Champions Online
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ESRB:
Blood,Fantasy Violence,Suggestive Themes
Publisher: Atari Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://champions-online.com/
Learning to Fight Hacking through the open mission of the tutorial. The initial tutorial that gets you to level 5 concentrates on teaching the basic controls and includes introductory missions that showcase the basic mission mechanics - pick some glowing items, kill enemies to loot quest items, use quest item on specific targets... the usual MMO questing mechanics are all there. Tutorial also includes a couple of optional hidden missions for the explorer types. It tops off with one open mission - using same mechanic as in Warhammer Online Public Quests - and a very basic and soloable lair instance with one major villain boss. You are then celebrated as the saviour of the day and you get to choose between heading to Canadian Wilderness or Southwest Desert Crisis. At first when you get to either of these starter zones, it looks odd - they are so small. That is because the tutorial continues - both zones are special "Crisis" versions of the actual zones and the real ones become available after you finish this second part of the tutorial. New concepts are introduced gradually - you'll find a tailor, crafting trainers and gain access to the Powerhouse which is a combined training hall and power testing area. At this point you get to pick one travel power and your third superpower and it is possible to actually test out all available selections for free - as long as you stay inside Powerhouse, any training can be undone at no cost. Powerhouse includes rooms where you can try out new powers on some target dummies - it is not exactly the same as fighting real villains, but considering how broken the respec ("Retcon") system is at the moment, it's the best way to learn what the powers can do. Travel powers give you the first taste of power balance (see: lack of) in Champions Online. The short version? You can learn to fly. Oh, there are other choices, but... okay, you can pick from these:
Most of these choices are available for those theme characters but choosing anything other than one of the flight powers puts you at a disadvantage. Get used to this - the same is true for many superpowers as well.
You also get to pick a Characteristic Focus (+13 to a single stat) and your first Talent (+8 to one stat, +5 to two stats, +3 to four stats or +2/+3 spread over six or eight stats). On some levels you also gain points you can use to slot Advantages to your powers - these can either just improve the effectiveness of the power or add additional features - most offensive powers can be adjusted with extra taunt effect and accelerated metabolism that provides small energy regeneration buff when the power is used, but the real meat is in power-specific advantages that can turn unimpressive power into an overpowered villain-mowing power of doom. Biggest outstanding balance issues actually come from Advantages and the emergent synergistic effects they can provide. As mentioned earlier, you are free to pick from any power framework but there are reasons to focus on one or two early on - some powers from same framework have synergy advantages and higher tier powers require either three or five powers from same framework while those with spread out picks need to have five or eight total powers from anywhere before they become available. After eight powers this doesn't matter but early on you get access to higher tier powers earlier if you stick to a single framework. It remains to be seen how on earth Champions Online can balance the character system properly. With the current non-existing power balance there are already lists of "must have" powers forming that every powergamer will go for - at least until the inevitable round of nerfs arrives. User Interface Grade: Okay User interface that can actually be configured! Thumbs up. Champions Online user interface skips reinventing the wheel and goes for tried and true - everything is lifted from previous Cryptic titles and spiced with some loaned bits from World of Warcraft. While there is no addon support, everything can be moved around and all the basic customization options are there. You are even offered three separate default keymaps - WoW-style (Fantasy), City of Heroes-style (Paragon) or CO's own (Champion) and you can obviously remap anything you like. For someone who has played WoW a lot, the Fantasy keymap worked perfectly. You can also scale the UI but this currently leads to problems with costume editor and few other screens. Only real UI problems come up in more advanced features - Mail, Auction and LFG interfaces are very basic and missing many features you'd expect to see. At the same time, mission tracker works great and every mission objective area is instantly shown as a green circle on the map, removing the need to actually read the mission description. Three cheers for the lazy people, you won!
Oh, and there is the issue with "Pick up Crate" Spam. UI automatically shows you any actions you can perform with Z key to nearby objects - usually glowing quest-related things but also any objects you can physically pick up and use as blunt instruments or projectiles. Stronger your hero is, bigger things he can lob and heavy objects actually do respectable damage. Fun, until you get to a mission objective next to a pile of crates and instead of just hitting a button you have to use the mouse to fish out the "touch the shiny mission item" action from a pile of "Pick up Crate" actions that keep randomly re-sorting if you move even a pixel or two. Nobody thought that it might be a good idea to ensure that a mission-related object is always the default choice? Overall the UI works, even if there are a couple of odd problems that betray lapses in basic Q&A testing.
Related Stuff Games: Champions Online
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