I think that Eric Burns' summary of the beta is a rather good example for those looking for an in-depth comparison.
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
Quote: Champions Online---
Not long after my last City of Heroes essay (and in part thanks to an offhanded comment in that essay) I got into the closed beta of
Champions Online. As with all closed betas, Champions Online has been a bit of a rough ride, especially since their beta schedule was two
nights a week, typically -- Wednesdays and Fridays. The first (pretty unstable) build of the week would be pushed for Wednesday, and a bug-fixed/stabilized
version of that build would go in Friday. Sometimes it would be spectacularly broken, and sometimes it would be pretty amazingly flawless, but all in all it
was... well, a closed beta. Betas aren't there for the fun of the testers -- they're so that the game breaking bugs get caught before someone
actually pays for that thing.
Still, those sessions gave me a pretty good idea of how Champions Online was supposed to go. And now that the NDA has been lifted and we're
into Open Beta, I can share impressions with you guys.
Now, before I got into Closed Beta, most of what I heard about Champions Online was... well, pretty awful. Generally, the word came from
disgruntled beta testers who'd up and quit, often for legitimate reasons -- though naturally that gives you a pretty one sided sense of things. I'll
write a bit about the nature of a closed beta process -- and what it is and it isn't -- later on in the week, luck willing. Suffice it to say I've
watched the game evolve a tremendous amount since getting in, and I can make a few subjective assessments.
On the whole? This is a really, really good game.
Seriously. Cryptic Studios developed City of Heroes before the NCSoft buyout and development split (though all of the developers who were still
working on City of Heroes at the time of the split stuck with the property), and their experience with the older game informed Champions
Online tremendously. In particular, Champions Online addresses a lot of the long standing complaints people have with City of Heroes.
Hitting some of the high points:
- Characters can be built out of any combination of powers, eschewing classes (or archetypes) and permitting a broad
spread of abilities, which themselves can be customized in color and often in animation or anchor point. (My current open beta character concept is a
techno-shaman whose basic abilities are reflected by light blue electricity, along with some sorcerous powers. The technological spirits of the
character's shamanism are reflected by various summonable robots and toys. Needless to say, this character couldn't exist in City of
Heroes.)
- Travel powers are automatic after the tutorial finishes, and are far more usable in combat. One can legitimately
have a flying hero who never touches the ground. Further, there are a lot more travel powers available -- tunneling underground, riding a flying
disk, having an ice bridge carry you a la Iceman, flying wreathed in flame a la the Human Torch (or, if you colored it green, Fire from Justice League
International), an acrobatic style of flips and bouncing, and swinging. Swinging. Screw fighting crime -- I'll happily swing half-way across the desert
for hours on end just because it's fun. There is far less of a sense that your character has to slog on foot everywhere in this game.
- The character creation engine is astounding. Not only does it have broad uses, but almost everything is
adjustable by sliders. What's more, a good number of the costumes incorporate not only patterns but textures. (A leather bodysuit is different than a
cloth one, and both of those are different than metal -- and all three of these can be put through a knit weave or various patterns and cuts of jumpsuit,
and that's just bodysuits.) You can have a stag's head. Or a shark head. There are jet packs and rockets and backpacks and freaking
quivers. You can change your character's eye color. You can make his eyes glow, even, or go with the Batmanseque 'pupilless eyes' look. (I
may create a Little Orphan Annie parody with no pupils, if I can figure out a good batshit insane powerset.)
- Barring names that infringe on trademark, names are tied to a specific account instead of a server. Which means that
anyone can have any name, but only one character in their own account can be named that name. So, if I want to name a character Force, the fact that my
friend Mason might have a character named Force wouldn't stop me. Messages or mail to our respective characters would just go to
"Force@ericburnswhite" (neither of those are our real global names, for the record.) So, the days of trying to
find a misspelled variation of the name we wanted in the first place? Are over.
- Immersion is immediate and heroic. As much as I've always loved City of Heroes, the
City of Heroes tutorial, while good at teaching you how to play the game, was terrible at making you feel like a hero. You were in a sealed
section of town, beating up sick men (with, admittedly, glowing eyes) who were throwing small rocks at you and hitting you with pipes. And it took a few
hits to beat them at that. As much as the backstory of the game justified the events, you never quite shook the feeling that the freaking Wondertwins could
have solved this 'crisis' in ten minutes and still had time for a heartfelt moral and some cruel mocking of their monkey.
