Anyone following Champions Online?

[KeithTalent]

Official site

I just signed up for the beta after stumbling across some videos on GT for the game.

Obviously looks like a comic MMO, but watching the videos made it look very fun and interesting.

Some details on features here:

The First True Action MMORPG:
Hi-Octane Excitement: Champions Online delivers furious, fast-paced encounters previously reserved for action and fighting games. No more boring auto attacks and lengthy recharge times. Champions Online combat is instantaneous ? and electrifying!

Be the Hero You Want To Be
Total customization, at your fingertips: Choose from hundreds of different costume pieces, colors and body types to create your character's one-of-a-kind costume and look. There are billions of possible combinations, and in a universe brimming with the fantastic and the unforgettable, you can still be completely unique!

Your powers, on your terms:
There are a multitude of astonishing powers to choose from in Champions Online, and its flexible character creation system gives you total control over your hero's abilities. You can even pick the appearance of your powers. Do you want purple force fields? Green fire blasts? Jet black claws? In Champions Online, you decide!

Keep your enemies close:
Every hero must have an archenemy. In Champions Online, you design your character's supreme adversary, choosing a name, powers and costume for a superpowered foe to bedevil your hero throughout his or her career.

Vast Universe. Endless exploration:
The battle against evil in Champions Online rages across the world into outer space and alternate dimensions. No other MMOG offers players the chance to explore such diverse realms ? from the shining skyscrapers of Millennium City and the frozen wastes of Canada to the interstellar gladiatorial arena on the moon, the hidden underwater city of Lemuria and the foul mystical dimension known as Qliphotic.

Make your mark:
The story of Champions Online is constantly changing, continually evolving. Villains are defeated. Heroes rise and fall. Cities transform. Your actions may decide the future!

I think it looks kind of cool. Anyone in the beta already or at least following this game?

KT

 

[lupi]

the guy i used to get my wow addons from went to school for graphic design and ended up getting a job with them. unfortunately that also means no more wow addons for us.

 

[mesthead21]

I signed up for the beta a couple months back, hopefully i get in. Hopefully its better than City of Heroes...

 

[SunnyD]

Yeah, I've been playing this for several years now - it's called "City of Heroes" :laugh:

 

[coloumb]

I've been in the beta for about a week now - I'm limited to various testing phases [last Friday was character builds and quests]. I've never played COH so I can't compare it to that MMO.

Character creation is very cool - someone created a hero that looks just like Duke Nukem...

It's the same old "get quest, go do something, come back for reward" but without orcs, elves, and hobbits.

From what I've done so far - it's pretty enjoyable.

 

[KeithTalent]

Thanks for the info coloumb. Let us know if you encounter anything interesting that you are allowed to share.

KT

 

[Tremulant]

I've been following it sporadically for a while now. Signed up for the beta last year I think. Looks interesting, but I've always liked comic books and comic book themed stuff.

 

[sactoking]

I've been following it for a while, off-and-on. My first MMO was City of Heroes, which was designed by Jack Emmert. Emmert is the lead designer of Champions online. From what i know of the history of the game, I don't have high hopes.

So, Emmert created CoH. It never had a large player base, but the players it did have were pretty loyal. The problem that arose was that Emmert considered it to be "his" game. He often made changes to the game that pissed the players off royally, but he didn't care. He was interested in making the game perfect for him, and if the people paying him didn't like it they could go screw themselves. It eventually got so bad that NCSoft/Cryptic had to "promote" him to get him out of the way and putt Matt Miller in charge. When that happened, the relationship between developers and players became a LOT less contentious.

Sometime while that was going on, Marvel sued Cryptic, alleging that the CoH costume creator facilitated copyright infringement. The suit never went to trial, but kind of hung around for a couple of years. At one point, Marvel announced that they were going to create their own MMO, Marvel Universe Online, to put CoH out of business. Presumably, this was an attempt to leverage Cryptic into settlement.

