{"id":1257,"date":"2009-08-18T09:12:51","date_gmt":"2009-08-18T15:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2009-08-18T10:39:32","modified_gmt":"2009-08-18T16:39:32","slug":"co-beta-comments-from-other-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2009\/08\/co-beta-comments-from-other-people.html","title":{"rendered":"CO: Beta comments from other people"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, with the Open Beta ostensibly started, the NDA for the Closed Beta is turned off, and folks are indeed commenting.<\/p>\n

The comments at Champions Online NDA has dropped – Massively<\/a> have a lot of the initial impressions. Not surprisingly, they consist of (a) “Ew, it’s lame, it’s console gaming, it’s buggy, it’s icky, Cryptic blew it, nobody will ever play this” and (b) “Zowee, I love it, I’m signing up for a lifetime subscription.” <\/p>\n

As Mark Twain put it<\/a> …<\/p>\n

\n

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horse races.<\/p>\n

Mark Twain<\/b> (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Pudd\u2019nhead Wilson\u2019s Calendar<\/i> (1894)<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Specific comments of substance seem to be:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The character creator is awesome.<\/li>\n
  2. There’s a shortage of original content of an epic, thematic nature — though, of course, it’s the start of the game. I’ll be trying to get a feel for this as we start playing.<\/li>\n
  3. There’s little to encourage grouping. Which is the opposite of some concerns I’d heard of previously (and doesn’t particularly bother me).<\/li>\n
  4. It feels to much like a “console” game. This seems associated with doing lots of key presses to build up and use powers, plus movement within combat, plus repetitiveness of combat. Not sure how that is all that different from CoX. The “controls” are described as console-like. I’m not quite sure what this means (I suppose I will find out — but, honestly, it’s not clear to me what in the<\/li>\n
  5. Power balance is off. Well, that’s often a matter of taste, and is always something true in betas and the early versions of any game (cf. CoX).<\/li>\n
  6. Powers are too much the same. Which is the risk of balancing power sets too much, the flip side of the previous item.<\/li>\n
  7. Servers instance too much, reducing city population in any instance excessively. Again, something to watch out for, and something Cryptic can adjust if need be.<\/li>\n
  8. A lot of debate (pro and con) over the reduction of roles — tank, healer, etc. — in the game. Again, I think some of this is gameplay expectation and some of it will be play style. I look forward to getting a better sense of it.<\/li>\n
  9. Some concern about non-instanced missions and drawbacks to that (boss camping, kill stealing) that I’ve seen in other MMOs. Again, to be watched for.<\/li>\n
  10. Some folks hate the look of the game. Other think it’s da bomb. The former tend to be more of the “I don’t like it, therefore it is an abomination before Man and God,” which is tiresome in politics, let along in gaming.<\/li>\n
  11. Micro-transactions suck. Well, they can suck depending on how they are applied. I don’t think they are intrinsically sucky (I’d rather have everything covered by the monthly cost, but …). They can easily be abused, though. Most discussion of this, though, is on a binary Evil\/Not-Evil basis.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    An interesting comment was made that, once the Xbox console version comes out, we may not see much in the way of big content patches. I have no idea how updating on the Xbox works; if it cannot handle large content patches (new zones, etc.) or even new game system mods, then that would in fact be a concern.<\/p>\n

    Massively did give their reviewer beta impressions, too. What’d we think? Staff impressions of the Champions Online beta – Massively<\/a>. By and large, while touching on some of the above, they were pretty positive.<\/p>\n

    Comments there don’t touch on anything new, other than “Cryptic sucks!” “No, you suck!” “Nuh-uh, CO sucks!” “Nuh-uh, WoW sucks!” “You suck for saying I suck for saying CO sucks!”<\/p>\n

    Also, there are plenty of folks who seem to think the game sucks (or will suck) because of the cluster regarding the downloads last night. While the problems may be indicative of Cryptic’s ability to support the system, they don’t have much to do directly <\/em>with whether it’s a good game or not.<\/p>\n

    I’m looking forward to actually playing this … albeit maybe sometime tonight. Or maybe over lunch …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, with the Open Beta ostensibly started, the NDA for the Closed Beta is turned off, and folks are indeed commenting. The comments at Champions Online NDA has dropped – Massively have a lot of the initial impressions. Not surprisingly, they consist of (a) “Ew, it’s lame, it’s console gaming, it’s buggy, it’s icky, Cryptic blew it, … Continue reading “CO: Beta comments from other people”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-champions-online","category-gameplay","category-resources-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1258,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}