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Severely disappointed by open beta
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I played for most of the open beta. I played through the tutorial about 4 times. Through most of the desert and through about half of Canada. Also did some MC. Plus on the last day of open beta they let everyone level to 40 by talking to a contact by the zone transport. So i had 3 different 40s I got to try all the diff powers. I did all this because I really wanted to find some redeeming quality to this game, since i wanted something diff from CoH. But i found none.
Also the perks is NOT a false statement. Apparently you didnt look them up. The PvP ones are easier to get, but they're all crap like luchador masks. Also they're not as easy as you're making it out to be. Unless you were using one of the vastly OPed builds. Another major problem in the game is the complete lack of balance. Maybe you found some1 w/ out regen or invuln. 1,000 - 5,000 kills is the NORM for PvE perks. Again 17-80 HOURS for each one at 1 kill per minute. for ONE costume piece. Oh yea, this game is all about customization; NOT. They think they will keep people subbed by making them grind forever because they dont have much content and most of it is cheap shovelware.
Another thing I learned through my research is that almost all of Cryptic stayed at NCSoft, as Paragon Studios. Only Jack Emmet left and he took the Cryptic name with him.
So despite the name, the team who made CoH and the team who made CO is NOT the same, not even close.
I agree with the OP on a lot. I was in beta for 6 months and I was completely unimpressed.
That's not to say that it wasn't fun for a short time, and I understand where a lot of the people who enjoy the game are coming from, but in the end the game is very shallow strategically and without having classes it falls into a issue where everyone is going to basically build their characters the same way.
You might pick your end builder from fire and your AoE from ice with a telepathy hold and heal and a power armor def, and someone else takes the power armor end builder with a fire AoE.. etc, but in the end you end up with basically the same build with different effects. Sure, you can number crunch and come up with the absolute best build and a week later everyone will be playing it.
The combat animations are in general lackluster and some of them are just silly looking.
No roll to hit makes ranged combat boring and repetitive.
Melee is ineffective.
Still no capes with armor or integrated shoulders. (At one point in beta they had them and we were trying to get them back for months. It might not seem like much, but it was a highly requested addition for a long time.)
LOL these guys didnt even play the full game. Total misinformation from the OP. These people are scared out of their minds that CO is going to dethrone all mmo's and take over. HAHAHAHA
The WoW killer is here!
MC is 100 not 150. Unless they will change it for retail, but i seriously doubt that. Tutorial was 50 i believe. Crisis zone was either 50 or 75. I'm 99% sure the Desert & Canada were both 100. All very low by MMO standards. For example CoH doesn't create a new instance unless there are close to 300 people in a zone. Back when people did hami every weekend you could have over 200 people all grouped up fighting it in the same area.
When i was talking about the animations I was talking about how they dont move fluidly from one to the next. Your char jerks around when you choose powers too fast. For example, bestial lunge. You have to hold forward when u hit it to attack. But if you move in any direction during that attack the attack is completely stopped and the animation goes from a lunge in the middle of the air, instantly to standing on the ground like normal. It is especially noticeable when interrupting melle moves with other moves.
Also, if teaming worked you might have a point about doing quests together. But it's almost impossible to get the same quest as some1 else. Especially if they are a diff level & especially if they dont have the same contacts and aren't in the same part of that contact's arc. Very team up unfriendly. The only teaming i actually did that worked was inviting random people who were in the same area doing obviously the same quest. But most of those quests involved clicking blinkies which only counts for the person who clicks them. So the quest itself is anti-teamplay.
p.s. I've been a comic book fan for 20 years and I did not like the voice overs. They were just plain bad.
Also, 1000 kills IS a lot. that's 17 hours of farming one freakin mob. Half a work week, for a little stupid video game item. 5,000 kills is beyond insane. And why would that matter? I dunno. Take for example the pirate costume pieces. You want to be a pirate? Well too bad, it's not in the costume creator. You have to grind for it. But wait, Crypitic will sell it to you for only $10. WHAT A DEAL! (sarcasm
)
Actually the game takes a lot from WoW. Bill Roper (who also came from WoW & the disaster that was hellgate london) admitted as much. The item, purse system is the same. the item stacking is the same. the mail stations & sending items in mail is the same (just wait for gold farmers to get ahold of that). The teaming is sort of the same, except worse. The idea for open quests is the same. The idea for raids, the same. etc.. They tried to copy but they only copied the shell & not the substance.
