Champions Online Preview

Jakob Paulsen (Ventura) // Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 // Printable version

Champions Online preview

We’ve been heroic in Cryptic’s upcoming superhero MMO.

Starting a character in a new MMO is always a bit daunting. Everything is new, from combat controls to interaction with other players. However, being a five-year City of Heroes veteran I anticipated fewer problems than usual when I first booted up the Champions Online beta. After all – both game have been developed by Cryptic.

However, I was in for quite a surprise. Champions Online is vastly different from City of Heroes. It’s much more like an action game you’d expect to see on a console than a standard PC MMO.

The press beta is locked to three zones (including the tutorial) – which results in a maximum of roughly level eight or nine, so this preview is all about the first part of the game. We will not pass a full judgement on the game based on the starting part, just take a look at how different the first 20 levels of Age of Conan were compared to the rest of the game.

Although Champions Online does not play at all as City of Heroes the first few steps feel very familiar to a CoH veteran like myself particularly the costume creator. Cryptic is famous for its insanely diverse costume creator feature in City of Heroes. The Champions version is even more diverse and detailed. This is not your standard MMO where everyone looks the same – the character creator offers billions of combinations. You can change anything right down to the length of your arms and specific attachments for any body part – most of them can even be changed between right, left or both sides of the body.

During the beta the costume creator has been improved and the colour options make more sense now. This is a game that looks set to reward creativity by players. And you needn't worry that you'll be fixed to your costume creator creation - the zones feature tailors who offer their services for a small fee.

Power selecting the easy or the free way

 

You can select your future powers in two ways. The easiest route is to go with the pre-defined groups that Cryptic has set up including the basic statistics (called talent). If you take Dual Blades, for example, you can be quite sure that you will not end up with an under-par character. However, you are also free to select a custom framework, where you pick two powers from any group as well as a talent like the heavy hitter or the untouchable, which influences your points in the various categories such as strength, intelligence and endurance. Much like you know from a standard RPG.

The interesting feature about Champions Online’s power structure is that you can mix and match. If you choose Dual Blades to become a melee character, there’s nothing stopping you from taking a ranged power from the Supernatural or the Power Armour pool. Of course there are limits – if you don’t specialize you don’t get access to the higher tier powers and you will probably not end up with a very strong hero in the end, but the freedom is fresh and allows every player to create his or her ideal avatar.

Travel early, travel fast

Once you’ve created your hero you will be send to Millennium City which is under attack from aliens. This is the tutorial, which includes roughly a dozen missions. With some practice you can single out the few key missions and get through the tutorial in half an hour. While the tutorial is fun, superhero MMOs traditionally seek to make you create many characters and that makes the tutorial get a bit old fast. It does get you through all kinds of missions, though, including an interesting one that makes use of the game’s physics. You can lift all small objects in the game and in that particular mission you have to rescue civilians who are caught under debris from the battle. You lift op the piece of wall and throw it away – hero of the day.

Travel powers come early – level 5 – which is much earlier than in City of Heroes, and that’s a great decision by the developer. The late travel power is one of City of Heroes' lasting annoyances (you need to play for five years to be able to get them at level 6 instead of level 14). There’s a great selection already and the developer seems to be able to add them nearly on the fly. However, some of the powers are terrible. I especially disliked tunnelling. You can’t tunnel under anything at all – even a box on the ground will stop you in your tracks. Flight is so far the king of travel powers in Champions Online.

Open missions

The tutorial climaxes with one of the cool features of Champions Online – an open mission. Anyone can join those at any time by being in the right spot. Here I had to defend the Champions HQ from aliens and help build up a huge gun to take down the mothership. Post-mission you can compare your performance with other players. Finally you go inside the HQ to help Defender clear the HQ and fire the gun you just helped create.

The tutorial does a good job of giving you the feeling of being in the centre of attention even though you are just a lowly hero.

From there on you can select one of two zones to move to. There’s a desert zone and a Canadian zone. The former features something that reminds me a lot of Hulk – a bomb in the desert goes off and results in radiated zombies. During the beta several of the quests have been improved. A common problem with object gathering missions is that there are too many heroes and too few things – with a slow spawn rate. But the developer seems to be aware of that.

The Canadian zone is the more interesting of the two in my mind with cooler foes, better weather effects and a much more interesting background story, which I won’t spoil here. In the end you travel to an instance where you have to fight a boss that’s quite hard to solo. But the fun stopped there for me, the press beta doesn’t allow us journalists to move further.

Fast-paced combat

Combat is fast-paced and visually satisfying to a point that makes most MMOs look like they are boring slide-shows. Powers work quite differently from City of Heroes. Now you have to activate your low tier powers in order to build up endurance enough to use your more powerful attacks. There’s no waiting for powers to recharge and thus you just need enough juice to do what you want. The cool thing is that some of the endurance building powers just need to be activated once, then your hero will keep using for the rest of the fight unless you get knocked out/held or you activate another power. Once that has been used, the endurance builder attacks automatically again.

This also lets you use another aspect of combat that will please the console gamers but challenges old-school MMO players: Evade and block. If you move around, you are harder to hit, and that would be nearly impossible if it wasn’t for the auto-attack powers. In practice I didn’t like that very much and ended up not moving at all, just like I’m used to from other MMOs. You can also block attacks, which is especially important with bosses – you can see a clear icon above their head if they are about to launch a really powerful attack.

Finally some powers charge up if you keep the key pressed. The longer you press, the stronger the attack. Of course that leaves you more vulnerable.

Distinct look

Cryptic has chosen a very distinctive visual style for Champions Online, which makes it look a lot more like a comic book than City of Heroes but at the same time feels less detailed and more taxing on the video card. If your PC is struggling with City of Heroe, it will not be happy with Champions at all, although frame rate and lag seems to have been addressed during the beta. So things can still improve. The main weakness is probably body looks which I found extremely hard to use – I rarely got a look that was totally satisfying in-game – even though it looked good in the creator.

The audio delivers what you’d expect from an MMO – however the spoken dialogue is good and seems to be getting more common in the latest generation of MMO’s.

Only seen the early part...

Do remember that I have only been able to see first three zones of the game. So what I say may not be true for the whole game at all and will only be revealed during a full review. But from what I’ve seen Champions Online is much more like an action-game than a standard MMO. While grouping works fine it’s nowhere as necessary as in City of Heroes. If you have the right build you can probably solo most parts of the game – and fast, too. I’ve seen beta players report that they reached level 40 in less than 50 hours. Lately Cryptic has begun adding team missions, but the whole group dynamic I know and love from City of Heroes with clearly defined synergies between various types of heroes is missing here.

I’ve seen reports that not all powers are interesting enough or unique enough, but as I’ve only played to level eight and nine, I can’t confirm that. What I can say is that some of the power groups are really well-done. I loved Supernatural and Dual Blades for example.

A hero on a set course

The game feels a lot more like Lord of the Rings online with a very structured story and a strict story-line that you follow through the missions. I can’t say if that’s true in the later parts of the game, too, but the open world of City of Heroes has not been copied by Champions Online. You move along a set course doing the pre-defined missions. You can’t choose to street hunt or to do random missions if you want to bypass parts of the story. Whether that’s good or bad or whether that’s true after level nine, it’s still too early to say. But combined with the console action game feel of the combat, it makes for a very different hero game.

I think there’s room for both games. Players will probably choose the game after the gameplay style they prefer the most – or might even stay in both because they are very different. Personally I hope for more low level zones as I’ve already begun being bored with the current ones, which you’d expect from the type of player who might create 5-10 characters to play with at the same time. I can’t wait to see the final game in September.

Source:  rpg.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php