[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!

[Malo]

I've been looking at it since Open Beta started. I absolutely love the character creator, they've gone even beyond what you could do in CoH, which was amazing in the first place. All the outfit options, body parts, bump maps for detail, it is incredible.

And I love the graphics, so much more of a comic style. The cell shading combined with simple things like comic-outlining gives it that authentic comic look. They need to work on the engine some for optimization, but I get decent framerates out of it so far with almost max settings. Nice they include options like SSAO built-in.

The travel powers are a lot of fun, I think it's great being able to fight completely from in the air, floating on my disc platform. I believe you also get a 2nd travel power to choose at some level. I've only got a max 10th level so I haven't really experienced a whole lot of the game, I've spent most of my time creating heroes then deleting them

I'm still not decided on whether I'm going to pre-order or buy the game yet though, I'm not sure whether it has enough for me to actually play it often, amidst work, family and WoW as well. I hope it does well though and get a healthy population to sustain it. I know a lot of the dedicated CoH/CoX players will move over to CO.

[Chalnoth]

Haha, I was just heading back to one of my contacts in Millenium City, and I ran across this little scene:


A bunch of level 40's took a few minutes to take this guy down....looked fun

[Malo]

Yeah the last day of Beta event, Millenium City overrun with Destroids and Mega-destroids Apparently you get access to some exclusive costumes and some other stuff ingame for the release if you help take out Mega-destroids.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Malo

Yeah the last day of Beta event, Millenium City overrun with Destroids and Mega-destroids Apparently you get access to some exclusive costumes and some other stuff ingame for the release if you help take out Mega-destroids.

Ah, makes sense. After a bit more looking, I saw a bunch of those standing around the town hall. Unfortunately one of my contacts was also in that area, and I think they killed him