Looking for our City of Heroes replacement (mutter mutter mutter), Margie and I loaded up Champions Online. Rather, I loaded it back up; Margie still had it on her machine from our last go-around.
Very initial thoughts:
- We are former subscribers. Trying it F2P, we eventually found it a lot easier to simply create new accounts. That’s because our accounts are “full” of our previous characters — which are unplayable as F2P players because they use freeform archetypes. CO doesn’t make this very clear up front or during the whole process.
- It was also kind of messy distinguishing between our old Cryptic Online accounts and the new Perfect World accounts, esp. since sometimes you can use either, other times you have to use the PW account, and in both cases they really don’t want you to have the same display name for the forums and onscreen as your account name, and both are limited to just characters and numbers, no spaces or dashes or underscores.
- The new character tutorial has been trimmed down a bit in terms of what adventures are available during the Qularr invasion. That got us out of it faster, but also lost some of the more fun bits.
- There’s also still that sense of mad rush with attackers attacking even as little tutorial bits pop up to help you through what you’re desperately trying to mash keys to avert. Blocking wasn’t really discussed, and the whole need for energy buildups, etc., either flashed by without my spotting any info about it.
- There are some nice on-screen button prompts for things you can do in proximity (Talk to X, Open Door Y).
- There’s additional narration / dialog to frame the whole invasion and all, which is nice. On the other hand, we lose the big salute/parade at the end, which is sad.
We didn’t get much beyond that in our first play with two newly-rolled characters (fire blaster and strength tank). We’ll continue trying, though. I’m anticpating how the level-up process has evolved, if at all, as well as how level-balanced things work out in the non-instanced field of play.
Have you tried DC Universe Online? I enjoyed that quite a bit more than CO, and played my Joker-style villain quite a while before the lure of Lotro pulled me back in there full-time.
I’ll be interested to hear how the search for a replacement for COH goes. I’ll need to find one too, if TonyV’s assorted schemes fail to bear fruit ( http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,134.0.html )
I dusted off CO for the same reason and I just didn’t like it. Did they up the difficulty on it? Because I remember breezing through the tutorial when CO first came out, but no matter what AT I chose this weekend I died a lot. Got swarmed in the public quest once or twice. And got pwned in the door mission assisting Defender. Which ultimately turned me off. Wasn’t feeling very heroic at all.
@BrimstoneAshe – Feeling heroic is a very important consideration. I’m going to try a bit more this weekend, and see how I’m feeling.
That first door mission assisting Defender has always been a PitA to solo. I don’t think it’s any harder, because I remember the same thing before.
Having played CO a bit more, I find the endurance model a bit of a pain to deal with. Having to throw a lot of low-level attacks in order to power up more powerful attacks feels more like busywork than it should.