with are playing in the same world as you. And it works beautifully.
The way Champions Online manages to get everyone on one server without causing major lag issues and such is by heavily instancing the world. Whenever you move to a new zone it brings up a list of all instances (called “Shards” in Champions Online) of that zone, adding how many team members, supergroup (guild) members and friends are in each zone, sorting them with the one with most of the most important one at the top (team first, then supergroup, then friends, then general population). And at all times you see what instance number you are in, making it easy to communicate this to friends, and equally you’re always able to switch to another instance. While many games do instancing badly, in Champions Online it is such a natural part of the game that one hardly thinks twice about it.
While one could fear that with everyone on one server it would make finding unique character names impossible, one need to worry as Cryptic found a perfect solution for this: you don’t have to have a unique character name. Instead each player has one, unique, [i:31yyciin]player[/i:31yyciin] name that is used to identify them, adding as a postfix after the character name. As such this is no worse than any account creation in any other game where your account name needs to be unique across the entire game (regardless of servers) anyway. In chat and friends lists names are then displayed as <character name>@<player name> while only the character name floats above your character’s head. When you then try to use a character name it can automatically fill in the player name for you or offer you a list of possibilities if there are more. Or you could just use the @<player name>.
Overall this server structure is one I’ve waited a long time for and I honestly feel that multiple servers are an archaic holdover from the past when the technology didn’t exist yet to do better. But I suspect that the first couple of MMOs will still use the multiple-server approach (I’m mostly looking at Star Wars: The Old Republic here though I hope that they will use just one server much like Champions Online) and there are always detractors of instanced systems why will cry loud and hard no matter how well implemented it is.
[b:31yyciin]Graphics[/b:31yyciin]
Character created and you first Shard selected our new hero enters the tutorial. The first thing one will notice is the unique graphics style that Champions Online uses.
Here it must be said in all honesty that not everyone is going to like the graphics style Champions Online has chosen (but then, name me one style that everyone is happy with). The term “cartoony” has gotten some very negative connotations in games, so much so that new games are instead using the term “stylized” now to describe their art style. But Champions Online is one game that embraces the term “cartoony” with pride.
This is because Champions Online is trying to have a look and feel reminiscent of comic books, and in that it definitely succeeds. Though optional a black outline surrounds characters and objects as if everything was inked. Colours are bold and shapes clear, and the similarities to comics go beyond that. Text appears in chat bubbles above avatar’s heads and the power-up indicator for enemies appears as a “BAM” or “ZWOOSH”-type sound-effect bubble over their heads, the UI appearing a bit like comic frames and the fonts used looking like those used in comics. This all seems to perfectly achieve the effect that Champions Online is going for: making it appear as if a superhero comic book has come to life.
Tastes vary, obviously, and I have little doubt that this style will turn people off. But despite being unable to play World of Warcraft for very long due to its cartoony style something just works for me in Champions Online. Perhaps it is because characters are still relatively realistically proportioned (for the most part) or perhaps it is because they’re so bold about it. It certainly doesn’t feel as if they simply couldn’t do any better, but feels like a purposeful choice (something some “stylized” games don’t yet achieve despite verdant claims otherwise by the developers).
It is perhaps not the most beautiful looking MMO ever (which I feel is a prize that still goes to Age of Conan), but it defines itself in its own style and does so very well.
[b:31yyciin]Combat[/b:31yyciin]
Combat is like the next thing new players will notice as it is something that the tutorial starts you with pretty much straight away. And though it still has the same targeting-and-skill-bar system of other MMOs, combat certainly isn’t what one would call “twitch-based”, it feels fast, dynamic and forces players to pay attention and react.
To start with the standard abilities don’t have a cool-down; you can use them again as soon as your previous attack finishes. Later abilities often do come on cool-downs, but these times tend to be fairly short. In fact, your most basic, or “energy-building”, attack automatically goes on auto-repeat so that it does that attack unless you manually select another one. This is a good thing, since you need energy to power all your powers regardless of whether they’re physical or magical, close-up or ranged. SO in general you start attacking, let your energy bar build up and then let go with more powerful attacks (using up your energy in the progress). And since you can attack while moving this can make combat quite dynamic.
But Champions Online also has a fairly unique (for MMOs) mechanic that adds even more to combat, namely blocking. With a single key/button press you tell your character to block, which decreases the damage you receive. This generally makes little sense for the normal attacks, but is vital for the special attacks. And noted above enemies sometimes get this special bubble above their head that tells you that they are going to let loose with a special attack. Blocking this effect in time means that you prevent most, if not all, of the damage as well as have a chance at stopping any special effect that it might carry (such as knockbacks or stuns). [i:31yyciin]Not[/i:31yyciin] stopping it in time means you quickly see your health bar deplete.
