My Initial Impressions:

Phyluxia

So after the day 1 patch debacle, i DL'd the new client from FilePlanet and played for a few hours last night. Here're some thoughts on the games larger systems:

 

Loading the game for the first time:

#1 thing you should do upon loading the game for the first time is tweak your graphics options. If you look at things with the generic defaults they provide, things look very blah. Boosting resolution and turning on many of the advanced effects really breathes a bit more life into the world.

 

Character Creation:

This was very on par with the CoX character creation. I could have spent hours in this thing with the number of options they give you. It tends to be a fairly straightforward creation process, but if you really start detailing your character, it can get a bit confusing at times. In the end, though, the individuality that this system offers is Cryptic's signature. My suggestion: If you know you want a very detailed character and dont have much experience using this creator, just go ahead and randomize a guy and get in game. Take notes from the characters you see around you and ask how to find specific details that you like. Progressing through the first 10 levels is not tough, so the investment that you put in here wont be that significant and you potentially get some great ideas about how to make your real character truly feel like the hero you wanted.

 

The UI:

The UI is very.... basic, IMHO. Standard 2 rows of hotbars. Quest tracker on the right. Character/Target health in upper left. Map upper right. Chat lower left. The only thing that took a mild bit of getting used to were the equipment slots and the useable item slots in the lower right, but once you run through the tutorial zone, they're fairly well explained/utilized. It's pretty easy to jump right in and just play if you want without having to learn too much new stuff if you want, which is nice.

The biggest gripe i have about the UI tend to be with targetting and the "Z" key usage. The Z key is bound to "use/interact" with your current target, or interactable object you're facing. Box targetted? You'll pick it up (btw... press Z again to drop it once you pick something up. This, for some reason, took me a minute to figure out and i found myself transformed into Captain Box Boy for a spell...). If you have a friendly NPC targetted, you'll speak with them. As well as simply pressing Z, you'll notice that small blue boxes appear below anything that you can interact with that you can click on to perform the same actions as the Z button. IMHO, these interactions tended to be a bit laggy and they could be burdensome if you had LOTS of interactable objects around you at once. I was a big fan of passing by piles of boxes and being temporarily blinded by the flash of blue boxes that appeared.  Bottomline, you're probably going to end up interacting with a lot of stuff that you dont intend to. Hopefully this is just one of those initial "getting used to the game" type things.

 

Combat:

Overall, i thought combat was okay. It was fast paced... I didnt find myself simply standing around a whole lot while spamming attacks... and the abilities seems to be very unique in that many of them have multiple conditional affects. To explain the energy system real fast, all attacks are based off energy. To start, you'll choose 1 energy building attack and 1 attack that uses energy. For all intents and purposes, energy building attacks are your auto-attack. They are toggleable abilities that you just have to click once and they persist until you click it again or kill the enemy. They're generally low damage and when active, they will gradually increase the amount of energy you have available. Looking at the energy bar, you'll notice that it has a line somewhere on it (typically towards the middle, but this is affected by stats). That's your base energy point. That's the point that your energy bar naturally gravitates towards. In other words, lets say your natural energy point is 50% of max energy. If you leave combat with 100% energy, your energy bar will gradually decrease until it hits the 50% mark and then remain there. If you leave combat with 5% energy, it will gravitate upwards to that 50% mark. This is to ensure that you're always able to enter combat with some energy stored up, enabling you to use energy-based attacks right away. As stated prior, the other ability you choose when you start the game will be an energy-based attack. Whenever you use one of these, it will use a portion of the energy you've accumulated (varies by ability and is explained in each tooltip). These abilities tend to be much more powerful than energy builders and have other potential affects associated with them. Once you deplete your energy to a minimal state, it's up to your active energy builder to continue building up energy (in combat) so that you can further use these abilities.

In addition to the general use of abilities, as described above, some abilities have states which you can initiate by altering the way you press the hotkey. With some abilities, you're able to "maintain" them for a certain period of time by holding the hotkey associated with them. This is usually accompanied by a drain in your energy. Think of a flame thrower for example. As long as you hold the trigger, the flame comes out of it, but you use fuel by doing so. Same concept here. As well as maintainable abilities, there are abilities you can "charge up" by holding the hotkey. Lets take a fireball ability for example. Just by tapping the hotkey, you'll produce a small, quickfire fireball that'll hit the enemy. By holding down the same hotkey, though, the fireball stays in your hands and grows (you'll see a build up meter increase as you hold the key). When you unleash this, it's much more potent.

Another thing that i'm not sure if i like yet, but it wasn't bad by any means, is the reactiveness of defense in combat. The two big things i noticed were 1) blocking and 2) breaking enemy holds. To block an enemy attack (which will just reduce the damage by a portion), hold the shift key. You'll notice that some mobs will use charge ups on their big abilities just like you can. This is often associated with a voice prompt or animation. At that point, you know something big is coming, so it may be best to utilize block. Pretty neat feature is implemented well. The other thing mentioned, breaking holds, was interestingly annoying IMHO. At times, enemies would root/stun/hold you, at which point your only option was to press the Z key as fast as possible to break out of the hold. I'm not fully in tune with how that works, but it seemed like it could be an interesting twist to the ways enemies handle you.

