There’s a lot of Champs Online criticism below. It’s leavened by some positives at the end, but it comes from a few days of fairly intense play (mostly on Margie’s part), and a variety of frustrations.
Once upon a time … before zone remixes, and early travel powers, and early radio contact with contact, and police band missions, and a variety of content …
,,, The Hollows was the bane of CoX experience. A huge zone. Missions assigned willy-nilly across the whole map. Endless nasty mobs that you had to run past or dodge around. And no hospitals in the zone — you die, you go back to Atlas. No trainer in the park — how many groups lost all their momentum (and often members) because people had to run back to Atlas for leveling — “GTL BRB.” No stores in the zone, either.
And it was the only game in town. From 6 to 15 or so, that’s where you had to go, sooner or later. Yeah, there was some Kings Row stuff, and if you really were desperate you could go into Perez (which was where all the I1-3 content for that level was — The Hollows was a late addition).
There’s a reason why the Chamber of Transcendence was the epitome of the Hollows — hard to get to, lots of mobs, a pain in the bitch of you get killed (or need to level) …
There’s also a reason I don’t go to the Hollows much any more, even though it’s been much improved as a level,
Champions Online feels, sometimes, like I’m stuck in the Hollows. At least in the Canada / Desert zones. Huge zones, Missions scattered around. Contacts that you always have to go back to. If you need to level, sell, or craft, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the zone. Dying (respawn points) aren’t as bad, but it’s still annoying.
Part of this is travel power selection. Flyers and TP are pretty much golden, though they miss some of the ground content and “treasure” — and there are AA guns in some areas. But Superspeed, Acrobatics, and even Superjump are problematic — especially since even just being aggroed will immediately slow you down (and draw fire for seemingly 30 seconds, even if you break LoS).
(Irradiates plasma bolts remind me of the old-style ToS Romulan fireballs — faster than you and unevadable.)
Much of this is due to the relative immaturity of the game, sure. There’s a lack of content, and the Devs are still tuning the XP curve and how aggro works and all. I’m sure that, in the future, we’ll probably be able to call contacts (realistic), and pick up mission rewards (um, okay, that would be unrealistic). We’ll know about the best paths through the terrain, the relatively safe points — using meta-knowledge to counter lack of world immersion.
But it’s still annoying.
I hate inventory issues. No, really.
And CO has them. Not a lot of them immediately, but we started to see it last night.
You have basically three sets of things in your inventory:
- Widgets / power-ups. Some of these you use, in which case you swap them for something else in your tray, which doesn’t help the overall inventory problem. The rest you either sell (if not of your craft school) or deconstruct (if they are). You might also auction them, but we haven’t started doing auction stuff yet. That means these things do, with regular maintenance, get taken care of.
- Resources / raw materials. These are used for crafting, so it’s unlikely you’re going to use them up as fast. They become a real problem as you advance in crafting tiers, and suddenly open up new types of raw materials. There may be a more efficient way of dealing with them, but at present they aren’t too bad.
- Mission items. These are the real PitAs. They can fill your tray in nothing flat — and sometimes they end up staying there. (Do I ever really need the Key to the City? Like, ever? Inquiring minds want to know and/or clear their inventory). Given that you can stack several missions and be working on different ones, it’s irksome — especially with missions that involve several items (e.g., four different keycards takes up almost 15% of your inventory right there).
I’ve gotten past being irked about how you have to handle drops (wait, there’s a bang! no, that’s yours. wait, I opened it up, but then forgot to choose Take all …) I just find the growing inventory problems a pain.
My solution: Treat mission objects separately. They simply exist.
Another solution: Treat resources separately. I mean, my guy isn’t really carrying around a locker full of Argent Arms on his back. We assume they exist in katanaspace, and move on.
Another solution: More places where you can sell stuff.
Ironically enough, the one place that you don’t run into inventory problems is with stacking of stuff, e.g., heal patches. Except, when they are down in your actual “usage” tray, you can’t see how many you have. Rrg.
Other gripes:
- There’s a lot of interesting “read this” content … Viper plans you run across, taunting letters from mysterious enemies, arcane tomes stashed here and there, etc. Unfortunately, those items stay “stuck” wherever they are; read them while you are standing there (hopefully not in an area where bad guys are about to respawn). That’s both silly and a lost chance for immersion.
- Is anyone taking active use of the “multi-build” capabilities? I’m not — it’s all I can do to track what I have and can do, let alone creating specialty versions with different powers available.
- A group of -5 cons should not be able to take me down. Or even slow me down. If i can’t get XP for them, I should not be be in danger or affected by them. Or, conversely, if they are a risk, I should get XP.
- The current XP curve is wonky. Characters are ending Canada and Desert content around levels 12-13 … but MC is really designed for 14 and above. And you can’t just go out at that point and punch out some baddies — they’re all conning so low that the XP is worthless. So I’m finding myself taking maxxed-out chars in one place and hopping over to the other to grab a few more missions in the hinterlands.
All that said, it’s clear that CO’s biggest “problem” is that it is an immature MMO. There is nothing fundamentally wrong here that can’t be fixed by time and tweaks — as demonstrated by CoX having overcome most of this stuff. Which begs the issue of, aside from volume of content, why should the CO devs have to relearn some of those lessons that CoX already lived through.
There are still a lot of positive that get lost in the above. The gameplay is fun. The travel powers are cool. Things could just be better than they are. Being able to be a totally custom framework character is very, very cool. But the learning curve remains high, and the documentation remains scanty. As Margie puts it, she feels “inefficient.”
An example problem — I was agonizing over a power to take last night. I finally took one. Um … hey, what happened to it? Wasn’t it supposed to show up there? Ah, it’s a slotted passive power. And I already have one. Um … then why was it being offered to me? Oh, I could slot it in a different build. Hrm. Okay. A warning that, “Hey, dummy, you already have one, so you can’t have another in your currently active build” would have been nice. For that matter, realizing that I was going to be offered one later on would have been nice, too. I suppose I could use my freespec on the character to fix that (the button is finally there), but I’m not sure I want to.
Meanwhile, Margie discovered that she had a slotted passive power that hadn’t gotten slottted. So she was operating at a disadvantage for the last couple of sessions of gameplay. Irritating.
I like it that the sound quality in certain settings changes — sounds (powers, etc.) start to echo. I like the number of objects that can be affected. I like the animation and art style, still.
Interestingly, for a character who’s traditionally been (in CoX) a Controller/Defender, or sometimes a Blaster, I’m finding myself most enjoying melee characters that just hop in and start wailing.
I like that there is a dedicated “T” key to toggle on Travel powers. I don’t like that my toons keep getting bugged back to CO button layouts (using C1-5 for the usage items) rather than the “Other Super-hero Games” (snort) (using F1-5).
Margie says: “I don’t think it will replace City of Heroes for me — but that’s okay. And it will take a while for me to get tired of picking up Humvees and throwing them.”
That’s not a bad place to be a couple of weeks post-game start.
Went to play CO tonight … and the server was down. So, back to CoX!
What seriously put it into perspective, though, was some skimming through the forums this evening. Oh. My. God. You’d think that Bill Roper and the various CO Devs were personally spitting on each person’s mother’s grave, and also selling their sisters down to Rio. “Game is screwed – quitting now.” “One last shot for CO to prove me wrong.” “30 minute Retcon grace period or i cancel my account.” “This sucks.” “Nerf is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.” Etc.