Also the color system is completely borked, just like i said. Re-read my explanation. I gave a specific example. When the game goes live, if youre actually going to buy it, try it. Do a "gradient" or "blend" color scheme and 2 colors. then try to match it w/ the hands, legs, feet, head, anything. You wont be able to.
Quoted for truth
I really had fun in the champions beta. First game ive had fun in, in over a year so. And to the OP your review seems at most garbage what did you do play open beta for 3 hr's quit then say it sucks?
Sic semper tyrannis "Democracy broke down, not when the Union
ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms."
LOL! You always have a lot of enthusiasm. I hope you're right. I don't like CO, but I hate WoW.
Are you a member of Watchfire?
read my posts. I played it for almost a week. Through all the zones. Leveled to 40 & tried all the powers on the last day. Even tried to have fun w/ the Destroids, which were mildly fun in that they were big but the lag was unbearable & it just cemented my observation about how the zone caps are too small, as trying to get enough people was impossible. You just had to keep changing zones until you found one right by the power house entrance where there were enough people.
Which is another point i forgot to mention.
Searching. Completely broken & useless. It lists all the instances but not their numbers. The instance names are too long anyway & get cut off for most so even if they were numbered it wouldnt help. Why? Because the colums aren't scaleable.
Not to mention theres zero metadata. It's like inviting players blindly. You dont know what their stats lean towards or what build they're using. Sure anybody can choose any powers, but that also makes team building really hard if not impossible.
Yup thats personally what I was worried about, thats why I played through all the content in CB and then didn't purchase the game when it launched due to there being absolutely no content that I haven't seen. I also knew that CO was so great and the WoW killer with all of my being in such a way that I responded fairly succinctly to the claims the OP made about some of the actual truths in his rant that the game is still lacking on many areas. Those are the reasons why I'm personally scared of CO.. so .. good call on that one.
I already responded to this once, but you ignored it. The pop cap was over 150 in closed beta. Once open beta hit, the players were clustered into the lowest level areas of each zone and it caused some overcrowding. They lowered it to prevent the overcrowding. Once players spread out it will be increased. I would bet you money that it will be around 200 within a month of CO's release.
They didn't do this because of any technical limitation. If they thought it would be good to have 1000 players per zone they could do that, but every MOB would be camped and no one would be able to do anything. They have it set to 100 for our own good. Had they done it differently you would be bitching about spawn camping and how there are too many players everywhere.
The instanced shards gives them a great amount of control. You won't end up with 5000 max level players standing around the current raid instance entrance. You won't find emptry newbie zones. It load balances everyone so that we don't have to deal with a lot of the utter garbage that single instance servers cause.
Every time WoW puts out an expansion the first zones are so camped that it just plain sucks to play the game. That will never happen in CO. In WoW when you make a newbie character on an older server, half the game world is empty. It sucks. That will never happen in CO.
There have been so many times where I'll run into a real life friend and we find out that we both play the same game but we will never see each other because we were on different servers. That sucks and it will never happen in CO because of the shard system.
Also, I never had any problems with the color system during all 5 months of closed beta testing and open beta so I have no idea what you're talking about.
There is no such thing a a WoW killer, its a MYTH.
CO is a good, fun game, not for everyone tho.Its got its good, and its bad. For me its more good than bad, for someone else. Itll be different.
After many years of WoW, its the game for me. Then I like MMOs that other people dont like. Horizons and Ryzom were alot of fun for me. I am hoping more people join in on CO than those game, but no...its not a WoW killer.
Dax
I agree to most of the OP. Someone else also said, there were only ! and ? NPCs, and little "life" in the game, which also is quite true, given how detailled with live a gameworld like LOTRO is. Or WOW. Or even EQ2. In CO there are so many as you need quests, and the rest is random passer by.
Also, I lacked this sense of story. Both the world story and my story. Again, LOTRO showed in a good way how that can be done; those book quests felt very moving, whereas no CO quest ever felt more like "meh another kill x job".
I agree with a lot of your OP, and the things I don't agree with have already been pointed out.
I just wanted to comment on the statement above because I have no idea what you're talking about.