In all, i thought combat was decently done. The mechanics are there for a very super-heroesque feel to the game. That being said, there's still quite a few apparent flaws to work out in the system (lag, animations were a tad off, UI may need some enhancements). With being fast paced, the game needs to give enough information that you can keep up with it at all times, and at this point i think it may fall short in that respect. The reactive burden on the player cant be hindered by artificial animation and lag flaws.

 

Quests:

The quests were lacking, IMHO. Very standard interfaces for the quest givers. The map provides markers for quests (if you're into that kind of thing). My only beef was how easy they tended to be, which really began to water down whatever story they were trying to tell. At level 5, i chose super speed as my travel power. After visiting a quest hub, it was literally ZOOM kill 10 of these... ZOOM get item... ZOOM kick a puppy... ZOOM eat radioactive taco.... ZOOM turn in quests. Literally, they were being done so fast that i didnt have time to realy enjoy what was going on. I honestly DO NOT remember levels 5-9. I logged out last night at 10 and dont remember even dinging half of those levels. As for WHY i did any of those quests... no idea. I talked to someone, there was a marker on my map, so i went there and did stuff. I had no real incentive to slow down and actually envelop myself in the story. If they were making a comic book based on the adventures i had last night, my characters name would be "Captain WTF Just Happened?".

That being said, i am happy that they got away from the instancing that was overly abundant in CoX. It was much more of an open feel to the quests. So the groundwork is there, but quests simply need to feel a tad more... epic, IMHO.

I did run across a few PQs too. To be honest, i'm not sure i understood the point of them. They popped up their objectives... you did them... you finished, and up comes a nice little scoreboard with the final results. Results that equated to... nothing because there was no reward. Since i assume it's for bragging rights, i had to make the best of my first place finish and yelled "SUCK IT, HIPPIES!" in chat after my 2nd PQ. That really didnt make me feel much better, though

 

Game Flaws:

Let me simply start by saying this: If you expect this game to be bug free, you are going to hate it. It's chock full of all kinds of fun bugs. There are mobs that are standing around with no health (they should prolly be dead...)... interacting with objects sometimes cuts off and warps you a few feet away... some quests are clearly broken or may not give good directions... my buff bar seemed to flash all kinds of random stuff whenever is wanted... etc etc etc. The list is prolly fairly big. As well, speaking about class balance for a second, i witnessed 2 players dueling last night. One of them was regenning faster than the other player could damage them. quite literally, they cannot be killed. It seems like the amount of stat customization offered via items, perks, etc in the game offer TOO high of a maximzation point thus far. If you want to never die, you can just boost your regen stats to ungodly highs. Want to crit just about every hit? Boost that stat. There is still A LOT of balancing that needs to happen in this game. This not only detracts from PvE by potentially trivializing it, but the PvP will be even worse off.

 

General Opinion:

Bottomline, despite the flaws, which can be worked out over time, i actually had a very good first experience with the game. The base is there to make a very good super hero game. The flaws are indeed obvious and many, but i would contend it's no worse off than many games that have released recently. In the end, it's all about having fun (which i definitely had) and if you can look past some shakey aspects to this game, then you have what has the potential to be a real winner. If you want a quantified statement that relates to how MMO communities view new MMOs: IMHO, you'll be paying to play beta for another 4-6 months. If you're down with that, then it'll be a fun 4-6 months.

thecandide

Originally posted by Phyluxia



I did run across a few PQs too. To be honest, i'm not sure i understood the point of them. They popped up their objectives... you did them... you finished, and up comes a nice little scoreboard with the final results. Results that equated to... nothing because there was no reward. Since i assume it's for bragging rights, i had to make the best of my first place finish and yelled "SUCK IT, HIPPIES!" in chat after my 2nd PQ. That really didnt make me feel much better, though

 

After completing a PQ with the second highest score, the PQ icon/symbol/thingy from the mini map appeared on the ground in the middle of the PQ. I stood on it and interacted with it to receive my loot reward.

For the most part I agree with your assessment. The non-voiced quests were not engaging, but I have been big on story lines. I ran into buggy issues with the teleportation, it would shoot me straight in the air and I found the over all control difficult. I liked the "active" combat abilities though I hope to get further along with the game and have many more options. All in all I have enjoyed my experiance and time has flown by but I don't know if it's enough to make me sub.

Phyluxia

Originally posted by thecandide


After completing a PQ with the second highest score, the PQ icon/symbol/thingy from the mini map appeared on the ground in the middle of the PQ. I stood on it and interacted with it to receive my loot reward.
For the most part I agree with your assessment. The non-voiced quests were not engaging, but I have been big on story lines. I ran into buggy issues with the teleportation, it would shoot me straight in the air and I found the over all control difficult. I liked the "active" combat abilities though I hope to get further along with the game and have many more options. All in all I have enjoyed my experiance and time has flown by but I don't know if it's enough to make me sub.

 

Good to know. I must have completely missed the icon for the reward.

I was going to try teleportation with my next guy, so that's good to know. I saw someone doing it last night and it looked badass. Super speed is pretty freekin cool. My only complaint would be that it may be TOO cool, in that it literally allows you to bypass just about anything you want (mobs cant really touch what they cant catch). Then again, i guess the same could be said about flight. Biggest think about super speed was the inability to stop where you want to. It's a tad too sensitive when trying to make small movements, but then again, i suppose i should just turn it off when i do that In the end, it just seems like it's a bit of a new feel that takes some getting used to.