I like Champions Online.
Not unreservedly, mind you. There are plenty of places where it is still rough, still “1.0.” My comparison is with CoX, of course, and I’ve been playing that over five years, since Issue 3. When I compare CO to that, and to rumors of what CoX was like at release, I think it fits most favorably.
CO reminds me a lot (to change point of reference) to LotRO, in terms of the graphics and the feel — except that here I feel (super-)heroic.
One point of contention on CO is the graphics, and the “cartoon” look. I like it. Margie doesn’t.
I think we both got a sense of the “console” feel of the game which folks had written of. It’s hard to pin down — just a sense that the controls have been designed around a more limited keyset. I don’t find it that jarring, and it’s no so much different from a “keyboard” feel as to cause me any particular difficulties. It’s occasionally inconvenient, but not dramatically so.
I like that there’s no AFK timeout. We both like that when you exit, you don’t go through a 30 second cool-off before it takes. Margie (and I agree) dislikes the CO “interacting” for elevators.
The proximation algorithms and mechanisms for choosing between the various things you can do standing at point X (Talk to Fred, Lift that Crate, Visit the Arms Table) are awkward. Double-clicking on something actually sometimes chooses whatever is highlighted or at the top of the list, not what you clicked on.
I miss being able to level pact. Again, as a console game, there’s not a strong sense of people playing duos that would LP. Of course, CoX only recently got that feature (and it’s still limited to new characters), so it’s hard to bitch too much.
The crafting setup is irksome. It makes a bit more sense than some I’ve seen, either the doubletalk abstractions of CoX or the folk magical industry of LotRO, but it’s still just an annoying thing to have to do. And, at least for some stuff, you sort of have to do it. (Certainly the second string of missions forces you through it, though apparently there are gadgets in the final mission — Desert side, at least — that will take care of it if you haven’t been crafting what you’ve been told you have to craft).
I’m sure there are people who will just love piecing together bits and bobs and blueprints and different foci and schools and emphases and all to make (or deconstruct, for that matter) crafted widgets. I am not one of those people.
At least, though, inventory hasn’t been a problem. So far.
Margie isn’t happy with the HUD/interface, feeling that it feels more obtrusive than in CoX. I disagree, but I do agree that the chat window is nearly useless.
While there is (Praise the Maker) a way to see what level you are at, there is no easy way to tell if you need to go and train up (i.e., you have leveled).
One serious weakness to the game starting out is that while it provides a lot of numbers, it doesn’t do a good job of explaining them. There’s a lot of info thrown at players in the first several levels, but when it’s time to go into the Power House (a great concept) to level up, there’s a tremendous amount of guesswork and shrugwork going on. Take upgrade X that gives a 20% chance of some unexplained effect occuring? Take another level of the power? There’s some great possibilities here, but without explaining in plain English what it means (with numbers to follow for those who understand the shorthand), it’s a frustration of “OMG, did I choose the wrong thing?” That’s less of a concern in Beta, but it will be moreso in the future (though respecs are not wildly difficult).
It feels more difficult to defeat foes. Even moreso solo. In some instanced missions we’ve run both solo and duo, there’s not a lot of apparent scaling going on.
I miss the character selection screen not telling me where they are (thought it does, like the main HUD, tell me what level they are!). I also miss not being able to rotate the characters.
The mission play is more episodic, at least through level 8. In other words, you are in a setting, and there are missions around that setting. Again, that reminds me of LotRO, and less of CoX (where you are In The City). On the one hand, that provides a real feeling of depth and interest and difference over time. On the other hand, there’s a whiff of railroading, a resemblance to FPS games, and (so far) less feel for what life is like in Millennium (vs. Paragon) City.
And maybe (from the limited perspective I have, only having gotten up to lvl 8 with any characters) that’s the most significant difference between CoX and CO. With the former, I’m exploring the city, doing good, pursuing different arcs, but generally acting independently. (CoV introduced some destiny sorts of stuff, but we’ll disregard that for the moment). In the latter, we’re on a series of adventures around the world. It’s a much larger palette, but it also feels more like (as I said) a FPS game, going through scenarios.
Margie misses Superjump being something you can just hold the keys down for, rather than having to jump each jump. On the other hand CPO Sarah loves her flying disc. Acrobats is a freaking blast. And even Super-Speed isn’t very annoying. I like the way they’ve dealt with in-combat vs. out-of-combat travel powers.
Bottom line: I think we’re going to subscribe, probably for a 6 month block. I don’t quite feel the confidence to do a Lifetime sub (even if it gives me eight more precious character slots), but I can see this as a game I can enjoy for a while. And one I can enjoy while still playing CoX, too.
I want to keep testing,but I keep getting fatal errors in the tutorial!
Similar feelings here.
