Champions Online (a quick review)

Just thought I'd write up a quick "first impressions" review of Champions Online in case any of you are into superhero games, etc.

My final verdict is at the end, so scroll down if you don't care about the details.

Let's just start by saying the first night of the Beta (Monday night) was horrid. Downloads failed repeatedly, and very few if any people were able to get into the game. It was a rather horrible experience. I would say, however, that the game did redeem itself last night.

When I got home yesterday, the download had failed at about 51%. I restarted it, and went downstairs for about 45 minutes. When I came back up, the game was ready to play.

The first couple of zones contained the inevitable tutorial type stuff. Plus they were fairly claustrophobic. The first zone is surrounded by an alien shield which prevents movement beyond a few blocks of the city (there's an alien invasion going on that you have to help stop). This worried me at first because one of City of Heroes (CoH) biggest problems in my book was the huge walls around each zone which made you feel like you were in a box all the time. Once you complete the first zone (about level 5), you move on to one of two possible 2nd zones, which similarly start out very restricted, but complete about 10 quests, and you do a "gateway" dungeon (which seems to be the common theme, a "you have to be this tall to proceed" kind of mission, before you move on to a new zone). Once you complete the gateway dungeon, the map opens up quite a bit. It was at this point that I realized that the game was going to be much more than expected. The map is quite large at that point. It still effectively has boundaries, but they are soft boundaries where the terrain kinda turns grey and you can plainly see that there's no point in continuing on. It's basically a "soft wall", but the zone is quite large, so it doesn't really bother me much. Also, once you have made it this far, you can travel back to Millennium city, and it is quite huge. Feels very WoW-like in scale.

Character Creation:
Lots of flexibility here. In CoH, you had a primary and secondary power set, and could choose from a third set of power groupings past level 6. Most of the third set of power groupings related to either travel powers, leadership powers, or self-buffing powers (better health, energy, etc). In Champions, you're not quite as restricted. For quick character creation, you can pick an "archtype" (for lack of a better word), such as "fire", "munitions", "swords", "strong guy" and the list goes on. You can, however, build your own custom "archtype" by cherry picking your favorite power groupings, etc. At about level 5, everyone gets thier travel power. Flight, Fire Flight, Ice Slide, Levitating earth, levitating disk, cable swinging (think spidey), and a few others. It's very nice to get these at level 5. Kudos for Champions for getting this right.

Using your powers:
Most MMOs provide you with a reserve of energy (mana, endurance, etc) to fuel your abilities. In Champions, my fire based character's lowliest attack generates energy that can be used by other attacks (immolate, fireball, etc). It took me a bit to realize this, but it's a neat mechanic. Also, on the Fireball/immolate, you can do more damage and use more energy reserves with an attack by holding down the button when you use the attack, which "charges up" the attack, thus delivering more damage. This is pretty neat I think :-)

Quests:
The quests are fairly wow-like, but less of the "kill 10 of these" type of quests, although they do exists. Lots of radioactive zombies to kill, wounded soldiers to rescue, etc.

Dungeons:
Most of the dungeons so far have at least one or two characters which audibly talk to you throughout the dungeon. This is very neat, because it's more natural than reading text the whole time. Some of the voice acting won't win an oscar, but it's not too horrible :-) There were even a few moments where I was sucked in by the story, etc. Early on when you successfully defend the city against the alien attack, you exit the dungeon (Champions HQ), and there are troops lined along the walkway, and they all salute you as you walk down the stairs to greet the mayor, who gives you the key to the city.

Zones:
Zones feel a lot like wow, but with the soft walls around a fairly large area. It appears that most zones have a few "super bad guys" that wander the zones and they will talk smack to you if you attack them. There was one of these "villains" that was about lvl 26 (prolly elite) who, when attacked by my level 10 fire character, verbally made fun of me "you stupid heroes are like mosquitoes to me" he taunted, and then leapt away (think "The Hulk" kind of leap). This was a nice change of pace from WoW, where he would have simply stomped me with one foot and moved on. I kinda like the forgiving nature of this encounter. It's nice as a noob to learn your lesson without having to die. There are respawn points along the way, as you explore, so you generally respawn pretty close to where you died. Very nice. No long walks back from the GY. The zone I spent the most time in was mostly a desert type of zone, but with lots of rock formations, etc. I'll be exploring it for a while.

The Bad:
The game was definitely more unstable than WoW. I think it crashed on me about 4 times last night, but I played for more hours than I will admit here, and technically, this is a pre-launch Beta, so it wasn't bad with all of that considered.

Unique server structure:
I'll describe their server structure by comparing it to WoW. In WoW, your character is tied to a particular server. Did your buddy from your hometown pick the game up? Great! What? He created his character on a different server and isn't willing to move? Well, you can forget about playing with him then. This is not the case in Champions. They actually have come up with a scheme for their servers which initially appears to be pretty smart. When you zone from one zone to another, you are shown a list of numbered servers to choose from. Each shows you it's current population (generally 99 or less as of last night). At that point, you get to choose which "shard" to visit. I'm guessing that if you're grouped, it tries to keep your group on the same shard, although I haven't tested this theory yet. The beauty of this is that they can bring up zone servers as needed, therefore I would expect that queues won't be much of a problem. If I recall, they tend to present the lowest population shard at the top of the list, so load balancing seems fairly painless. Kudos to them for this. It also appears that you can communicate with anyone in the game, regardless of what shard they are on. Character names in chat show up as CharName@AcctName, so my character, Chained Phoenix, shows up as ChainedPhoenix@LagDaddy. Thus I would imagine you could find your buddy regardless of what character they were currently playing. That's pretty neat if you ask me.

User Interface:
They did their best to mimic WoW in this respect, and I think it was to the benefit of everyone that they did. A lot about the game is styled to make it easy for someone to transition from WoW to champions. There's very little learning curve. The one counter-intuitive thing is dealing with doors and quest givers. Basically, when you're near enough to an object to interact with it, a button appears on the screen that says something like "Talk to Tom Jones (quest giver)", "Pick up crate", "loot the dead guy", etc. I don't like this so much, but I see why they did it. Have you ever walked up to a flight point in WoW only to discover a huge Tauren camping on him so you can't click him? This CAN'T happen in Champions due to the magic button that appears based on proximity. The button is something you have to get used to though. I automatically click on the quest giver (5 years of conditioning), and then have to remember to click on the magic button. Only a minor annoyance.

Controls:
Just a quick note here. When you start playing the game, they ask you if you want to use a "Fantasy MMO control scheme" or a couple of others. "Fantasy MMO control scheme" equals "Set me up with WoW controls that I'm used to." <- smart move.

Eye Candy:
Definitely more evolved than CoH, but not quite as polished as some other games. Also there's some awkward/unpolished animations that need some work, but they are not too bad. The costume options are fairly limitless, and there's lots of hints at unlockable costume parts, etc to come. I ran into a vendor in the city that sells various costume parts for in-game currency. I have not seen a game mechanic yet that allows you to trade real money for in-game money, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's already there or in the works.

Gizmos:
You can link your Champions account to your Twitter account in just a few seconds, in game. Then you can just type "/tweet This game ROCKS!" and it appears on your twitter feed. Yay web 2.0!!!

Overall Rating:
Generally, if you consider WoW to be the bar setter, and you gave WoW an "A", I would give Champions a "B", but a very strong "B". It's a good game, and I think it has a decent future. I could be way off base on this, but you know me, I'm easy to please :-)