Notes: Champions Online

A good friend hooked me into this against my better judgement, and so far I'm really enjoying it. I know that MMOs are inherently bad for both one's wallet and mental health, so I'm going to try to very carefully manage my investment of resources - short subscription periods with no auto-renew, doing my homework before playing, etc. That micro-payment store they're setting up looks awfully dangerous, but we'll leap that building when we come to it.

All that aside, Champions is proving to be quite a lot of fun. Made by Cryptic, it is essentially City of Heroes Only Better. While the previous franchise has fallen into subscription retention mode, eschewing further content development for easing player limits and offering free goodies, Champions revisits the whole superhero game genre and adds a lot of new functionality we haven't seen before. There are some embarrassing similarities, to be sure. Cryptic seems to have retained the rights to a lot of CoH's design assets - suspiciously familiar textures, meshes, sounds, and animations that pop up all throught the game. Luckily, the impressive sweep of original content and customization more than makes up for the legacy content.

Despite the similar paint job, under the hood, Champions runs very different from its predecessor. Gone are the cookie-cutter map tile door missions with the repetetive "defeat all" requirement. While there are a handful of missions like this, they are usually quick filler, generated dynamically when a citizen runs up to you asking for help. Most of the content is delivered in more traditional MMO style (think World of Warcraft), with parameters, locations, and rewards varying greatly. There is an admirable focus on scripting, which allows for a lot of interactivity and variable NPC behavior. There is also a lot of great writing, and plots tend to be engaging and spread out over discernible arcs. I particularly enjoyed coming to the rescue of the Action News Team (with Ron Mahoghany). Classy.

Game mechanics are fairly predictable - approach hostiles, unleash various attacks, manage aggro, win, recover, move on. Champions focuses primarily on energy management. Rather than forcing you to wait for regen or rely on a specific power to replenish your energy, as in CoH, Champions starts every hero out with a simple energy building attack power that you can fall back on between big blasts. Your energy also aturally recharges to an equilibrium state determined by your stats. The result is a very frenetic, flashy fight dynamic (as advertised) with very little downtime between action scenes.

This doesn't work out well for all builds. Melée heroes have trouble building energy until they can get in close, and have to really focus on defense if they intend to take on groups. Champions seems geared toward small squad battles instead of big street-sweeping mobs, which is kinda disappointing but it keeps things balanced. Holds and crowd control seem to become more and more important as you advance, as you face more and more singularly dangerous villains that need to be neutralized quickly. I haven't yet been able to make anything other than a well-rounded blaster work yet. Experimentation is key.

PvP is fun and fits seamlessly with the rest of the game - a first for superhero games, I think. There are lots of rewards just for playing, many inside jokes, and a lot of little features to keep players happy. You can throw trucks at bad guys. There are also some now almost standard MMO launch problems: driver issues, server crashes, balance changes, lag, forum drama, etc. Hopefully all of that will be ironed out soon.

But I do have some big complaints:

1. No documentation. They sell the game as something you can pick up and play without a lot of study. That's true, but there is also a very dense complexity under that "casual" veneer that becomes really engaging once you dig down into it. The problem is you have no clue how anything works. Every power framework has a gimmick. If you don't know the gimmick, you are likely to make some poor decisions that may go unnoticed until much later. Compounding this is the respec/"retcon" system, which forces you to backtrack character levels one at a time to make changes, and becomes prohibitively expensive more than 2 or 3 levels back.

2. Broken economy. The devs are starting very conservatively in managing the nascent economy, which means very little money going in. They have acknowledged that this is a problem, and will be adding more soon, but the rest of the infrastructure is also lacking. The market interface is poor, comparative values of items are hard to assess (see item 1), and most excess items get recycled into skill grinding. And crafting is basically its own reward - there's not much you need to buy unless you are ignoring the skill system entirely.

3. No need to team. The Ogre and I met up on Saturday to bust some suckahs up in game. In 5 hours or so, Foxy Chocolate and the Iron Ho each advanced 8 levels, stuck it to the man and kept it very Kung Fu funky. Very fun, but not very different from soloing. Missions to not appreciably change with more team members, and most of the very few team-oriented missions can be solo'd with a little work. Maybe team content gets fleshed out at higher levels.

So overall, a solid game with a lot of potential, some lessons learned from previous outings, and assets quietly stolen from the Marvel Online development cycle. Plus you can launch rockets at a robot cowboy and then bash it over the head with a snowmobile. Sold.