(no subject)
So, there's a new MMO out called Champions Online. It's a superhero MMO, and so of course everyone who plays or has ever been interested in City of Heroes is all a-buzz with talk and opinions about it. Well, this weekend there was a completely open beta for anyone who wanted to give it a try just before it went live, so Nick and I downloaded it (well, let's be exact - it got downloaded onto Nick's machine because my computer currently doesn't have the graphics to run anything much above Minesweeper) and we spent most of Sunday giving it a test-run.
The thing that everyone talks about most in Champions Online (hereafter referred to as CO to save typing) is its character creator. Five years ago when CoX first hit, its character creator was pretty much the most detailed and multi-optioned one out there in any MMO, and now the general consensus is that CO is topping that and then some. Nick certainly seems to agree with that assessment, as he spent a total of nine hours non-stop on Sunday just creating character after character, just to see if he could and how detailed the options were. He barely actually played the game, just the creator (if there was a way to download just that - and, you know, not pay for it - he'd be a happy bunny for the forseeable future). As for me, I picked the two characters I've had since CoX began, the ones I wanted to create the most in game, and used them to test out the creator.
The first thing I noticed was that, yes, there are a lot of options. And bars, and sliders, and all sorts of things like that. In fact, it almost seems a little too complicated to me, but hey, I get impatient sometimes, and spending 20-30 minutes working out what colour my eyebrows are going to be sometimes seems like a little too much for me. But in the end, despite all those options, I still wasn't able to make my characters the way I wanted them. Part of that is, of course, down to the fact that I know I'm never going to be able to get those characters exactly the way they look in my head, but there was also the problem that, in both cases, there actually weren't enough options to get what I wanted. and no, I don't think I'm being picky here.
In the first case, I have a female character who's a combination of a superspeedster and fire manipulator who uses a pair of (tonfa) batons along with martial arts to fight. Now, for the most part this wasn't a problem - you can mix-and-match powers so you can go with, say, Claws and Martial Arts or Dual Blades and Martial Arts to get the right look. The problem was that you can't select what your weapons look like at character creation. This surprised me, because in CoX we've had that option for some time now, and I figured that if CO was the improvement on CoX's creator we'd have had that option too. But no, and so as I understand it my options are limited to changing my weapons as I level up (and possibly getting stuck with each one as I level) or unlocking special costume parts. Okay, the last one's not too bad - providing I don't have to pre-order or do a microtransaction for it - hey, some people are on budgets and can't afford to shell out for every single little thing they want in an MMO, unfortunately. But when you consider that CO is starting off with being able to change the colour of your powers' effects and the like, and CoX isn't getting that till i16 (coming Soon), it does stand out a little, at least to me.
In the second case, I have my teenage psychic. I had something of a bigger problem here - CO has no options for teen heroes in its body types or faces. Sure, I can take the basic form and face and slim and tweak them until they resmble a teenager as best as I can manage, but still... And when you consider the existance of the teen hero trope in superhero comics/games, it does surprise me that there aren't any options in there for it.
But okay, overall the character creator wasn't bad at all. Very nice, very shiny, a little too over-complicated for my tastes but overall not bad. Onto the rest of the game.
Graphics are genuinely good. Nick's computer is currently running a GeForce 8600 GT, and we had little to no problems with running the game, apart from the occasional moment of stalling or patch of grass that was more vomit-yellow and pixillated than it probably should have been, but hey, it's also beta so we'll forgive little glitches like that. The controls were... Well, for me they were awkward, but that might well have been because I was having to use Nick's default settings and he uses the WADS method while I use the cursor keys. It took me a good few minutes to work out how I was going to do things there, because I kept trying to turn and ended up strafing sideways because I forgot that the keys weren't set that way.