In previous posts I thought you were referring to PvP, but in the quote above you say mob. So I'm assuming you're talking about PvE. I don't know what kind of build you had, but on my character I could kill 10-15 even-con mobs easily in under a minute. So at a minimum kill-rate that would be just a little over an hour and a half of non-stop grinding to reach 1000 kills.
So I'm not really sure where you got this 17 hour figure from.
Maybe you could explain?
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
it was not to long ago that you could only TEST 12h a week.. but the killer is how SMALL the instances are. There were to many times playing with friends that we could NOT get back to the SAME instance. No cue.. nothing .. then the quests are so CLOSE together that I cant remember how many YEARS ago I had to CAMP over and over and over and over and over a quest JUST to get it done.
You will be SHOCKED at how many waiting for the same quest and you try to JOIN, make a TEAM just for that ONE quest and they wont.
If you liked COH.. you will like CO.. lol its NOT like night and day.. there so much the same its unreal.
I have 3 systems, 3 different MB, 2 different video cards like NV 285, ATI 4890..and you WILL get alot of LAG at times. The game is not opt'ed at all. It needs a few more months for testing. You will find at times you feel like a HERO.. then for some odd reason you are having a hard time killing something YOUR level.
The powers are so goofed up.. just read the forums.
But like most FREE2PLAY games CHampions Online will have a shop that you can PAY extra money to get stuff. Now they had a sticky on this but took it down fast. When asked a million times about the MT/money sucker shop .. you got ...... we plan to let you know about it in the coming WEEKS.. yep.. ONLY ..ONLY after you BUY the game then they will SHARE whats its all about.
Like you want to RESPECT your toon? A FULL respect will be in the shop.. that you PAY REAL cash for.. just like FREE2PLAY games.. just like all other MAJOR MMO's.. NOT.. They did the same with COH.
Its fun.. but ask lol about END GAME.. ask about PVP.. yeah like why 5 (NO LIE) could not kill ONE.. Yes it needs work .. but man they should have gave it one more month.
My thinking is AION, blah blah is coming out and they feel they HAVE to get out fast. But like I said at the start.. if you were in CLOSED beta then you know it wasnt long ago that we could only play 12y a week..
Oh how I love betas. Saves us all money and time. Next.
MC is 100 not 150. Unless they will change it for retail, but i seriously doubt that. Tutorial was 50 i believe. Crisis zone was either 50 or 75. I'm 99% sure the Desert & Canada were both 100. All very low by MMO standards. For example CoH doesn't create a new instance unless there are close to 300 people in a zone. Back when people did hami every weekend you could have over 200 people all grouped up fighting it in the same area.
Last time I logged into MC it was 150, not 75, not 100 but 150, but it is as say its less then youd expect from a MMO... but with quests in the open/not instanced as in CoX this is a need. Although I think introducing more instances and devide cities into more different zones would be great as you could be playing as a lvl 1 and lvl 30 in same zone. So a devide would be great, that or vastly increase the worlds size
When i was talking about the animations I was talking about how they dont move fluidly from one to the next. Your char jerks around when you choose powers too fast. For example, bestial lunge. You have to hold forward when u hit it to attack. But if you move in any direction during that attack the attack is completely stopped and the animation goes from a lunge in the middle of the air, instantly to standing on the ground like normal. It is especially noticeable when interrupting melle moves with other moves.
uhm ok? Well Played as Power armor and as Kinetic class, the animations shown by both were good, if not great. All animations in MMO suck I mean cmon... Combat mechanic wise theres no complaint for me whatsoever
Also, if teaming worked you might have a point about doing quests together. But it's almost impossible to get the same quest as some1 else. Especially if they are a diff level & especially if they dont have the same contacts and aren't in the same part of that contact's arc. Very team up unfriendly. The only teaming i actually did that worked was inviting random people who were in the same area doing obviously the same quest. But most of those quests involved clicking blinkies which only counts for the person who clicks them. So the quest itself is anti-teamplay.
I hooked up with some people that I played with during the entire lenght of the beta so this was not a problem for me. A lot of people solod Id give you that, but quite frankly why not do missions 3 times faster? Even if you have to help redo some missions for you and the guys in team to get insync.