By contrast, in Champions Online the entire of Millennium City is plunged into abject chaos by an alien invasion. Forcefields are everywhere. The
police are cut off. You have to fight insect aliens, rescue hostages, free trapped people from rubble, rescue a lost freaking cat and return it to a
grandmother, figure out where the alien menace came from, mount a counterattack, and storm the contested headquarters of the signature heroes in the game.
Along the way, you meet several of those signature heroes, not a some L1 newbie unworthy of their attention, but as a peer, save at least one from a
horrible fate, then fight alongside the game's Superman figure. And in the major supervillain fight near the end of the tutorial, almost always that
Superman figure will go down and you'll have to save the day in his stead. And that is followed by a celebration, and for the rest of your
time in the game, whenever you're in Millennium City random people will run up to you and gush over the fact that you saved their lives and the
whole freaking city.
Now that's superheroic.
- While there aren't many zones, they are positively huge, and you move back and forth between them
throughout the game.This also means there aren't loading screens all the time, and you get a real sense of city. (Or of desert or frozen
countryside, depending). They're also totally beautiful.
- PvP is in the game from the beginning and works the way you'd expect superheroic PvP to work. You can invite
anyone in the game to duel, and then (after a rocket drops from the sky to mark the duel field) you two can duke it out. Or, pretty much anywhere (with no
travel time) you can queue to go into team based or free for all PvP (under the title 'The Hero Games' after the original publishers of
Champions). PvP grants experience and in-game rewards. If the model sounds familiar, it's because it's been largely taken from World
of Warcraft, who did it as well as anyone in the business. I hate PvP in general, but this is a fun occasional diversion, and because I don't need
to travel to special arenas to participate it can be done whenever I have a vague yen -- or see someone on the street I want to have a zero-penalty
slugfest with. At the same time, I can never touch it at all and I'm out nothing.
- Because they have access to the decades-long Champions intellectual property, they have hundreds of fleshed
out supervillains and organizations to fight. You fight an actual supervillain in the tutorial. You fight a couple of Supervillains in whichever Crisis you
choose after the tutorial. You actually run into costumed supervillains as a part of the missions you take place in, even outdoors, in the game. At any
point you might discover yourself facing a full on spandex-clad nemesis -- and for those of us who've been playing Champions for half of
forever, you'll also do some undignified squeeing during the process. (I was pathetically happy to fight Ankylosaur at one point.)
- Viper (which by the way predates "Cobra" from G.I. Joe by several years) is a monumentally cool recurring
enemy. They'd take 'the Council' from City of Heroes any day of the week.
- Environments are moderately destructible, and your stats give you environmental options. A character with an area of
effect attack will often lay waste to cars, boulders, computers, lampposts and the like. At the same time, the stronger your character the heavier an
object he can lift. The first time you have a superstrong character who manages to pick up a tank, fly into the air, and hurl it an an enemy as an opening
attack will stay with you for a long time.
- You can make your own costumed nemesis, and that nemesis actually engages you in the game proper. I can't
overestimate how cool it is to have a pack of your nemesis's minions show up and reinforce your opponents because they cut a side-deal to specifically
take you out. Further, your nemesis is among the hardest opponents you face in the game. And after a while, you get the option to create more, until you
have your own Rogue's Gallery.
- The game is beautiful and laden with little touches. For example, going into a simulated wild west saloon in a
robotic theme park, you see a saloon like interior. However, there's also a robot piano player. And he's merrily playing a slightly out of tune
piano. And a whole line of robotic cowpoke girls are dancing in a choreographed western style line dance to it. That doesn't add a thing to gameplay,
but man it's cool.
This makes it sound like Champions Online is in all ways a better game than City of Heroes, but that's unfair. There are still
plenty of issues that need to be ironed out, and lots of those issues will only come with time and development of content. Let me hit those high
(low?) points too:
- The game is incredibly linear right now. You must start in the Tutorial (and no matter how awesome
that Tutorial is, the fifth time you launch Ironclad you're pretty sick of his bizarrely Ted-Cassidyesque voice). Once finished the Tutorial, you
must go to a crisis zone either in the Desert or the Canadian Wilderness. You must do the multiple missions to complete the Crisis. Only
after all that is finished are you in a position to take control of your own path, and even then it's strongly suggested that you stick to the
non-crisis version of the zone you're in until you level your way up in that content. One won't realistically start having adventures in the
'main' location of Millennium City until L11 or L12 at the earliest. (Though that does give an in-game explanation of how they were able to clean
up the damage from the alien invasion so quickly). Someone who enjoys building lots of alt characters is going to get really sick of going through that
same content over and over again. While one gets to know all the City of Heroes content (not counting Mission Architect), there's a lot more
variety in the early levels before you end up following mission chains. World of Warcraft, which really is the gold standard for MMOs right now,
has two major factions and those factions each have three different starting locations and quests, not to mention lots of quests that are specific to given
classes or the like.
