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Champions Online

Behold, Millennium City

Visually Champions Online looks pretty good. Once you get past the two tutorial-style sections and open up the first proper adventuring zone, the key selling point of the visuals opens up - the draw distance is massive and even if lot of the detail goes hidden as you zoom to the sky, the scale of each play area is impressive. In fact, the engine draws stuff a bit too far to the horizon - you can easily see the artificial edges of the allowable play area and if you go high enough with flying powers, you'll also find that invisible glass ceiling - even if it is a lot higher than in City of Heroes.

Millennium City - home of the Champions

Zones are large, but it is painfully obvious where the world ends.

Buildings and other terrain features do follow the comic book style with simple easily recognizable shapes and color schemes, but up close there is plenty of detail. Indoors the modular maps do not repeat nearly as badly as in That Other Superhero Game and you can find many completely unique indoor locations. Everything is spiced with "comic shading" that adds a cel-shaded look - which can optionally be disabled if it bothers you.

Unfortunately there is a ton of pop-up when more detailed versions of terrain objects and NPCs come into view. It is not game-breaking, but it is yet another nail in the "immersion" coffin. Another one is the animation quality. It varies from terrible to passable and you'll find the usual list of problems indicating corner-cutting - moonwalking characters, powers and abilities sometimes going through solid objects, knockbacks sending characters to wacky spots...

Cutscenes look fine in still images, but the animation is usually laughably bad.

Ugh, me Hulk, me throw crate.

While many objects are indeed destructible and can be picked up, the physics modeling of object-tossing is just something so bad it has to be seen in action. Objects also always explode - doesn't matter if you tossed a snowmobile, a crate or a table - they all blow up up on impact. There is some debris left over but it is all cosmetic client-side stuff that acts like Styrofoam.

Super Powered System Required

Champions Online does go beyond City of Heroes in one aspect - the all-new engine requires a real gaming PC to run acceptably. Okay, by turning down visuals it is possible to play on a midrange system but the listed minimum is quite hilarious. The engine seems to be mostly demanding gobs of CPU power and a dual core processor is the practical minimum - you might get by with a really really fast single core CPU, but we can't really recommend it. As usual, our listed YouGamers minimum setup indicates a configuration that will get you by in a pinch (dual core CPU, GeForce 8600 GT or Radeon X1900). Note that playing on a setup like this assumes that you disable the shadows and set lighting to "low".

On the other hand, if you start tweaking the visual sliders the game turns to the GPU and proceeds to maul it just as badly. In all honesty, to run the game with maxed visuals you need a fast quad core and a GeForce GTX 285 or ATI Radeon HD 4890. Seriously. Even then you'll see a stutter or two and some LOD-popping as you move around but at least the action during normal fights runs as it should.

Maximum settings - mostly for future hardware, sliders at 200% or more.	What I used most of the time with GTX 285 - sliders at 150%
Default settings, sliders at 100% - suitable for YouGamers recommended setup.	Downgrading for slightly weaker systems. Lighting Low, Shadows Low, SSAO off, Depth of Field off.
Even more - Shadows Off, Reflections Off, Sliders at 75%. Works fine on YouGamers minimum setup.	Minimum settings with everything possible turned off.

If you accept the default "100%" setting on the sliders (that can go all the way to 200% or 300% depending on the slider) with proper shadows and dynamic lighting still enabled and just dial back AA and AF a bit, the YouGamers recommended setup with GeForce 9800GTX or Radeon HD 4850 will keep things running okay. Not shockingly high end, but anyone playing on older systems is bound to have performance issues. There is some hope in the horizon - reports indicate that the next patch, currently on test servers, includes some noticeable performance improvements so things may get better as code is polished up more.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Character CreationPage 3: Leveling, Powerhouse, UIPage 4: Combat, Nemesis SystemPage 5: The Fail Sector: Unfinished, UnpolishedPage 6: Fail, Part 2: Respec Problems and MorePage 7: Visuals, PerformancePage 8: Summary, Scoring

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