Gameplay was more... hit-and-miss. A fair few things in CO seem to have been, shall we say, "inspired" by things in Warhammer Online, such as green circles on the map overview to show you where a mission should be completed, and Public Quests/Missions, where anyone and everyone in the area can pitch in and help save that area of the city, be it by apparently shooting an alien out of a giant cannon or detecting zombie infiltrators in Canada. The problem I found was that the difficulty levels of the PQs seems to vary rather a lot. The tutorial PQ was simple (natch), but the PQ I did in Canada had a section that was almost impossible to figure out what to do, which was somewhat frustrating. *shrug* Maybe it gets explained better somewhere and I missed it.
I found the map rather confusing to follow and use at times, but whether that's down to over-complicated design or the fact that my dyscalculia means I have no sense of direction I don't know.
The powers... well, I personally tested only a couple (although Nick informs me that Powered Armour was "awesome", Might was "kick-ass" and Munitions was "utterly deadly"). I first played with my Claws/Martial Arts combo, and found it to be mighty indeed. In fact, it was pretty much everything I might ever have wanted in a powerset for that particular character (aside from the lack of flame effects or weapons of choice, but hey, can't have everything - although while in Canada I did get the chance to create a piece of body armour that gave me a flame effect over my body as a side detail, which was good). Coupled with the Perks, Enhancements and other things that I admit I got confused over and can't remember too much about, I was able to develop the character pretty much how I had envisioned her in my head and writings in the past.
On the other hand... I found it rather more difficult to play my psychic character, mainly because, by mixing Telepathy and Telekinesis, I found that I had one ranged attack and one melee attack, which I didn't really want. Maybe if I'd had more time to change powers around I might have gotten both ranged powers, but let's face it, unless you're Emma Frost telepaths generally don't go running into melee range. This, and the fact that the telepathy power I started with seemed kind of... weak, gave me the impression that this character would be slower to play than when he was a low-level Mind Control/Kinetics character in CoX (which, for anyone who's not played it, is pretty damn slow). Which, after the Claws/Martial Arts fun, didn't make me too eager to keep playing there.
Maybe I'm being too critical here, for a game which is literally only going live now, but... It is a very pretty game, I'll be the first to admit that, but at the same time it felt to me like it was still missing a lot, and might not have had all that much to recommend it beneath the pretty graphics and character creator of time-consuming. We'll see - Nick might get the game in the near future to try it out properly, meaning I can play a little more, and several of my friends are playing it, so things might change. But right now I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with my City of Heroes game.
The thing that everyone talks about most in Champions Online (hereafter referred to as CO to save typing) is its character creator. Five years ago when CoX first hit, its character creator was pretty much the most detailed and multi-optioned one out there in any MMO, and now the general consensus is that CO is topping that and then some. Nick certainly seems to agree with that assessment, as he spent a total of nine hours non-stop on Sunday just creating character after character, just to see if he could and how detailed the options were. He barely actually played the game, just the creator (if there was a way to download just that - and, you know, not pay for it - he'd be a happy bunny for the forseeable future). As for me, I picked the two characters I've had since CoX began, the ones I wanted to create the most in game, and used them to test out the creator.
The first thing I noticed was that, yes, there are a lot of options. And bars, and sliders, and all sorts of things like that. In fact, it almost seems a little too complicated to me, but hey, I get impatient sometimes, and spending 20-30 minutes working out what colour my eyebrows are going to be sometimes seems like a little too much for me. But in the end, despite all those options, I still wasn't able to make my characters the way I wanted them. Part of that is, of course, down to the fact that I know I'm never going to be able to get those characters exactly the way they look in my head, but there was also the problem that, in both cases, there actually weren't enough options to get what I wanted. and no, I don't think I'm being picky here.
In the first case, I have a female character who's a combination of a superspeedster and fire manipulator who uses a pair of (tonfa) batons along with martial arts to fight. Now, for the most part this wasn't a problem - you can mix-and-match powers so you can go with, say, Claws and Martial Arts or Dual Blades and Martial Arts to get the right look. The problem was that you can't select what your weapons look like at character creation. This surprised me, because in CoX we've had that option for some time now, and I figured that if CO was the improvement on CoX's creator we'd have had that option too. But no, and so as I understand it my options are limited to changing my weapons as I level up (and possibly getting stuck with each one as I level) or unlocking special costume parts. Okay, the last one's not too bad - providing I don't have to pre-order or do a microtransaction for it - hey, some people are on budgets and can't afford to shell out for every single little thing they want in an MMO, unfortunately. But when you consider that CO is starting off with being able to change the colour of your powers' effects and the like, and CoX isn't getting that till i16 (coming Soon), it does stand out a little, at least to me.