The only real regret I have regarding the combat system is that you do need to target your enemies first (with Tab, by clicking on them, or the controller bumper buttons). After playing Age of Conan every system where you first have to target an enemy before you can attack them seems like a step back, particularly with melee, and I wish that in Champions Online I could just attack and hit whatever was in front of me, even more because you tend to fight multiple enemies at once. As it is ranged combat is a little easier since you have a bit more oversight and can more easily switch between targets while with melee I at times find my character doing nothing because I accidentally targeted an enemy a little distance away. But it is something that you get used to (I don’t make the mistake as often anymore).
Another thing that still needs work is balancing. At the end of closed beta the difficulty has gone through a few iterations upon cries from some in the forums that it was too easy. But now at times it feels like it might be too hard. At the end of beta it was as good as impossible to defeat super villains with my melee character and now in open beta I find myself having severe difficulty with them still with my ranged character, as well as having a lot of difficulty with some lower mobs. Hopefully they will tweak this so that it feels like a fun challenge regardless of your powerset, maybe even include some difficulty setting.
[b:31yyciin]Progression[/b:31yyciin]
I’ve talked some about “melee character” and “ranged character”, but perhaps that is not entirely fair. After all, a character can be both if you want to. This is because Champions Online leaves you largely free in what powers you give your character on level-up.
Characters get new powers roughly every three levels (out of 40) and in between get things like ‘advantages’ (improvements to your powers) and attribute increases. But the power choice most will first look forward to is the selection of a travel power.
Travel powers are something that City of Heroes introduced, and something which I’d like to think as being a staple of the superhero MMO genre. City of Heroes offered four travel powers—Super Speed, Super Jump, Flight and Teleport—and while players weren’t forced to choose one they were so useful that you’d be gimped if you didn’t (those few that did without still got a ‘travel power light’ by combining combat jumping and sprinting abilities). Champions Online has a special power slot reserved that can only be used for a travel power, which you get at level 5 already right out of the tutorial, and offers far more of them. Super Speed, Super Jump, Flight, Teleport, Acrobatics (pretty much your Combat Jumping + Sprint only better), Swinging (like spiderman), Tunneling, Jet Boots (like Ironman), Hover Disk, Ice Slide and more besides.
I haven’t tried all of them, but even in the ones similar to City of Heroes there are some notable differences. Teleport in particular is implemented much better. Where City of Heroes has an awkward destination targeting mechanic that made the power quite unwieldy (even though my villain still used it with joy), in Champions it is basically an invisible, short-duration flight. You activate teleport, you turn invisible for everything and have a few seconds to fly fast to the next point before the teleport runs out (where you slowly float down for a moment, giving you a chance to activate the next teleport). Acrobatics also can be quite fun and has some very nice animations (with flips and spins and what not), but makes it harder to avoid enemies. Super Jump unfortunately doesn’t quite feel as nice as in the other superhero game. Where in City of Heroes it was by far my favourite power, in Champions it is often more a hassle than a help as it is useless in the smaller corridors and it is very hard to accurately target (a problem City of Heroes didn’t have). It also seems to lack forwards momentum. Luckily powers like flight make up for it which, while at times painfully slow in City of Heroes, are not only a lot smoother in Champions, but feel fantastic to use particularly if your character has wings.
For the rest of the power selection you are largely free. Powers are group based on sets (the same ones you could select at the start), but you’re not restricted to them. In fact, it is often beneficial to not stick to the same set. Having some healing, some defensive powers, some ranged powers, some crowd control and some pets can make for a very effective character. The only restriction really is that powers are in three tiers and that you needs a number of powers before the higher tiers unlock. This is cross-set, though powers within the same set unlock a bit sooner than those in other sets. Either way somewhere in the early twenties every power should be unlocked.
Other upgrades your character gets include advantages, which are basically upgrades to your powers or giving your powers additional effects. One of my single blade attacks, for instance, could either be made stronger or I could turn it into a cone-based attack (allowing me to pick the other advantages if I want the next time). You also get to regularly select stat upgrades and select two primary stats (which means that they increase as you level, as I understand it).
Overall this should make for some very varied heroes with a wide variety of abilities. Though, this is a weakness as well since not all combinations are equally effective. As such certain cries of ‘too easy’ or ‘too hard’ might simply come from people picking the wrong power combinations with or without knowing it. Personally I feel that if you let people free in picking their powers like this then you need to make sure that all builds are roughly equally viable, which I am not sure is the case currently (based on some difficulty I’m having with my ranged character). These are things most subject to adjustment however.
[b:31yyciin]Gameplay[/b:31yyciin]
I’ve seen it mention that Champions Online is the first to offer such a wide variety of quest types in one game, and there is truth in that. Starting in the tutorial you have the basic “NPC with an exclamation mark” where talking to them gives you a quest. But there are also quest started by glowies in the world, quest started from inventory items, quests you can start for just being in a certain area, quests randomly given to you by NPCs as they approach you, open quests (like public quests in Warhammer Online), and many more (a number of which I haven’t seen yet such as PvP and endgame content).
