[Chalnoth]

So, anybody here playing Champions Online?

I've recently gotten into the Open Beta, and am quite enjoying it. Here are my basic impressions:

1. Throwing stuff is fun! I had a quest recently where I had to destroy a number of the vehicles of a certain villain group. So, I picked 'em up and threw 'em at the enemies You can throw tons and tons of objects in the world. The bigger they are, the higher strength stat you need, and the more damage they do.

2. The customizability in this game is simply incredible. The costume options are incredible, and the character creation is almost completely free (every character has, in principle, access to every power, as long as they have the prerequisites). This is likely to make things a bit difficult for some, with certain power combinations being far too hard, and others being incredibly overpowered. Hopefully the devs will work hard to get all of the powers balanced.

3. Unlike City of Heroes (the previous MMO by the same devs), you get access to a travel power almost right away (immediately after leaving the newbie zone). There's lots of fun travel powers to choose from (the obvious flight, super jump, and super speed, but also fun stuff like rocket boots, rocket jump boots, fire flight, ice flight, hover disc, and acrobatics, which is sort of like a cross between super jump and super speed with some neat animations thrown in). The quick access to a travel power definitely is refreshing.

4. It's got a more-or-less normal gear system! And the crafting isn't bad either.

5. PVP is fun! I usually don't go for PvP, but in this game it's got the right combination of ease and reward: you click a button, sit in a queue, and when there's enough players, you all get teleported to the PvP instance. The game lasts a few minutes, and then when it's over you get teleported back to where you were, and can continue on with whatever PvE you were working on. As a reward for fighting in these matches you can buy some pretty impressive gear from certain merchants.

6. Strongly mission-oriented. The missions are pretty standard MMO fare, for the most part, though there are some interesting ones. Some of the missions are a bit buggy in the beta, but the dev team seems to be working the kinks out very rapidly. Most are overland missions, often with contested mobs (that usually respawn very rapidly). There are some missions that take place in instances. When you're in the city, every once in a while a random citizen will run up to you and ask for help. If you accept, you're sent off to some instanced mission where you usually have to either recover some items or defeat a few bad guys.

7. Combat is fun! It focuses on the correct execution of a small number of powers, combined with smart blocking of the opponents' attacks. And in PvP lots of dodging around helps too.

8. I've read about the ability to create your own nemesis, but I haven't quite gotten that far in the game yet. Sounds like that will be fun!

Anyway, I'm definitely going to be playing this game for a bit once it's released (September 1st). I just hope it's got a decent end game!