Eventually, Cryptic DID settle. The settlement involved no admission of wrongdoing on Cryptic's part. It did involve Cryptic selling the CoH platform to NCSoft. NCSoft would now own CoH (previously they were just the publishers) and retain all or most of the existing development talent. Emmert, as an owner of Cryptic and no longer a developer, worked out a deal to join Marvel to become head designer of MUO. Since the players had prevented him from making "HIS" game, he was willing to jump ship to the company that had hounded him for years so he could make "his" game and put the game the players "ruined" out of business.

Not long after Emmert joined Marvel, Marvel scrapped MUO. They were going to concentrate on movies, and didn't believe that superhero MMO's had the pull to compete with WoW. Emmert got the green light to take his work and shop it around. After several months, he was able to work out a deal with the Champions people to base his game on their ruleset.

So, the lead developer of Champions has a history of being an ass, alienating his players, sleeping with the enemy, trying to put his own game out of business, and is basing his new game on a system that he settled for and isn't what he wants. I don't give Champions much of a chance.

 

[KeithTalent]

Well that was depressing, but thanks for the detailed information; very interesting stuff.

KT

 

[SunnyD]

One should also mention that the gameplay design of Champions first and foremost was designed to be console friendly. Yep, you heard me right - Champions Online is slated to come out on at least the XBox 360 as well as the PC.

 

[Lumathix]

Originally posted by: sactoking
I've been following it for a while, off-and-on. My first MMO was City of Heroes, which was designed by Jack Emmert. Emmert is the lead designer of Champions online. From what i know of the history of the game, I don't have high hopes.

So, Emmert created CoH. It never had a large player base, but the players it did have were pretty loyal. The problem that arose was that Emmert considered it to be "his" game. He often made changes to the game that pissed the players off royally, but he didn't care. He was interested in making the game perfect for him, and if the people paying him didn't like it they could go screw themselves. It eventually got so bad that NCSoft/Cryptic had to "promote" him to get him out of the way and putt Matt Miller in charge. When that happened, the relationship between developers and players became a LOT less contentious.

Sometime while that was going on, Marvel sued Cryptic, alleging that the CoH costume creator facilitated copyright infringement. The suit never went to trial, but kind of hung around for a couple of years. At one point, Marvel announced that they were going to create their own MMO, Marvel Universe Online, to put CoH out of business. Presumably, this was an attempt to leverage Cryptic into settlement.

Eventually, Cryptic DID settle. The settlement involved no admission of wrongdoing on Cryptic's part. It did involve Cryptic selling the CoH platform to NCSoft. NCSoft would now own CoH (previously they were just the publishers) and retain all or most of the existing development talent. Emmert, as an owner of Cryptic and no longer a developer, worked out a deal to join Marvel to become head designer of MUO. Since the players had prevented him from making "HIS" game, he was willing to jump ship to the company that had hounded him for years so he could make "his" game and put the game the players "ruined" out of business.

Not long after Emmert joined Marvel, Marvel scrapped MUO. They were going to concentrate on movies, and didn't believe that superhero MMO's had the pull to compete with WoW. Emmert got the green light to take his work and shop it around. After several months, he was able to work out a deal with the Champions people to base his game on their ruleset.

So, the lead developer of Champions has a history of being an ass, alienating his players, sleeping with the enemy, trying to put his own game out of business, and is basing his new game on a system that he settled for and isn't what he wants. I don't give Champions much of a chance.

Well I've been following it for a while now, and will give it a shot. I did like CoH for a while, but it got bland really fast. Hopefully this one will be better. Maybe I can even get my wife to play with me

 

[sactoking]

Originally posted by: Lumathix



Well I've been following it for a while now, and will give it a shot. I did like CoH for a while, but it got bland really fast. Hopefully this one will be better. Maybe I can even get my wife to play with me

I'd like to try it when it's released to see how it is, but dang I'd have a hard time justifying $50 plus fees. Unfortunately, by the time it's more affordable I think it stands a good chance of being a ghost town.