Where City of Heroes had some open world, but most quests really took place in instances Champions Online goes the other way around. Most quests are in the open world with some being in instances. Though it does seem that as you get higher level you get more instanced missions, which is a good thing because personally I prefer the more directed (better able to tell a story) and protected (no spawn camping) environment of instanced missions over open world.
The game also has an extensive crafting system. Crafting components can either be found in the world in special boxes (based on your crafting type), or be gotten by ‘researching’ (basically deconstructing) existing inventory items. Because, yes, Champions Online has an inventory system as well. Gone are the Enhancements from City of Heroes and instead you have nine slots, three each for offence, defence and utility (all of which basically just increase your stats and give some extra effects). Items for these slots you get from drops, as quest rewards or by crafting them.
There us also PvP in the game, but I haven’t had a chance to try this yet. As I understand PvP takes places in separate instances (so no open world PvP) and comes in various types (free-for-all, team-based, goal-based, etc). You can enter PvP by queuing up for the “Hero Games” and then waiting until there’s an open spot.
The main problems right now as I see it is that there is definitely a problem with spawn camping, particularly during the early parts of the game where everyone is after the same spawns and glowies (quest objectives) and such. Even if there are multiple instances where you could go to do your quests they all tend to be about equally crowded with people all going after the same things in all of them. I suspect that this will become less of a problem later in the game as people get more spread out, but it remains to be a problem.
Another problem is currently with the amount of content. Don’t get me wrong, there is enough content (so far) to allow you to level and progress through the game; you’ll never run out of quests, but this is only [i:31yyciin]just[/i:31yyciin] the case and at times you’ll be left with only one or two quests to do. Not that big a problem the first time, but a problem for replaying as then you really notice how every character does pretty much the exact same things; you start in a tutorial, then go to one of two ‘crisis’ zones (which are smaller versions of later big zones) after which you enter the game proper. But then you still do quests in one zone first, then the next zone, then to the main city, etc. As I understand it uses more randomization at the endgame to ensure that there’s always content for people to play, and now content is undoubtedly to be added, but right now it doesn’t really encourage replaying which is a shame considering the great customization system.
[b:31yyciin]Conclusion[/b:31yyciin]
There is undoubtedly more to say about the game. Such as one of my small, personal highlights during closed beta where I got my own mini robot cowboy pet (which looks like a leprechaun). Completely pointless, but just fun. Similarly the game is full of jokes, puns and pop-culture references. For example, one of the crisis zones is full of references to the show Lost and you get quest names such as “World of Witchcraft”. This is perhaps not to everyone’s taste, particularly not those looking for a more serious gaming experience, but in general I think Champions Online more looks to be a fun game instead of a serious one.
Unfortunately the game is also still rife with a number of bugs. While it is true that it is still beta and thus bugs are to be expected, I do have to wonder if they’re really going to be able to clear up those bugs before release. The bugs aren’t massively problematic, the only crash I experienced in beta seems to be fixed, but they can be frustrating. Things like the chat window not allowing you to change the height (which was working in closed beta and is something they are aware of). And as I mentioned before balancing also still seems to be a struggle; some might prefer a very difficult game but I personally prefer something a bit easier where I can relax and unwind some by smacking some enemies around.
Another question, for me, is how well the game lends itself to roleplaying. With the travel powers characters not only quickly drift apart, but you rarely see characters move in the world. One certainly doesn’t have enough time to stop and talk to them. The emotes seem standard but nothing special and in general it doesn’t really feel like the game supports roleplaying any better than other MMOs. On the flipside it’s not really that much worse either (all one rally needs is a chatbox and a visual representation) and the game does offer a number of locations well suited for roleplaying such as Club Caprise and City Hall. Now all we need is a way for roleplayers to find each other easier (either by having RP Shards or by allowing players to tag themselves RP) and the rest will be up to the players.
Overall it’s a nice looking game if you don’t object to the graphics style and it plays nice enough. The missions themselves aren’t that special and can start to feel a bit repetitive (though not as bad as City of Heroes had), but the game probably offers the widest variety of quest types of any MMO to date. Customization, both visually and of abilities, is absolutely fantastic and alone something to keep one busy for hours. There are still bugs and balancing issues, but nothing severe enough to detract from the enjoyment too much, particularly not if you take a brake now and then (or at least that’s my own preference). Roleplaying is still questionable, but the game isn’t worse than other MMOs.
In short, not the best MMO ever, but certainly one that can be enjoyable for a while and well worth giving a shot at least.
Find me on [color=orange:31yyciin]@Nyanya[/color:31yyciin] ingame.