- On the other hand, Alts are hard to come by anyway. You get a whopping eight character slots to begin with.
You can earn (or buy) more, and people who get a permanent account during the promotional period get an additional eight. Compare that to World of
Warcraft's fifty total alts, and bear in mind that if you spread alts between servers, you can make a whopping one hundred and twenty one
alternate characters on City of Heroes without even touching on earned or bought additional slots.
- While the character creator has incredible depth, it's also mired in a specific house style that's less
comic-book and more cartoon. Even if one turns off the trademark 'black outline' surrounding characters to make them look inked (as almost everyone
seems to), characters look closer to Kim Possible's wide eyes, the Tick's chin, or Justice League Unlimited characters than they do to a
Greg LaRocque drawing. In particular, though you have a ton of sliders that let you change a person's features, those faces look very much alike unless
you make them full on grotesque.
- Crafting is, charitably, a work in progress. They're trying very hard to make crafting useful and relevant, and
having it incorporate the capacity to swap gear and change your stats and abilities in other games while avoiding changing the lovingly created costumes in
the game to something canned. However, the result misses the visceral joy of turning leather into pants that's such a bizarrely addictive subgame
within World of Warcraft and other fantasy games. The three professions -- mysticism, science and arms -- feel arbitrary, and they've recently
added a byzantine series of specializations within the main fields that just muddle everything. (As a side note, I have long maintained that the
'crafting' system in a superhero MMO shouldn't be goods, it should be based on in-game professions. For example, crooks could drop
'clues,' which a character can gather. If that character is a reporter, he can smith those clues into leads, which in turn could be made into a
story you can sell, or you could take several stories and smith them into a series or expos�. Those could then be made into mission arcs or other in-game
benefits. Meanwhile, a 'Detective' could take those same clues and smith them into leads, which become full cases. And so on. Sadly, that seems
unlikely anytime soon.)
- As cool as your Nemesis is, you don't see very much of them, and what you do see feels canned. You don't
even create them until L25, which is more than halfway to the current maximum level. Even after you get your nemesis, you spend a lot more time being
ambushed by your nemesis's enemies than you do actually confronting your nemesis. I really, really hope they drop your nemesis's entry to L15 or
even lower, and make the Nemesis himself a more prevalent part of your day to day adventuring life.
- Rather than have multiple 'named' servers, all the characters in the game officially exist on the same
server, which then will spawn additional virtual servers to reduce load as much as possible. This was meant to put everyone into one pool, so that you
don't have separation of players by what server they exist on. However, the dynamic splitting of servers means players are never really sure which
instance their friends are going to be on and there can be a lot of confusion.
- On the other side of it, as weird as it is to type this... it's not like the game goes out of its way to
encourage friends to meet up in the first place. It's got plenty of social options, but in terms of actually adventuring together? The game is
much more solo-friendly. In particular, though there's a mechanism to 'share' missions, it seems like most missions can't be
shared via that mechanism. Most teaming that takes place are very short ad hoc pickup groups so that everyone waiting for mission objectives to spawn can
clear the mission at once, then split up and go their separate ways.
- The above probably highlights the most obvious weakness. Almost all the missions are live on the streets, in shared
areas, rather than in discrete instances. As a result, during earlier levels when there's a lot of people trying to work their way up the only possible
way to complete missions is to camp the various spawn points for objectives. There's something innately unheroic about camping a spawn point to beat up
Canadian separatists before your fellow heroes have a chance to do the same thing.
As you can tell, the exciting parts of Champions Online boil down to the new and exciting gameplay options in the game. (It is certainly worth
noting Champions Online has a much smarter AI than its predecessor. The days of taunting a room of bad guys around a corner and having them
all pile around it to let you fry them with AoE attacks seems to be done.) The problems Champions Online has largely boil down to the game being
brand new and immature. While there have been plenty of broken and bugged bits (culminating in the first day of open beta being kind of a disaster as
everyone hit the patching server at once and it melted under the weight), I won't officially hold those against Champions Online until
after launch. That is, after all, why one has Beta tests.
Needless to say, however, I'm preordered on Champions Online. I'm really impressed with what they've done, and the game is fun and
fast paced and has shiny bits I rather like. What this means for City of Heroes only time will tell, but I think I can officially state that right
now? We have ourselves a ball game.
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."