I do agree with what your saying about the quests though, they should be sharable even if chained, it takes away a lots of benefits of grouping otherwise. As for clicking blinkies well... sure you get alot of those but your not just clicking objects you need to kill whatever guarding them and in general they are quick to do. The missions/quests are better then your average mmo period.
p.s. I've been a comic book fan for 20 years and I did not like the voice overs. They were just plain bad.
oh.. well I somewhat agree to one lenght but another just chuckles and cheers for the man in tights, its bad but humourus
Also, 1000 kills IS a lot. that's 17 hours of farming one freakin mob. Half a work week, for a little stupid video game item. 5,000 kills is beyond insane. And why would that matter? I dunno. Take for example the pirate costume pieces. You want to be a pirate? Well too bad, it's not in the costume creator. You have to grind for it. But wait, Crypitic will sell it to you for only $10. WHAT A DEAL! (sarcasm
)
hmm well to be honest I dont know wether if this is true or not, but even if it is so what? Its not meant for you to stand around and grind its more of a thing you get as a bonus while progressing through-out the game, kinda a bit like WAR did with its "trophies"
Actually the game takes a lot from WoW. Bill Roper (who also came from WoW & the disaster that was hellgate london) admitted as much. The item, purse system is the same. the item stacking is the same. the mail stations & sending items in mail is the same (just wait for gold farmers to get ahold of that). The teaming is sort of the same, except worse. The idea for open quests is the same. The idea for raids, the same. etc.. They tried to copy but they only copied the shell & not the substance.
What have you been smoking? What you have described can be fitted into any and every fantasy mmo released to date. As for open quests... well oh dear this is just shocking, you cant be serious?
Also the color system is completely borked, just like i said. Re-read my explanation. I gave a specific example. When the game goes live, if youre actually going to buy it, try it. Do a "gradient" or "blend" color scheme and 2 colors. then try to match it w/ the hands, legs, feet, head, anything. You wont be able to.
Once again, this game has except from CoX the best character custimation system of any mmo, perhaps any game ever! Thats not an opionion its fact, the number of possible looks and colorings are un-countable. So what you cant gradiant a whole suit cause your too lazy to do every piece for yourself.
If your talking about the pattern ofth it. Personally I have so many accesories that it wouldnt have mattered much for me anyhow the colorings, ex the crosses and lightnings and so on then they dont always match thats true, but there are many that do if your that obsessed with
I already responded to this once, but you ignored it. The pop cap was over 150 in closed beta. Once open beta hit, the players were clustered into the lowest level areas of each zone and it caused some overcrowding. They lowered it to prevent the overcrowding. Once players spread out it will be increased. I would bet you money that it will be around 200 within a month of CO's release.
They didn't do this because of any technical limitation. If they thought it would be good to have 1000 players per zone they could do that, but every MOB would be camped and no one would be able to do anything. They have it set to 100 for our own good. Had they done it differently you would be bitching about spawn camping and how there are too many players everywhere.
The instanced shards gives them a great amount of control. You won't end up with 5000 max level players standing around the current raid instance entrance. You won't find emptry newbie zones. It load balances everyone so that we don't have to deal with a lot of the utter garbage that single instance servers cause.
Every time WoW puts out an expansion the first zones are so camped that it just plain sucks to play the game. That will never happen in CO. In WoW when you make a newbie character on an older server, half the game world is empty. It sucks. That will never happen in CO.
There have been so many times where I'll run into a real life friend and we find out that we both play the same game but we will never see each other because we were on different servers. That sucks and it will never happen in CO because of the shard system.
Also, I never had any problems with the color system during all 5 months of closed beta testing and open beta so I have no idea what you're talking about.
What you're quoting is a response to a post PapaB34R made. He made no reference to closed beta at all. I havent even gotten to read your post as this thread balloned fast. But regardless, if it's like you said then what's to stop them from shrinking high level zone pops once the majority of the players reach level cap? By your logic that's exactly what they will do.
If they had just made the zones larger, and made quests splittable to multiple locations & randomly generated. For instance. Go kill X of this. Group A goes to contact. Gets a green circle in area A w/ mob X. Group B goes to contact and gets area B to hunt mob X. Group C goes to contact and gets area C to hunt mob X. Group D goes to contact and gets area D to hunt mob X. you have just quadroupled the number of people who can be on the same instance w/o causing quest interferance. The could have also done what SWG did, supply waypoints for group tasks & generate them at specific distances frome eachother. Their attempt at this doesnt work well. The area is gigantic & overlaps w/ other storyline quests most of the time.