I’ve now tried a number of different power types through the very first part of the tutorial, played with the costume creator (where I’ve figured out that in long lists, if you grab the scroll bar on the right, keep the mouse button pushed down, then move the cursor over the list of items and then down, you can scroll through the list pretty easily), and got one guy up to level 8.
Here are my thoughts….
I’m pretty happy with the character creator. Easy to lose things you know you’ve seen before, but that’s part and parcel of having so much choice (a good thing). I’d still like to see the running animations in the creator though.
With a few key bind changes, I’m finding the general control / interaction easier and more intuitive. It’s really bugging me that you can’t save your UI layout and key bind changes for use on other characters though.
Almost all the low level powers feel very similar (broadly grouping ranged and melee power sets), but I believe they’ll become more varied at higher level.
Most parts of the tutorial are good, giving you a general feeling for the game, but (linked to the below) I don’t feel it covers some areas well enough – particularly item drops and slotting stuff. I can also see myself getting really fed up with it after completing it a few more times.
Post tutorial, I’ve only been to the dessert. It’s a pretty fun area on the whole. The Power House is still a great idea. Most of the missions in the area are fun (especially the very last one (more CoX like!), but I did really struggle with two things:
1. Crafting / Slotting. I still have no idea how I managed to craft the thing I crafted, other than randomly clicking menus and items in the inventory. I also have no idea what all the stats mean, especially when you hover over an item and you get three different on screen boxes appear, each with different stats. Which apply? All of them? Is it based on my speciality?
2. World events. As mentioned before, waiting around for respawns of world events is driving me nuts e.g. get Frank (or whatever his name was) with three team mates. OK. I now have three team mates, where’s Frank? No one knows. We move around the zone a lot looking for him, get worried / frustrated that we’re doing something wrong, then he randomly pops up from nowhere! Grr.
After the first dessert area, I started the next zone. What I found here was that it was feeling very ‘get 10 of these guys then come back, now get 5 of these guys then come back, now…’. I don’t know how long that lasts, or whether it’s going to be a big feature of the game’s style, but I don’t like it. I know you could argue that CoX is similar in a way, but even in CoX I never liked the ‘Kill 10 Trolls’ mission types.
And finally (for now) I don’t like how jump works either. Hopefully some smart person will figure out a bind that lets you hold down the space bar and keep jumping, but until then, it’s flight for me.
I’m absolutely going to keep playing, especially through the early start weekend and into the first free month you get through buying the game, but then I’ll see how I feel about subscribing.
Very similar thoughts here.
I like the fact that it plays well with only a couple of keybind changes. I dislike the fact that I have to redo them for every toon. (I didn’t like the fact that “toon” really applies here due to the graphics, but I got used to it, and it doesn’t bother me anymore.)
Crafting sucks in any game. Bleh. However, I got one toon to lvl 12 without paying much attention to it.
I have picked up way too many chairs and boxes and things instead of talking to the contact I clicked on. That bit is annoying.
I got one guy through all the Canada missions and started to explore Millenium City. I disagree with the assessment of the City. I found it very interesting, and way cool to run around just beating on thugs and exploring. With more development, it could be better, but the one thing I hated about COH was its claustrophobic feel. I’ve swam under the docks and flown to the top of the tallest building. And talking to NPC’s is a hoot (and sometimes gets you missions.) This game feels like I can go anywhere and do anything.
My biggest complaint is that almost none of it is self-evident. I’ve had to discover (or had my MMO-hopping son figure them out) a bunch of things on my own that I would have liked to have known earlier in the game. For example, to your above point about not knowing if you need to visit the power house, press “P” to look at your powers and it shows you unspent power points at the bottom of the window. They really need an online manual.
Definitely doing the 6 month thing to get the Star Trek beta, and if they do as good a job on that as they did on this, I’ll be happy, not out of my mind, but happy.
@Stuart:
Bugs me, too. Part of the, “Hey, folks are only going to run just a single character, maybe two” feel to the game’s design. Granted, CoX didn’t have a way to save UI layout until very recently (and its keybind saves were and are pretty crude).
Agreed. In part that’s because everyone gets their initial low-level power-builder and then a zapper — the distinction being between attacks that can be built and those that can’t. Arguably CoX Lvl 1-4 characters suffer from the same problem. The distinction between them may either go up or remain more hidden because of the way that CO powers work — if you do a lot of upgrades to the powers you have, the variety of power play may not increase all that much (just the effectiveness); on the other hand, you can go out and grab powers from another power set, which would make for some seriously different combos.
The game suffers from a lack of digested information. When it comes to what a power (or upgrade or drop) does, I want something textual in summary (“This will increase your melee damage, and give a small chance of knocking the opponent down”) followed by the numbers. Right now we have mostly numbers, some text, but it’s very inconsistent (probably because everything’s still being tweaked).