In the second case, I have my teenage psychic. I had something of a bigger problem here - CO has no options for teen heroes in its body types or faces. Sure, I can take the basic form and face and slim and tweak them until they resmble a teenager as best as I can manage, but still... And when you consider the existance of the teen hero trope in superhero comics/games, it does surprise me that there aren't any options in there for it.
But okay, overall the character creator wasn't bad at all. Very nice, very shiny, a little too over-complicated for my tastes but overall not bad. Onto the rest of the game.
Graphics are genuinely good. Nick's computer is currently running a GeForce 8600 GT, and we had little to no problems with running the game, apart from the occasional moment of stalling or patch of grass that was more vomit-yellow and pixillated than it probably should have been, but hey, it's also beta so we'll forgive little glitches like that. The controls were... Well, for me they were awkward, but that might well have been because I was having to use Nick's default settings and he uses the WADS method while I use the cursor keys. It took me a good few minutes to work out how I was going to do things there, because I kept trying to turn and ended up strafing sideways because I forgot that the keys weren't set that way.
Gameplay was more... hit-and-miss. A fair few things in CO seem to have been, shall we say, "inspired" by things in Warhammer Online, such as green circles on the map overview to show you where a mission should be completed, and Public Quests/Missions, where anyone and everyone in the area can pitch in and help save that area of the city, be it by apparently shooting an alien out of a giant cannon or detecting zombie infiltrators in Canada. The problem I found was that the difficulty levels of the PQs seems to vary rather a lot. The tutorial PQ was simple (natch), but the PQ I did in Canada had a section that was almost impossible to figure out what to do, which was somewhat frustrating. *shrug* Maybe it gets explained better somewhere and I missed it.
I found the map rather confusing to follow and use at times, but whether that's down to over-complicated design or the fact that my dyscalculia means I have no sense of direction I don't know.
The powers... well, I personally tested only a couple (although Nick informs me that Powered Armour was "awesome", Might was "kick-ass" and Munitions was "utterly deadly"). I first played with my Claws/Martial Arts combo, and found it to be mighty indeed. In fact, it was pretty much everything I might ever have wanted in a powerset for that particular character (aside from the lack of flame effects or weapons of choice, but hey, can't have everything - although while in Canada I did get the chance to create a piece of body armour that gave me a flame effect over my body as a side detail, which was good). Coupled with the Perks, Enhancements and other things that I admit I got confused over and can't remember too much about, I was able to develop the character pretty much how I had envisioned her in my head and writings in the past.
On the other hand... I found it rather more difficult to play my psychic character, mainly because, by mixing Telepathy and Telekinesis, I found that I had one ranged attack and one melee attack, which I didn't really want. Maybe if I'd had more time to change powers around I might have gotten both ranged powers, but let's face it, unless you're Emma Frost telepaths generally don't go running into melee range. This, and the fact that the telepathy power I started with seemed kind of... weak, gave me the impression that this character would be slower to play than when he was a low-level Mind Control/Kinetics character in CoX (which, for anyone who's not played it, is pretty damn slow). Which, after the Claws/Martial Arts fun, didn't make me too eager to keep playing there.
Maybe I'm being too critical here, for a game which is literally only going live now, but... It is a very pretty game, I'll be the first to admit that, but at the same time it felt to me like it was still missing a lot, and might not have had all that much to recommend it beneath the pretty graphics and character creator of time-consuming. We'll see - Nick might get the game in the near future to try it out properly, meaning I can play a little more, and several of my friends are playing it, so things might change. But right now I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with my City of Heroes game.