You said you'd end up w/ 5,000 players all standing around a raid entrance. Does that happen in WoW? Doubtful. Also the game should be able to accomadate at least several hundred players in a local space. City of Heroes does it no problem. Costume contest under atlas on a saturday can easily approach 300 people. No major lag at all. Because people are just standing there. Very little bandwidth is being used. Again like i said, even during the hami raid there were often over 200 people crammed right next to eachother all spamming powers. They seemed to manage that just fine. But to humor your assertion, a simple solution to that? Make the cap 4,000 per zone. That's still an exponential increase over the current cap. And enough that it would speread players out. If you think that wont than that's akin to admitting they have a very limited end game. Which is another problem entirely.
You make it sound like they could have made only 2 choices and they chose the lesser of two evils. That's just not true. They limited themselves by design. & you keep comparing it to WoW's problems. You know there are other more elegant solutions to those problems. As i have tried explaining over & over. They just require more investment & effort.
p.s. re: the color matching. Do exactly what i said in the early start. Make a gradient from 2 colors for the chest & try to match it smoothly on the legs, hands, feet. you wont be able to. The gradient doesnt end at the second color, it ends at a blend of 2 colors you can select; creating a 3rd color which isn't in palette to start from.
I thought the gameplay was fine. My biggest criticism would be the instanced zones. It definitely made things seem small, not massive at all.
Our spirit was here long before you
Long before us
And long will it be after your pride brings you to your end
Focusing on the costume creator as it is probably the main thing this game has going for it & the main thing ALL reviews on it praise first & foremost, above all else in the game.
If you can't see how having something as generic & desireable by the player base as a pirate costume as a group of unlocks that would literally take you more time to get than there are working hours in a month; then I dont know what else to say.
They cant on one hand say they have a great costume creator, & that they're going to add more costume pieces & players can make whatever they want. And then on the other hand say, to make some things you have to jump through a million hoops first. Why is it OK for them to allow you to make a ninja as a starting char. But if you want to make a pirate you have to make a completely unrelated costume and spend an eternity grinding perks just to get your char to look how you want?
For a game that puts emphasis on aesthetic variety & FREEDOM; their implementation is severely limited. Most likely as to create artificial value to increase their microtransaction sales. Not cool.
p.s. the gradent blend is a pattern. A pattern which doesnt carry across to the rest of the body as it should. again, because the end of the gradient isn't at the secondary color, it's at a blend of a color. Yet the beginning of the next costume piece doesnt start at the end of another blend but at the hard palette color. so it's impossible to match by design.
I just can't forgive this game, it has too many flaws for me to overlook (even it's most redeeming quality is hampered by artificial walls); & their handling of their policies seem exploitive & contrary to player's interests
Focusing on the costume creator as it is probably the main thing this game has going for it & the main thing ALL reviews on it praise first & foremost, above all else in the game.
If you can't see how having something as generic & desireable by the player base as a pirate costume as a group of unlocks that would literally take you more time to get than there are working hours in a month; then I dont know what else to say.
They cant on one hand say they have a great costume creator, & that they're going to add more costume pieces & players can make whatever they want. And then on the other hand say, to make some things you have to jump through a million hoops first. Why is it OK for them to allow you to make a ninja as a starting char. But if you want to make a pirate you have to make a completely unrelated costume and spend an eternity grinding perks just to get your char to look how you want?
For a game that puts emphasis on aesthetic variety & FREEDOM; their implementation is severely limited. Most likely as to create artificial value to increase their microtransaction sales. Not cool.
p.s. the gradent blend is a pattern. A pattern which doesnt carry across to the rest of the body as it should. again, because the end of the gradient isn't at the secondary color, it's at a blend of a color. Yet the beginning of the next costume piece doesnt start at the end of another blend but at the hard palette color. so it's impossible to match by design.
I just can't forgive this game, it has too many flaws for me to overlook (even it's most redeeming quality is hampered by artificial walls); & their handling of their policies seem exploitive & contrary to player's interests
And with that note, this topic has come full circle.
:Locked:
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.