[HDimagination]

OK, so Champions Online. Seeing as we are in open Beta now, I can talk about it. I know that the game is going to be released now, and I’m sure that all the regular gaming sites will have their glowing reviews, just like they do of all high profile games. I also know that some of the people who exist here might be tempted to give it a try so, I hope that my opinion can give a bit of perspective.

That being said, My experiences are based off the Closed Beta from about three months ago, and I was running it on a machine that just about met it’s minimum specifications. As a result, I’m not going to comment on the graphics. The ‘cel shaded’ look is certainly more comic book like, but it does suffer in terms of clarity. Sometimes I could not be completely sure what I was looking at. But again, this could be due to my machine not being up to scratch.

Game play wise, the main mechanic of the game left me cold. This was surprising, as it was one of the parts of the game that I was initially enthusiastic about. The Idea is that you build your endurance with your basic attack power and then attack with your more powerful attacks when you have enough endurance. You will also have to block your enemies more powerful attacks to avoid most of the damage. As a result you really need to be on your toes when you are in combat, because if you miss the opportunity to block a Bosses powerful attack then you will go down pretty fast. The scale of this game is a lot harsher than city of heroes. In CoH you can leap into combat with 4-5 enemies and take them down as a regular occurrence, but in champions you would be in trouble if you take on more than 2 at the same time. All the above is fine, and mostly a matter of taste, but the interactive nature of the combat does cause problems, especially when you are suffering from Lag. On more than one occasion I was ‘Lagged to Death’ after a very short time while fighting regular enemies that were scaled to my level. The other problem with this for me is one of flavour. Sure the enemies you fight in this are tougher, but while I was playing, I didn’t really feel very super-heroic. It felt like a pulpy sci-fi action adventure, but it didn’t feel empowering in the same way as City of Heroes does. On a related note, it has a mechanic that means that you have to ‘button mash’ an ‘action’ button to escape from Mezzes and Holds. On a keyboard, this just feels wrong, and frustrating. Didn’t this kind of play die with the nineties, or are there still console games out there where this is required? If so, who buys them? This may be explained that Champions is being released on the X Box as well, many people in the beta said that the game played better and more smoothly with a USB joypad.

The actual environment of the game its self is also structured far more like a traditional MMO. Rather than the instanced based content of CoH the play is primarily biased around large PvE zones with quests and collection points, as in ‘Kill X number of enemies in a particular area’ or ‘rescue X civilians from point Y.’ Again, this is a fine choice, and it works for lots of MMO’s but it also brings back the problems of people camping spawn points, and competing to defeat the right sort of enemies while they are around (‘you mean I have to kill zombie rotters and not rotting zombies?’ for a completely made up example). Why not just team with those people that are doing the same quest, you might ask?

Well that comes into another problem, the way that the characters are built. Unlike most other MMOs there is no class structure. You chose your initial power set and then you can choose any other powers that you meet the prerequisites for, even from other sets. I must admit that I didn’t delve to deeply into this. But all the same, it felt a like all of the characters played in a very similar way. It also seemed like every-one who was playing was just a damage monkey. You either focused on ranged attacks or Melee, but still there were very few opportunities for people to play ‘healer’ or ‘Controller’ roles. There was even less impetus for people to group. In the three months I actually played the Beta I didn’t see or join any teams. This may change when the game goes live and the community is larger, and I really hope it does, for the sake of the people that play. I can see a game getting very boring without the opportunity to play with other people.

The last thing that really put me off the game was the tutorial and Crisis zone that you have to play through to get to the first actual PvE zone. As far as I can tell, there was no way to skip the tutorial, and it was far and away too long to actually qualify as a tutorial. Again this may be a personal thing, but I was bored of it the on my second play through, and it will easily take about an hour to play through, longer if you are out to get all the non essential missions, of which there are a lot. After you get through the tutorial zone, you are sent to one of two ‘crisis’ zones, where you are ostensibly helping the ‘champions’ (the local JLA equivalent) to deal with some imminent crisis, and you get the choice of ‘mutant zombies’ in the desert/texas style zone or Arctic Demons attacking a crashed plane in Alaska. To get to the first ‘real’ PvE zone you will have to play through the tutorial and the crisis zone every time. These are closed zones, so once you have done them, and exited them, you cannot go back, and will probably be about level 15. So, if you star the game, and have friends that you want to meet up with, you will have to wait, or get them to start new characters so they can join you. It also meant for myself that I knew that if I wanted to start a new character, I had to go through these zones all over again. Given the short window for play that I had (the closed beta only ran Wednesday and Friday 9:00 PST to midnight PST or in BST 5:00 till early morning) this was extremely intimidating, especially with the server rollbacks that are a regular occurrence in Beta tests (these generally mean you have to start from scratch).

So after about three months of play, I gave it up, which was a shame, mostly because during that time it was, you know, free, and I can’t at the moment afford MMO subs. But If I could, Champions is not for me. I know I didn’t play very far into the game, and perhaps it does get better in later levels, but as far as I can tell, all the people that are building this game up to be the amazing superhero game of wonder might be sorely disappointed.

[Teflon Billy]

It seems that the backlash is already under way:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/n...-how-to-make-a-fun-game-suck.aspx

[HDimagination]

Sorry that was a really bad article.

[Teflon Billy]

[HDimagination]

On the most part I’d agree with the sentiments, but you’ve got to take these things for what they are. I mean, no professional Gaming review site will ever give a high profile game less than, say 6.5 out of ten, so the gamespot review giving champions online 7.5 (or whatever) is pretty telling. Besides the comments in the review are pretty on the ball as far as I could tell.

I understand completely about the Jeff Gerstman Thing though, that was pretty disgraceful. It’s a shame that internet game journalism has basically turned into another marketing tool, especially where computer games continue to be such variable quality.

[metagaia]

Shamus Young (of DM of the Rings fame) is doing a series of amusing Champions Online related posts, which to my untrained eye also seem reasonably informative.  Though perhaps HDimagination would have a more enlightened view.

Regarding Gerstmanngate, what shocked me was not that promoted games might get more favourable reviews (often not outright corrupt, just benefit of the doubt kind of stuff), but the utter incompetancy of the PR department to make it so obvious then lie about it  .  However, I have nothing else to add since I agree with everything that has been said.