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Champions Online: Professor Beej@professorbeej
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Tag Archives: Champions Online
Champions Online – Initial Impressions
Despite my trying lots of trials and demos of MMOs and other games this summer, nothing really hooked me. My attention span was too short, I was too stressed, I was working too hard, or something. But nothing seemed as “OMG AWESOME” as I was hoping for. Not only that, nothing even seemed “fun.”
On a few people in the blogopshere’s advice (namely Pete at Dragonchasers and Syp at Bio Break), I yanked a pre-order of Champions Online from Gamestop. Unfortunately, I was so busy over the past few weeks that my plan of learning the ins-and-outs of the game during open beta and the headstart didn’t pan out. But I finally got my retail key, made my first live character (Professor Beej@professorbeej, no less), and took my first real jaunt into Millenium City.
Now my fiancee and I had co-created a heroine during open beta and gained a few levels, but it was early and we knew nothing about what was going on. We hadn’t even figured out the engery building/draining powers yet. So entering into the game’s tutorial on the live game really was a learning process for me.
My first surprise was that the game played so similarly to other MMOs on the outset. But I had been warned about that, so I didn’t let that deter me. I followed the quests here and there, doing my menial superhero tasks like getting people’s vacation tickets and luggage back for them amidst an alien invasion, and I learned the ropes. The tutorial was fun, but it wasn’t until I got to the open mission at the end that the game really grabbed my attention.
Open missions are roughly equivalent to Warhammer Online‘s Public Quests. And I love love love love love WAR‘s PQs. Fighting aliens alongside other heroes and then getting a cool solo instance where I fight a supervillain for my troubles? Yes, please!
By the time I left the tutorial, I had a pretty good grasp on the game, I thought. So I pick that I am going to Canada for my second tutorial area, and head to the Powerhouse (where young heroes train their powers, obviously!) and pick up my very first travel power to replace the incredibly slow Antigrav boots I got for preordering.
Now, since I’m on my fiancee’s laptop, I’m unable to upload a picture of my champion for you to see. Suffice it to say that I’m not the most visually creative guy in the world, so my guy’s only wearing a black suit and tie, a fedora, and has some matching feathered wings. I was delighted to see the wings flap when I activated my preorder flight power, so I assumed they would do that for any power.
No, they don’t. I picked the absolutely terrible Ice Slide as my travel power and had no idea that I could test it out inside the Powerhouse (thanks, World of Warcraft, for making me think I can only use travel abilities outside). Now don’t get me wrong, Ice Slide sounds like it could be great. I loved Bobby Drake in X-Men comics for years, but this power is nowhere near as awesome as he makes it seem. It can’t hover, it’s slow to start unless charged, and it actually feels slippery when you’re coming to a stop. There’s no maneuverability, either. And to top it off, my wings didn’t flap.
I play around with it for a while (finding that there are LOST-themed quests in Canada! Yay for pop culture references in MMOs!), and gain a few levels, but I can’t stand to travel like that anymore.
So I go back into the Powerhouse to retcon (respec in Champions Online lingo), and find that I’m too poor to unlearn Ice Slide. Retconning is ludicrously expensive for newbies, which I think is silly since most new players have absolutely no idea what powers/abilities are going to be worthwhile. I know I can get another travel power later on, but I find out by asking around that it’s at 35, and I’m only 8.
So I reroll. I also take the time to edit my costume to a less gaudy black and grey suit as opposed to the neon green and blue it was originally. I finally look like I’m a hero ready to whip some tail. When I get back home, I’ll post a blog with my picture.
So I breeze through the tutorial again and this time pick the Desert instead of Canada. I don’t think this area is as fun, really, but I made my choice, and I’ll stick with it. I’ve so far gotten back to level 8 and into the second part of the Desert storyline. I look forward to what awaits me.
