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November 10 2009

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the latest creation from Cryptic Studios, Champions online. This is the latest game in the Super Hero MMO front to hit the shelves. I do feel however that it is almost impossible to talk about the game without comparing it to Cryptic’s first venture into the super hero mmo genre, City of Heroes, so I simply won’t avoid comparing the two.

Visuals

Champions online is a very good looking game. It utilizes a cell shading effect that is very reminiscent of the game XIII for the game cube. This help lends it a very distinct feel to help separate it from the other MMOs and games out there. To be perfectly honest that is the first thing that piqued my interest in the game. Complete with 1960’s batman style “KABLOW”, the game screams comic book and that’s a huge plus in my book. The energy effects are vibrant and vivid the cityscapes are varied and surprisingly lush. This is a big departure from City of Heroes. In CoH the game was visually stunning, but for all the fantastic powers and things that happened, the game tried to go with a realistic feel to it, mimicking traffic patterns of both cars and pedestrians. buildings and zones felt like things you’d find in a city planning sim, great for the time but it just didn’t feel very heroic. Cryptic did great with this one and champions truly feel heroic and comic book like. Even foot traffic and car patterns seem more in line with comic books rather then a city planner

This leads into the second topic

Character Creation and Character Powers

Let’s face it; the meat of anything involving super heroes is going to come back to the point of your costume and your super powers. City of Heroes set the bar pretty high. They offered a series of costume choices that had near limitless combinations to make truly unique characters. Champions take this and bring it up a notch. Not only can you customize your body type but you can choose to sculpt the head, edit hand size and arm length. In addition to this the costume choices are phenomenal. You are presented with so many options in attire and you can even chose to add it to just one side (left or right) for an asymmetrical feel, or to both to keep things consistent. Also I feel I should point out that Champions Online has some pretty wicked looking wings, much better then those in CoH. You can honestly spend a lot of time doing nothing but creating costumes.

Everyone knows one of the most important things in a super hero back story is their super powers and the origins of those powers. Did they come from an ancient artifact, from a radioactive insect, a freak medical accident or have you just traveled the world honing your fighting skills? In CoH you got to choose the origin of your powers and then select from a myriad of choices for your powers based on that origin. In city of heroes however you were restricted to a very linear pool of powers. You are stuck with this power pool for your entire career; an invulnerability tank was always an invulnerability tank. The only exception to this is your secondary pools which you can pick up if you choose to add extra flavor to your character.

In Champions you can choose to pick a straight pool of powers or you can mix and match. It’s very easy to have a telekinetic double sword swinging fire breathing hero, by all means you can do it in CO. You get a multitude of choices that ensures your character can be exactly what you want it to be, with the powers you really want. I give them kudos in this as one of my biggest gripes in CoH was how limited the power pools were, if you saw someone pull out a katana, you knew what attacks were coming, in CO that’s most definitely not the case.

Champions will be a haven for alt-a-holics based on just character creation alone. I know a guy who spent more time making alts in CoH then actually playing, I have a feeling he’s already doing that here, but probably with more glee and vigor then before.

Questing

Another staple of any do-gooder is fighting evil, in order to fight evil you either need to patrol the city streets or get dispatched on missions. In CoH you were given contacts in certain zones that gave you missions to go and complete. The contacts tended to be spread out and require lots of movement between mission zone and quest giver. Also the quest giver wasn’t clearly marked unless you used the in game feature to highlight a target and move towards it. Sometimes you would get task force missions which were mini story arcs and that would just keep rolling on the missions until the very end, but there weren’t too many of those.

In Champions they’ve gone with a more traditional MMO questing feature complete with “ ? ” and “ ! ” marks. In CoH your quests were very spread out among many contacts over many zones, there was no traditional quest hub. In CO the “working areas” are very self contained. You never really have to go far to pick up or complete missions, so questing is easier. Boss battles happen pretty frequently and they can sometimes be completed in as little as 10 minutes (at least in the early stages) but there are many that require you to bring some friends along. The thing I like most about how the zones are constructed is that missions like “defeat x of y” won’t take you forever trying to find that ONE mob hiding on the other side of a large zone in an alley between two obscure buildings like I ran into time and time again in CoH.

Inventory

Now as you’re questing you’re going to be picking up things. In CoH you didn’t really have an inventory so to speak, you had a limited number of slots for enhancements and temporary power boosts called inspirations. Very very limited.
CO does have an inventory system which allows you to use items to buff your statsor your abilities. You also have a “tool belt” which holds 5 usable and perishable items. It’s a little more space overall which is good. This also leads into crafint. CoH introduced crafting in one of it’s later episodes. Crafting in CO is a lot like that in COH. You get a blueprint, gather the resources, hit the workbench and press a button and bam, work complete. In CO though you can disassemble certain items through research, and get the raw materials plus some additional credits you can use to purchase special blueprint.

Story

Now for the meat of why we’re here, this is after all “for the lore”. CoH had a very interesting very comic bookish story involving Nazi’s and Alien invasions. I’ll spare you the details but needless to say Paragon city had a pretty interesting clientele of bad gusy.

In Champions they have turned on a section of their site entitled Champions Lore. This section provides various stories from within the Champions universe, detailing the history of characters, places, and more. Character and NPC stories will unfold here, currently they are unveiling piece by piece the saga of a Character Named Ironclad. It’s quite a good story and if you have time I suggest you hop over and give it a read.

The story of CO plays out very much like a comic book, it’s not incredibly deep but it does have villains like Dr. Destroyer to come and give you a hard time. There is however an awesome feature that I LOVE about this game. Superman had Lex Luthor, Batman had the Joker, Spiderman had Carnage and Wolverine had Saber tooth. Well… in CO you create your own arch nemesis! This might not sound like much but your story will see you interacting with this a lot. Allowing you to create your own nemesis lets you have a vested interest in actually defeating it. Unlike a generic villain (which there are many to fight) you look forward to doing missions that will see you interacting with them. There is also a drive in the community for fan fiction and background not only on your own hero, but your hero’s nemesis. It allows you to have a hand in the creation of the story that will help drive your character. This is unique to this game and is awesome in the fact it allows you to create your own world within the world cryptic has set up.

Final thoughts

This is the next step in the evolution of hero MMO’s. It is a good game but it is very clearly built upon the shoulders of City of Heroes. I am impressed with the implementations and I can see me keeping this as a fun game to play because I’ll be honest, I’m a comic nerd. But I can also see me moving over to the other Comic MMO coming out when it’s finally released, DC Universe Online.

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