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Beta preview thoughts - plays like Marvel Ultimate Alliance with the CoX costume creator
therain93
Member UncommonPosts: 2,039
The client --
The client is relatively small and downloads/patches quickly. The avatar picture on login is connected to your friends list, randomly displaying a picture from the group. The engine is a modified version of the CoX one and thus handles largely the same way, right down to keybinds.
The hero costume creator / Tailor --
I'm mixed over the CC. There are plenty of options, as detailed in the youtube videos but there are some odd restrictions too, such as capes onlybeing available to people wearing tights.... Faces, especially female faces, are very generic, even though you can use the sliders to change it all around. In addition to costume designe, you can set your pose and facial expression. Some people have been quite successful re-creating their heroes from CoX and others haven't.
In the initial creator, you can only customize your face/upper body/hands/legs/pose/expression. As soon as you enter the tutorial, you can click on your powers and change their color. Weapons can be changed either at the Tailor or through the use of power replacers (drops that can change swords to axes, etc.)
The CC was still buggy at the end of cb and if you see an issue, bug it. For example, selecting options form a drop down in gloves might change to the lower body tab. Also, you cannot preview what the various weapons look like, etc.
On the nice side, you can basically configure every single weapon connected to a power and there is a very clear indicator of wher eyou can find new costume parts that you unlock. There are a number of them which you can acquire doign missions or completing perks.
Finally, you can an additiona lcostume slot when you join a super group and also at certain levels, the first being at level 14.
Hero Design / Power Selection/ The Power House.
Moving to a more traditional character system, heros have stats including the tradiational strength, intelligence, constitution and dexterity. The traits are not rolled but you can select one of a number of combinations. As you level up, you can choose how you want to increse those stats (add 8 to a stat, or 4 to 2 different stats, 3 to 3 different stats.) In addition, you can choose 2 super stats which will autmoatically increase each level. Your damage is also linked to this, so Harvey the Geek's raygun is not connected to strength as might be traditional for an mmo but the specific stat you choose...say dexterity.
Training is done at the Power House -- you select your powers, travel powers, stat improvements and advantages. You can actually change out the last 10 selections you make. Clever people have thought to always change out their travel power so it is the last selection they choose thus alaway available for changing. There's an immense number of options to choose from here as well and it really requires a nice consolidated set of documentation to make informed decisions. While you can select powers from almost any framework, there are some dependencies that due exist.
Combat
Combat is very fast and active. First, you can actively block incoming attacks. Typically whenenemies are about to unleashing something devastating, there will be a clear clue either in their "wind up" or stating something aloud. Energy management imakes the game fun. You have an energy bar and a resting energy rate (like a heart rate). So, your max energy might be 113, but your resting rate may be 43. This means that your energy will naturally gravitate towards the resting rate, rebuilding if you're in combat or dropping off if you're out of combat. Aside from naturally building, everyone selects an energy building attack which can raise you to the maximum (don't worry, blocking, as well certain other powers and advantages can raise energy too).
For example, my hero has a two bladed energy builder -- slice slice slice. And then pulls out twin pistols (two-gun mojo) to put out some serious firepower. using other powers and talents, i can have criticals add back energy.
I enjoy combat although the responsiveness to blocking and switching between powers could be better. A number of us have bugged this, you should too! ( ' :
PvP / Balance
Balance is tricky. PvP naturally underscores differences in builds. It's very easy to gimp yourself, the intial fear of the open power selection desigin CoX originally had. Tweaking is still occuring. I'm not a pvp'er and there's no purpose to it like other games but iI still found it fun. A few quests are tied to it so you'll get a taste ot it, win or lose.
Balance against mobs is another story. it;'s just wacky. Like CoX, you can take out multiple henchmen and as you get to some higher level mob types (villians, master villains..etc) the challenge is upped a bit but you will still mow through things. This has been bugged and some mobs have been altered accordingly and, in general, difficulty was upped in this last week. But my level 14 still took care of a level 17 master villain without much concern.
Quests
Some quests are fun and silly. There are references to Big Trouble in Little China, meeting Burt Jackson. And then there's the ping-pong ball hijacking by Foxbat (you slip on the poing pong balls....) unlike CoX, questing and your purpose here, is more themepark-like. There's significantly less quest instances, for better or for worse ("kill stealing" be an issue). There's nothing new about these...defeat x, deliver this, talk to him.