 

[Arglebargle]

Jack had the inspiration for a Superhero based MMO, and the friend with lots of money. But the original team had precious little experiance in the field, and made a lot of errors. Too many things tailored to 'We KNOW what will be fun for you!'.

Perhaps Jack learned....or perhaps not. Or perhaps he's not making major decisions nowadays.

I am mildly interested in CO, as City of Heroes was also my first MMO. I kind of hope that CO is some sort of success, because there are intimations that Cryptic wants to do a 1920's/30's style adventurer MMO with everything from jungle exploration to King Kong style stuff to Cthulhu mystery action.

 

[Cuular]

When Jack was in control of CoH was when things were really fun. You had tankers that could spec their defense to be almost non-hitable, casters could crank out damage like no others, and scrappers could do amazing things.

But someone up above decided that they needed to limit how you could spec your different classes to try and lower the amount of damage you could do, and remove your high defense if you specced that way. To try and make the game more "balanced". I liked the good old days when a tanker could tank, a blaster could blast, and other classes could spec like they wanted.

The balancing it out forces you to be more cookie cutter. Where there is definitely a single decent way to spec any given class. The original let you take one aspect and go all out if you wanted to, letting other aspects falter, and allowing other classes to fill in where you sucked.

It may be better for the game to have things more balanced and bland, but it definitely reduced the fun factor.

I now feel like less of a hero, and more of a "boosted" normal person.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Cuular
When Jack was in control of CoH was when things were really fun. You had tankers that could spec their defense to be almost non-hitable, casters could crank out damage like no others, and scrappers could do amazing things.

But someone up above decided that they needed to limit how you could spec your different classes to try and lower the amount of damage you could do, and remove your high defense if you specced that way. To try and make the game more "balanced". I liked the good old days when a tanker could tank, a blaster could blast, and other classes could spec like they wanted.

The balancing it out forces you to be more cookie cutter. Where there is definitely a single decent way to spec any given class. The original let you take one aspect and go all out if you wanted to, letting other aspects falter, and allowing other classes to fill in where you sucked.

It may be better for the game to have things more balanced and bland, but it definitely reduced the fun factor.

I now feel like less of a hero, and more of a "boosted" normal person.

This is my main reason I don't like CoX anymore. I played soon after it came out - started a blaster... and actually felt like a SUPERhero when I could walk up and street sweep 12 yellow-con mobs at the same time. Perma-hasten, lack of caps, etc.

PvP ruined it... 100% the reason for all the nerfage was PvP.

Now, it's more like City of Slightly-Above-Average-People. Le'sigh.

At least it's comforting to know that Issue 14 basically ruined the game for everybody. Apparently the market has gone to shit (people are farming on the Mission Architect - meaning highly sought-after enhancements are aplenty now) and basically every change they've done has catered to farmers. Heh. Oh well.

 

[sactoking]

Originally posted by: Cuular
When Jack was in control of CoH was when things were really fun. You had tankers that could spec their defense to be almost non-hitable, casters could crank out damage like no others, and scrappers could do amazing things.

But someone up above decided that they needed to limit how you could spec your different classes to try and lower the amount of damage you could do, and remove your high defense if you specced that way. To try and make the game more "balanced". I liked the good old days when a tanker could tank, a blaster could blast, and other classes could spec like they wanted.

The balancing it out forces you to be more cookie cutter. Where there is definitely a single decent way to spec any given class. The original let you take one aspect and go all out if you wanted to, letting other aspects falter, and allowing other classes to fill in where you sucked.

It may be better for the game to have things more balanced and bland, but it definitely reduced the fun factor.

I now feel like less of a hero, and more of a "boosted" normal person.

That was the Enhancement Diversification, or "ED", or "Enhancement Dysfunction" debacle. That was a Jack Emmert idea. He said the game had always been in his mind that way and he never thought Tankers would slot 6 Defense or Blasters would slot 6 Damage. Supposedly, the game was balanced internally with 3 of one enhancement only, because that's how Jack figured everyone would play. When people started 6-slotting, it "broke" the game design and ED was implemented to fix it.