I’d also like a much more thorough explanation of the primary and secondary offense / defense / utility slots, what they are used for, how (if) they are invoked, etc. Part of that might be needing to go back and more thoroughly read all those Info notes in the Tutorial.
The Crafting tutorial is similarly inadequate. What do I grab from where and where does it show up and, hey, what’s this window? I don’t know that it’s that much more complex than CoX crafting, but the latter’s tutorial is clearer at least on what you need to do.
I do think there’s going to be a need to bypass the Tutorial for new characters sooner or later (though, there again, there’s that, “Well, folks are probably going to just run a few characters through at a time, max” vibe). There’s a wide array of paths you can take in CoX in the first five levels, and the Outbreak tutorial can be skipped (though I don’t know that I’ve ever done that — I like getting a quick intro to the powers and look, but it also only takes 5-10 minutes).
I’ve done a lot more in Desert than in Canada (I’m not sure why they call one by the geography and the other by the name — why not “New Mexico” or “Burning Sands” or else “the Arctic”?). Though I suppose the official names are “Project Greenskin” and “Fort Steelhead.”) The two have a different feel to them. I’ve finished just the first phase in the Desert (Gigaton in the Vault); the second post-construction phase is only partly done and the Witchcraft scenarios haven’t been touched yet.
I’m discovering that, alas, Superspeed remains problematic on the vertical, even moreso here (I might need to see how it works in Canada, which doesn’t seem to have so many mountains). It also remains problematic if there are bad guys around — it desperately needs the “stealth” feature of CoX Superspeed to give it parity with folks who can simply fly/jump above the aggro range of the mobs.
I do like the Power House. Though, honestly, a lot of the power upgrades and so forth are impossible to test out, even there.
Yes, the great drawback to non-instanced missions — waiting for Godot (or whomever) to respawn, with various folks also waiting to leap in. It has the advantage of encouraging ad hoc ganging up on the bad guy (“Hey, those guys are beating on Ferd — let’s jump in!”), but the disadvantages you describe as well. (The queue for Foxbat in the Tutorial is already notorious for this).
One could argue that the “Defeat all X in the building” missions are also thematically similar, though the nature of the buildings gives it a different (if more artificial) vibe. Things that bug me in this area are (a) where you see something interesting, but it turns out you can’t do anything with it (yet) because it’s related to a mission you haven’t (yet) taken, and (b) where you have a mission but what you’re doing doesn’t seem to have an effect. CoX has this problem, too — “Question some X in neighborhood Y” — and you run over and beat up on some X and then discover that you’re not actually in neighborhood Y.
You’d think that CO, with its green circles for mission zones (nice!) would be immune to this, but there was at least one mission last night (stop the irradiates at the vehicle barrier on the north end) where we were in the area, we were at the barrier, we were zapping irradiates — but the count never dropped. Were we not quite at the right spot? Were we attacking the wrong irradiates? Is there some other condition we’re not meeting? Was the mission borked? Impossible to say.
@Solonor:
I’ve gotten around doing this now, by clicking directly on the button in lower-center screen for what I want. Slower than it could be, but it avoids the ambiguity.
That’s very good to hear — I was afraid the tone of the first 10 levels or so would continue on.
The dialog from NPCs, btw, is a hoot at times.
Ah. Actually, I knew this, but hadn’t connected it yet. I’d argue that we need an on-screen (by the level number) indicator — unless … hey, is, is that what the starburst around the level number means? I noticed that, but had no idea (again) what it meant.
Which is one of the stories of this game. And is likely to be a bigger problem as it comes out of beta (which, after all, has the players most dedicated to trying stuff out) and into gamma testing …
Btw, Margie found some good summary info on powers and leveling and all that, now that the NDA is down and players are starting to build guides. That should help a lot (and is a reminder that I’ve always relied a lot on players guides from the forums when trying new powersets in CoX).
Another thing I wonder about is if the short open beta got anyone around to testing Super Groups and Nemeses. If only a handful of hardcore testers got high enough to make a nemesis, then was it fully tested? I sure would have liked to have seen how it works.
And do Super Groups get to make bases? I have no idea.
I saw some folk with (what I assumed were) SG names under their hero name. I have no idea of how SGs work, but I think the ability to do them opens up at 8 (I recall a fleeting status message when I leveled).
Oh, okay, here’s a variation on another gripe — there’s a lot of status information that whips onto and off of the screen pretty quickly. While it also gets mirrored to the chat window, that’s so small that it’s very easy to miss it in both locations.
I believe there are ways of modifying the chat window — I need to look into that. For one thing, I want to get rid of NPC-NPC combat info.
Scratch that. It wasn’t fun enough for me to spend full price on, and since I went to get a 6-month sub and found out they “ran out”??? I don’t think I’ll bother.
A limited time discount is one thing (and they specifically said it was good until Sept 1 on the Star Trek forum), but limited quantity?? Good grief!