Champions Online Review [PC]
Emrys on Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 5:30AM Champions Online is a game I have been waiting for with bated breath. Developed by Cryptic Studios, the guys behind the hit City of Heroes, and based on a table-top RPG of the same name, leaving it with some very big shoes to fill. Sadly, while Champions makes an excellent effort, there is as much good in this game as bad. The developers have a brilliant concept, but it clearly needs a bit of work. This is the first of three reviews outlining all of the good, the bad, and the “oh my god” of this highly anticipated MMO.
For a brand-new release MMO, Champions is very solid. The game is gorgeous; its bright colors and thick outlines look like a classic comic book brought to life. The landscapes are beautiful and well-designed; it's a great backdrop for your epic quest to rid the world of evil. The trouble is, it's so graphic-intense that even year-old computers will chug a bit trying to handle it. Champions is the first game I have ever had to dial back the graphics on. It was a sad day for me, since I was sure my PC's GeForce 9600 GT could handle anything. The game's official stats recommend NVIDIA GeForce 8800 / ATI Radeon HD 3850 or better . Even worse was the experience on our older PC's GeForce 7950 – the graphics had to be scaled back considerably and still felt choppy, causing my other half to actually lose interest in buying the game at all. Considering the low level of detail in the actual textures, this is head-scratchingly frustrating. In contrast, competitor game City of Heroes runs almost perfectly on both computers and even looks alright on non-gaming laptops once the textures are toned down. [ED: In comparison, the game ran flawlessly on an E6600, 4GB Ram, and Radeon 4870 Win7 PC]
Champions is organized as one huge server with a lot of instances, which can make team-ups hard to do with friends. There are multiple numbered instances not just for smaller missions but for the actual zones in which your contacts and missions occur. Hopefully, in time, the developers will expand on the servers and help reduce the number of instances and lag issues. The maps are well-designed, not too big to explore and with great spawn rates; however, sometimes the direction you think you are going in is completely wrong. There are some minor issues with the mini-map and mission markers. This is another thing that I am hoping gets tweaked and becomes better with time.
Where Champions Online really shines is in its character design. This is one of the most customizable design systems I have seen, again rivaling the City of Heroes competition. The player can change everything from hand-size to mood to stance, and there are tons of costume options. I spent hours playing with my character's costume, because it's inexpensive to tinker with, and there near-limitless options. I also spent hours on it because the menus are sadly very counter-intuitive. Costume parts are locked at the end of complex menu trees and sometimes what you see in your head can take a long time to find on the screen.
Hand-in-hand with character design is power sets, and there are a ton of options. The player starts by picking a main power set, or framework, which starts off with two powers and gives base stats to boost them. Alternately, one can choose the custom design, picking any two powers from any framework and any stat bonus. The custom design is recommended for advanced or expert players only, because it's more than a little overwhelming.
Most of the powers can have custom colors, giving the player that extra bit of control over character design. Even some travel powers can be given a custom color, especially if you choose Fire Flight, like I did. Purple flames, what is more awesome than that?
I chose the Sorcery power set, because it appealed the most to me. I had a basic attack for little damage but no power drain, and a charge power that could one-shot enemies two levels above me. Pretty impressive to a new player. I got to custom color them as well.
The tutorial zone takes about an hour to get through. New skills or stats cannot be trained in this zone, even though characters end up being level 6 or 7 at the end of it. The player is then given two choices: go to the desert and fight irradiated mutants, or go to Canada and fight zombies. Being a quasi-Canadian, and having a bad obsession with zombies, it was off to Canada for me.
Once you get to your zone, which will take you to about level 15, hit the Powerhouse and get all those yummy new powers. Travel powers are open to you once you go in, and there are lots of options. All the classics are represented: flight, teleportation, super jump, and super speed. Then there are some really creative additions: tunneling, ice slide, fire-flight, hover disc, acrobatics, and rope swing. All of them are interesting and very well thought out. The biggest surprise to me was teleportation, which is a controlled move as opposed to the point-and-click we know from other games, and the graphical effect is appealing. They describe it as a dimensional shift; the player becomes a glowing blob and zips around and through people for about 10 seconds. With no recharge on it, and almost no power drain, it (like most other travel abilities in Champions) can be maintained basically forever.
Once you get to the Powerhouse, feel free to test your powers. Purchase powers, give them a test in the Training rooms, and if they don't fit right, remove them and try different ones. Powerhouse is probably my favorite thing so far, because who hasn't regretted a level-up choice in a game? Here you can test out each new power, and tweak as much as you need to. And once again, if there is a power in your framework (class), but you don't want it, and you want something from another framework, as long as you have the requirements, you can have that power. No longer are high damage characters limited by their apparent squishiness, and tanks are free to be damage dealers - and everything between.
However, trying to build a high damage character with decent defense is harder than it sounds. I felt pretty immortal up to level 12, then hit the glass ceiling because of the hordes. I could survive a lot of damage, 3-4 goons; maybe 5 if I was lucky. But any more (and there are always more) and I was dead meat. It was unbelievably frustrating at times to keep dying in the same spot, and by the time I got back to said spot, everything had respawned. This is another thing I hoping that they improve on as time goes, and a lot of the players are having the same issue. It's rumored that the only framework that can solo well is the archer class. So I am going to give them a try and will cover details on them in our next update.
Player VS Player is not my favorite thing in any game and in a lot of cases, it can become a reason why I will quit the game entirely. With Champions they found a nice balance. You can challenge someone to a duel, but it is way more fun to do the Hero Games, which are normally two teams of six players each in a Cage match. Yes, a Cage Match. Most of these go until one team has 15 kills, then rewards are handed out. Those rewards can be used to unlock Luchadore (Mexican Wrestler) costume pieces. I haven't earned enough yet to know what those pieces look like, but I'll try to have a screen-cap of a set for our next update. I like how the developers have handled PvP in Champions, so chances are I will play some more of it. It is definitely an excellent community and a good way to make some friends.
Champions Online gets high marks for its brilliance and gameplay, but loses a few because of the learning curve for beginners and can be laggy. I have very high hopes that this one will rival some long-standing favorites. Here's hoping the developers listen to their players when it comes to issues. With proper feedback and refinement, Champions Online will become a real contender for the main devourer of my free time.
Reader Comments (2)
Great piece!
The one thing that CoH / CoV was able to lord over the other MMO's, was their dedication and commitment to the fans. Pretty much every single issue (eg. expansion) released for CoH was directly from fan / player feedback.
Given that the next WoW expansion is 6-8 (or whatever) months away, now is probably the ideal time to try and steal players who are bored with Azeroth and want something else for a while.
[...] uploaded and ready to go at midnight. And I have to buckle down and work on the second part of the Champions Online review, I am on part 2 or 3, and its getting hard to work on, but, it must be [...]