Public Quests have been implemented and you're thrown into one in the tutorial all that it doesn't feel like you accomplish much. Furthermore, they appear to be a bit broken as you do not get any rewards from them.
Drops/Crafting
Kills yield resources, "item" drops, and glowies that act like instant inspirations (from CoX). Resources can be uesd to pay for costume changes and possibly something from the head crafters. Drops are like enhancements, affecting multiple things such as defense, stat bonuses, crit bonuses or be an item replacer as mentioned above. There are three types -- offensive, defensive, and utiltiy. Within these, you can have 1 primary of each and 2 secondary although why they are classified as such is unknown to me (another place for documentation.) Crafting levels up as you either deconstruct some of your drops or build new things (most notably bags) from blueprints you learn from the trainers.
An early post-tutorial mission you receive is to choose a specialization among the crafters -- arms, science or mysticism. This is later broken down further although I do not know why (again, documentation would be great here.) One thing I do know is that, although you may want to skip crafting (and you can), I have already come across objects (various weapon caches and boxes) that require certain levels of crafting to interact with. These may open new quest objects or not, but I figure that's something to try out eventually.
Other Broken Things...
The Auction house wasn't working. Hero Games were offline. I had trouble interacting with multiple items. Some mobs weren't fighting back. Many people with high end systems struggled. I had two ugly crashes early in July but the game ran fine otherwise......that is, until this past friday when the ugly crash returned. Most people complained about lag/fps issues.
For reference, I'm running a 2 year old Dell XPS410 2.1 ghz dual core, vista home premium, 3gb ram, evga nvidia 8800 gt ssc 512 mb ram video card..
Summary
In summary, the game feels fun but needs work. I advised in several postings that cb be extended to Sept 1, let open beta run all of september and release october 1st. Other testers claim the game has come a long way these past few months but I feel like some core systems aren't working well enough yet and the game lacks polish for go live. It won't tear me away from CoX entierly, if at all. I'm torn on purchasing it and won't decide until August 31st based on progress made patching the game.
Depending on the subscription model, I think it will do quite well on the xbox 360 and, depending on the frequency and quality of updates, could live side by side with CoX.
Comments
Added a few screenshots, also wanted tocomment that I turned off comic-outlining. BLECH!
Probably the best overview of the game I've seen posted on here yet.
While I happen to disagree and think CO is way better than CoX, I have to say your review seems to be pretty fair and well thought out. I disagree on some of your points, but I think everyone's experience will be slightly different, so I'll leave it at that.
I would say though that I think it plays a little more in-depth than Marvel Ultimate Alliance, what with the crafting and some of the more MMO elements, etc However it's not a bad way to describe the game. Perhaps I would say it plays like a Marvel Ultimate Alliance MMO with the CoX costume creator.
"Because it's easier to nitpick something than to be constructive." -roach5000
It is typical MMo thinking that they can't wait another 2 months to get the game polished enough... They know how much it actually costs them to release the game to early but just can't wait.
Good review however.
The avatar don't look so impressive to me... She just looks weird.
And this is typical consumer thinking that it's just THAT simple and no other factors contribute to the release date.
My suggestion: get used to it, or dont buy the games at launch. No MMO is going to release at a point you dont consider early, unless it's a foreign port.
I’ll play tonight. But at least one of the better previews I have seen yet.
Thank god for this review, makes every one that read it feel better. It is beta and from reading this review, CO don't have much wrong with it just need a bit of work before they release. I am happy as hell that something is new to play, I have not played any mmo for 4months.
I appreciate the positive feedback -- I tried not to be too biased. I did log in and get the nasty crash in the tutorial once but played fine since then (with a team of 3 others), picking up some perks.
I actually opted to play a power armor framework rather than the custom i mentioned above but have realized that I can't comment on the combat in quite the same fashion -- power armor is a bit slower, or at least feels that way after playing blades, pistols and chains. I'll recreate that hero tonight but the game was lag free in the tutorial.
Since cb they also added a save/load feature to the costume creator at the beginning of the game. As an additional feature, they've made it so you can send a screenshot of a costume to your friends who can open it and apply it to their heroes. Very nice!
The only screenshot I took this afternoon -- the guy in green to the left is called Komodo. Very nice outfit and he tintted his ice travelpower to match. (my wolf-headed power armored hero is in the center.)