Champions OnlineFollow

I haven't played it. A balanced assessment of it (from what I can tell) is that it is quicker paced, more arcade style action. More of a MMO-shoot'em up than an MMORPG. I've heard people say that the Xbox 360 controller is very desirable for it. Folks like being able to mix & match from any power pools ("I shoot ice rays and fireballs and levitate and fire a rifle").

Major criticisms I've heard is that everyone is ultimately a mage-tank with little reason to group. There's few support style powers so, for all the variety in pew-pews, everyone is pretty much the same at the end of the day just with different colors and shapes of pew-pews. I've heard estimates of perhaps 30 hours of content as well but they might have tweaked xp or may add more stuff. Folks complain that too many quest mobs/spawns are non-instanced leading to a crowd of players spam clicking on an escort NPC so they can be the one leading it or whatever but I suppose time will eventually fix that problem.

Graphics are hit or miss depending on the person but you can look those up on your own.

Frankly, I'm surprised at how little notice the game has gotten around here. We spent more time discussing Pirates of the Burning Sea than this game.

Yes, but how's the character creation?

That's pretty much all I did in CoH.

Actually I wasn't.

I'm not gonna spend money on it but if I did, I would pretty much do what I did in CoH: create a character with loving care, play her for 15 or so levels, delete and start over. And over. And over.

Nothing wrong with Malta! I was born in Malta, I'll have you know.....

Oh, and Potbs totally rocks my socks now. You should go buy it. The new spacebar cannon dance is redefining this modern day classic.

Yeah, I'm all over that.

Actually, if someone (who I actually know on here) wants a free month of City of Heroes, I can hook someone up. I once bought a discounted copy of City of Villains but, since I had already used a CoV Collector's Edition key, it wouldn't let me stack the codes for another free month of gameplay. Upshot being that I have an unused City of [Blank] code lying about. I only spent $6.00 on the game so I'm willing to give it away to someone who I figure isn't a total pud.

No obligations... if you hate it, stop playing.

Someone should jump on this. Joph is a great healer.

No. Really.

I suck at PVP. And I don't care for it.

Haha! What? You don't like Sappers, and stun guns, and freeze guns all at the same time? Sheesh!

One of the great pros of the character creation in Champions is that there are more color selections per location and you can view changes live. Basically, you select one of the 5 colors each location might have and as you mouse over the colors the image of your character reflects the changes. This is a vast improvement over the CoH method of making a change, then looking at the character. Nope, that's not quite right, try again. Opps. On that location, this color affects that bit. Drat! I changed the pattern and I want the colors reversed, etc...

I've typically found that color and pattern selection in CoH was very time consuming, so I usually stuck to simple color schemes, tended to copy them across the entire character, and usually stuck with similar or identical patterns on each location. With Champions, its so much easier to see what your changes will look like right there that I found myself actually taking the time to customize a bit more.

Joph is right that the inconsistency in selections in each location is annoying. I was making an armored guy, but the names for a "tech armor" look on each location varied wildly. I ended up just trying a zillion things to see how they looked. Which is fun, but it would have been more fun if the names allowed me to make a more informed choice about how they'd fit with selections I'd made in other locations. I don't mind trying a bunch of combinations, but the process was a bit more hunt and peck than I wanted.


Oh. And I did try PvP. Basically got my butt spanked pretty thoroughly, but that's to be expected. You can do a lot of customization of characters in Champions, even beyond power selection. My guy's mostly designed with AE damage in mind. There's just nothing wrong with firing off a barrage of mini-missiles (which is kind of like an AE DoT, hitting in four waves), and following it up with a mini-gun spray into the same group. That's great for taking out spawns of NPCs, but not so useful in PvP. I also discovered that they start you in the arena with all your extra clickies set as though they'd just been activated. So my "once every 15 minute forcefield of 20 second invulnerability" which I have slotted was kinda useless. And since it was, I effectively lost a primary utility slot which could have been used to add to my defenses and my stats (And these can be pretty big bonuses).


That's actually one of the neato things about the game. In addition to picking powers, stats, talents, perks, and advantages, throughout the game you'll pick up, be rewarded with, or craft various items. They come in three flavors: Offense, Defense, and Utility. Each of those can be primary or secondary. You have slots on your character for one primary and two secondaries of each of those three areas (so nine slots). These each typically have some defense points (like AC) and some stats. The amounts increase as the level of the item increases (you can only slot items your level or lower, and you tend to get drops and rewards of the same level as the stuff you're fighting). Collectively, this forms most of your normal defenses and a good portion of your total stats.

Based on what you put in those slots you can significantly affect how many hps your character has, your chance to critical, your ability to resist effects, whether or not you can pick up and throw barrel or a tank, etc. Some of them have additional power effects. Sometimes, they modify existing powers (but somehow I've managed to not find a single one which matched any of the powers I have). Some of them have always on defensive effects (like a minor HOT when you take damage, or a minor damage effect which hit anyone who attacks you). Sometimes, they give you an additional power to use. Those usually have a timer on them. So you can use the uber ghost bullet gun once every 5 minutes maybe, or the super forcefield every 15 minutes. The latter two usually come at the expense of significant amounts of defense and stats.


I'm still learning all the ins and outs, but I am having fun. We'll see if I'm still interested in a month or two. I think a lot of the staying power of the game will be based on how the end game content works (and the whole "pick your own arch enemy" thing seems promising) and how much new content they're able to add. Right now, the stories and missions are pretty set (at least up until the mid teens), and each zone will tend to have a set of missions at any given level range which will run out if you just run through them. Presumably, if you come back at a higher level, there may be more missions to run (I'm positive of this in fact). I suppose that's good, since it does force you to move from one area to another every few levels. I'm just not sure how many paths there are to follow. So far it looks like three maximum, and that choice only starts at around 8th or 9th level. It's basically about which order you choose to do the missions in a given zone, and so far, I've only seen three zones.


We'll see...

Does she own a falcon?

c'mon, you set that one up...

I have no dog in the CoX/CO thing and figure they're different enough that there's room for both. But I have no idea what your criticism is supposed to be here.

Because you are most likely poor, save your money. The game is crap.

More because you are a loser.

The spacebar cannon dance describes the ship battles, which consisted primarily of circling the other ships and pressing spacebar to fire your cannon as fast as possible.