Preview: Champions Online
Guest writer Janine Hawkins gives her insight to all of you guys stuck downloading that 3+ gig Champions Online patch. Should you hit cancel, or wait it out for a superhero MMO like no other?
It’s fairly safe to say that there are quite a few gamers eagerly waiting on the release of Cryptic Studio’s sophomore superhero MMORPG, Champions Online. Champions has been in closed beta for a few months, and today marks the beginning of its open beta. If you’re interested in Champions there are a few choices you’re probably confronted with: Do you dip your toes into the open beta, take the next step and pre-order the game, or go the whole nine yards and order a 6 month or even a lifetime subscription? If you didn’t have the chance to play the closed beta then you’ve got a lot less time to figure these things out, and there’s a lot you’re going to want to know.
If you weren’t in the closed beta (and desperately wanted to be), the past few months of waiting have likely been a mild form of torture. At first glance Champions Online looks like what City of Heroes should have been. The comic book style graphics, the nemesis system, the buffet-style power sets — everything is in place to give the player a more or less ideal superhero gaming experience. Speaking as a serial MMO player, I was excited about Champions because it’s doing so many innovative things at once. In my experience, the vast majority of MMOs struggle to replicate the success of World of Warcraft (which apparently means replicating its basic anatomy and changing the script). Naturally when something comes along that deviates even a little from that template, we should get excited. No game is perfect though, and the closed beta experience of Champions Online brought my soaring expectations right back down to earth.
Champions’ strongest point is the level of character customization possible. While in many MMOs this begins and ends with the character creation process, the character customization in Champions is endless, yet limited. As you’re probably well aware at this point, there is no class system in Champions. Yes, you can pick and choose from among many powers from any set that you like (including my favourite, a very satisfying cone-attack chainsaw), to build up your ideal hero. But to gain the top level powers you need to meet some requirements (a series of powers in the same overall set, for instance.) Yes, you can pick the colour and attachment points for many powers. But the power colours are limited to a fairly bright spectrum — in many cases I found myself wanting a slightly more muted palette and had to settle for neons instead.) Yes, you can customize how your weapons look, if you’re that sort of do gooder. But only at later levels, and even then it’s for a price — your celtic knight character will have to cope with wielding a katana for a few levels. One element of customization that is a welcome addition (and has no but) is that you can pick any name that you like, even if another hero has already taken it, as long as you haven’t already used that name elsewhere on your account (since it will appear as HeroName@UserName).
Champions has also gotten a lot of praise over the seemingly unlimited costume creation options. I say seemingly because, as many have discovered, certain costume parts are reserved for after the completion of certain achievements. City of Heroes does this as well, though the difference is that CoH doesn’t dangle them in front of your nose while they’re still unattainable. The costume color palette is, like the power colours, quite limited as well, especially compared to the full range CoH provides.
Which brings me to my next problem with Champions. In spite of having a charmingly simple and clean-cut user interface, it is not all that intuitive. There were a lot of things that I simply didn’t notice until I discussed the game with other players. The tutorial only runs through the most basic elements of playing the game, and leaves a lot of UI and game options in the dark.
Besides non-intuitiveness, Champions players need to face a surprising learning curve. While the game format has many similarities with other MMOs like City of Heroes (to beat that dead horse a little more), the actual mechanics of the gameplay are very different, and they will take some getting used to
for most players– but it’s not without its rewards. Champions Online is simply one of the most engaging MMORPGs I’ve ever played. In particular, soloing is still comfortably possible in nearly every scenario after the first 12 levels. The combat is faster paced than its competitors. You are constantly attacking and blocking to refill your endurance meter, powers deploy differently based on button press gimmicks, and many powers are unrestricted by movement. (Editors Note: No joke. My gunslinging, grapple hooking, champion of utilitarianism and noir sensibilities really appreciates the ability to swing through the air while blasting the crap out of irradiated mad men with dual pistols. -Austin)
Champions Online isn’t only plagued by game design difficulties, though. I started playing the beta in July, and I have to say that out of all the MMO beta testing I’ve done, I’ve never played any that are as consistently buggy this close to their release as Champions is. The majority of these bugs were in the first two mission areas, the arctic Canadian Wilderness and the radioactive deserts of Project Greenskin, and as updates came, old bugs were fixed and new bugs appeared (and reappeared) just as quickly.
I’m not talking about secondary game features being a little off kilter. I’m talking about level 1-20 missions being incompletable because, for example, the wolves you’re supposed to find are the size of mice, and either standing still and untargettable, or hiding under a correctly scaled wolf to kill you invisibly from below. After the next update, those wolves were the right size again, but most of them were still standing around as if in a panel from a comic. Considering that the closed beta has been going on for months, I don’t think that it’s dreadfully unrealistic to expect the experience of the first 20 levels, which every tester has been testing, to be quite solid by now. The mission limit meant that I ended up dropping at least 10 missions that I just couldn’t finish because of a bug at the time.
Maybe my expectations have been spoiled. In full disclosure, I’m also playing the Aion closed beta right now, and in the same span of 20 levels, I’ve run into one bug, and it was the voice preview button in character creation (which was fixed after they added all the other voiceover work anyway.) Now I’ll admit that comparing the Aion beta to the Champions Online beta isn’t entirely fair, as Aion has been released to the massive Asian MMO market, so they have a much larger testing base to draw on. However, both games are set to be released in September, and only one of them seems ready.
To take Cryptic’s side, the missions in Champions are not all “Kill 20 X then call me” type quests. The missions are quite diverse and involve many different kinds of resolutions, and unlike freshman effort City of Heroes, many different kinds of locales, with very little of the déjà vu which clouded every instanced combat in CoH. These pluses could conceivably could make fixing mission bugs a more complicated affair. Of course, they still have a chance to iron these out before the release, and I like to remain optimistic in thinking that they probably will.
Champions Online is unique, clever, and both graphically and narratively interesting enough that I know I’ll be playing the open beta. On top of that, I’ve canceled my City of Heroes account since I can’t quite justify paying for two superhero games a month come September, and between the two there’s almost no contest. However, as tempting as that lifetime subscription might be, the closed beta has made me just a little more hesitant– though I’ll be more than happy for Cryptic Studios to prove me wrong.
Janine Hawkins is a guest writer at One Last Continue. From her icy Canadian palace, this princess of acerbity considers herself a purveyor of all things MMO. Also, sometimes she writes about Second Life.