Now, as far as gameplay goes, I like it. It’s fast paced and fun, and the Telepath framework I started with seems to be decent enough. I’ve heard it’s one of the better healers end-game, so I’m heading in that direction now. I want to be able to heal whenever I want to and then solo when I can, and I’ve found a couple of builds I’m altering a little to accomplish that. My main concern is that I won’t be able to go back and retcon all the way down when I get to end-game if I make some silly choices now. We’ll just have to see how that plays out. I’m not sure if I should be building for a healer as I level or if I can use my Build 2 to do that at end-game. I just don’t know enough about the game yet. And I’m not much of a reroller/alt man, so I hope there’s a way.
Also, my fiancee has a pretty high chance of playing this one. As I said before, her impressions of the beta were positive, and she was quoted as saying something along the lines of “I like superheroes; I don’t like druids.” MMOs are always so much fun with other people, and I’ve been trying to get her into some kind of game with me since we started dating. This might be my chance. Her character, Ex Libris, just might come to life on a second account once the wedding is over in a couple months.
As it stands, I’m happy with how Champions Online plays. It’s fast paced, the animations are smooth and enjoyable, the customization is through the roof, and it’s fun to play casually. I don’t feel a need to play; I feel a desire to. I want to have fun, and that’s what I’m looking for in a game. And given that there are no real servers, I can finally play with everyone I want to instead of just a select few. I expect to stick with CO until I at least hit the level cap and see what the game has to offer. I have a few qualms with the retcon system, picking powers, and the fact that the game has gear-based progression, but I’m willing to deal with them for the time being.
The main selling point for me is that it’s fun. It’s fun, and I can have that fun on my own terms. Right now, that’s worth the price of admission and the subscription fee. So if anyone wants to meet up and smash some faces, run an instance, or just do whatever it is that off-duty heroes do, hit up @professorbeej.
Playing Champions Online? Friend me!
I finally got a chance to mess around in Champions Today (thank you, Labor Day holiday!), and I’m about to dive back in.
If any of you want to friend me, add @professorbeej (the same as my Twitter) to your friends list. If you have an account, add me a comment, and I’ll be sure to add you. I haven’t been able to find a lot of you guys’ and gals’ names on your own blogs, but I guess that’s what I get for letting my RSS get so backed up over the past few weeks.
Most of the fun in an MMO (especially a new one) is the community, so the more friends, the merrier.
Online? Online!
I’ve been pretty wishy-washy lately on what games I want to play. I’ve been giving trials and demos a fair shot, and I’ve been enjoying myself for the most part. It’s nice to be able to have even a temporary reprieve from the stress that comes from being an involved groom.
Aside from all that, my gaming attention has been directed at two specific games for the immediate future: Ultima Online and Champions Online.
I’ve spoken at length about how much I loved Ultima Online back in the day. I wish that the game I love still existed in an official capacity, but it does not. Instead, in 2003, some enterprising minds in Europe decided to open a free server community called Defiance. I had toyed around with Defiance in the past, and it was fun and relatively populated. Now that I am yearning for some good, open PvP, I don’t think there is a better option for me to spend some time in.
And then it happens. While we’re out training Wrestling behind a random cabin, we get PK’d. I was so happy about this. A roving band of three “reds” came up and simply murdered us! Unfortunately, I had to take my roommate’s story of the encounter because I had already gone to bed that night. But that’s something that hasn’t happened to me in an MMO in years. We had to finally be careful about how and where we chose to train.
Now we’re sitting with a few skills at max (grandmaster or GM), and we’re working on the rest. I certainly hope the server keeps being fun and will help us get back even a few hours of the best MMO experience we ever had. I decided to make our start a little easier and tossed the server a $20 donation for 50,000 of each reagent used in Magery training, but that will likely be the extent of our microtransactions with Defiance, unless one of us decides to splurge on ethereal mounts for the duo. (I vote him since I bought the regs.)
Once we finish our characters’ templates, we’re going back to our old griefing/PKing ways. I rolled under my old moniker Damien Wyrmsbane, and my roommate is Ethan Stormfire once again, just like we were on Lake Superior years ago. Anyone who wants is welcome to join us. We can always use another Flamestrike/Stun Punch/Paralyze/Poison/Whatever in the middle of a ganking situation. The more the merrier!
In other MMO news, I preordered Champions Online. I had been debating whether or not I wanted to, but I finally gave in because August is my “light” month in that I have the middle two weeks off work. I have summer orientation for my freshmen this week, and then faculty orientation the last week, but the middle two weeks are perfect for catching up on my writing, reading, and gaming (when I’m not out and about wedding planning somehow, that is). With the CO beta starting in just a few days, I figured that it would be okay to preorder the game since I had planned on picking this one up anyway.
I decided to go through Gamestop for a couple of reasons, but the most important was that I will get a digital copy of the game in advance. I hate waiting on preorders to be shipped, and Gamestop gave the option for not only beta access, but access to the “head start” which means I will be able to login to the live game a few days early, which led me to conclude that I will already have access to the client instead of having to wait an extra day or two to get the box in the mail. Gamestop also said that players who preorder there get flight at an earlier level, so given that I don’t know how hectic my schedule will be in a few weeks, I figured I’d go ahead and let myself take it easy since it’s my “light” month.
I’ve never been a real fan of the superhero MMO; City of Heroes just wasn’t my kind of game 5ish years ago when I tried it. I always mean to reinstall when they email me telling me my account has been reactivated, but until recently, I’ve been kind of sucked into World of Warcraft. Now that I’m looking for something new, Champions Online really has me interested. I like quite a few of the features, and even though it is, at heart, a “kill 10 rats in this questhub” MMO, there are enough quirks to it that make me think it will hold its own better than other niche MMOs like Warhammer Online.
You see, I love Warhammer Online. I think it’s a great game that suffers from having a lackluster population, and that’s the main reason I am not playing it right now. WAR had to merge servers once the “tourist” population left because so many servers were so underpopulated that Public Quests, instances, and PvP/RvR just could not happen. Even after the merge, the servers feel like a wasteland compared to what it was at launch, and that makes me sad. I don’t like wasting 20-30 minutes doing quests or something equally boring just to jump into some PvP.
Luckily, Champions Online will never have to suffer the bad press WAR did because CO will never have the option of merging servers when initial “tourist” populations drop because there is only one server, divided into instanced zones like Guild Wars (which has me worried a little because GW never felt like an MMO to me, but I’m keeping a very open mind here). This single server setup has many benefits I can see, but the most meaningful is that the server will never feel desolate and empty like many in WAR do because there will always be other players around for PvP and/or grouping. Not to mention never having to reroll to play with any friends, unless Cryptic does something like make EU/NA restricted servers, which will make me sad because I have plans of trying to recruit friends from other continents to play with me. You hear that, Gordon? I’m coming for you!
I’m also very interested in Champions Online’s PvP. There are a lot of interesting systems in place so far, and I’m very interested specifically to try out Bash, basically a CO version of WoW’s Lake Wintergrasp. I loved WG in WoW except for the timer, so I like the idea of a persistent zone in CO, but we’ll have to see how it’s done in practice to see if it works. I don’t mind the idea of having a hotspot for PvP because in games like Ultima Online or even Warhammer Online, there are places where PvPers gather and beat the unholy snot out of one another for days and weeks on end. It just so happens that CO is telling us where that it from the get-go and rewarding us for fighting there (here’s hoping it’s not an “honor grind” as in WoW). And the PvP should be meaningful because it’s not like WoW where battlegrounds are instanced and one fights against faceless masses of “tauren druids” and “human paladins” whose names don’t matter. With a single zone on a single server, CO has some potential for PvP.
If done correctly, I can see myself spending a great deal of my free time in Champions Online. If not, well, there’s always Defiance.
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