Champions Online Review

What do you get if you mix a solid, well-known developer, add some ideas from other MMOs, toss in elements out of a pen and paper role playing game, and top it all off with a release day patch that mucks everything up? You get a slightly buggy and somewhat unfinished game that is extremely fun to play. The game in question is Champions Online, a super hero themed massively multiplayer online game from developer Cryptic Studios. If the words ‘super hero’ and ‘Cryptic Studios’ sound familiar, it's because Cryptic happens to be the developer of the only successful super hero themed MMO to date, City of Heroes. The challenge that Cryptic faces will be if Champions Online offers gamers something completely original, or if it's just merely City of Heroes 2.0.

Playing Dress Up

The first step in creating a super hero is deciding the gender. After that you will be presented with a set of predefined faces and body types to choose from. It’s at this point that you begin to get a glimpse at just how customizable Champions truly is. If none of the preset faces or body types is to your liking, you can either randomize each or build your own custom physical appearance. There are a number of sliders to mess with, including choosing the size of your eyes, chin, nose, arms, hands, feet, even body mass. The combinations are really endless when it comes to the customization of your character’s physical appearance.

If there is one thing Cryptic knows, it’s that you can’t have a super hero game without an extensive costume creator and Cryptic has designed a really nice interface to help the player create the costume of his dreams.  On one side you have your character, so that you can preview costume changes, and one the other is the costume creation window. Along the top of the window are a number of tabs that allow you to focus on your head, hands, upper body, lower body, and even change your mood and stance.  Beneath the focus tabs is a drop down menu where you will choose the type of costume you want to use. For example if you choose the Upper Body tab, you will have choice of choosing Tights, Integrated Shoulders, Jackets, and so on.  There are literally hundreds of combinations of colors and costume pieces. There’s even an option to randomize a costume if you are having a tough time coming up with an idea. Should you decide that you want something different you can always visit a tailor in-game and, for a small price, edit your costume.

It’s hard to have any complaints about a costume creator that allows you to have so many options, but there are a few. If you are a weapon-using powerset (more on that later), currently there is not an option to choose a weapon other than the provided defaults.  Also, a number of costume pieces are exclusive to a specific gender.  However, such minor complaints as these do not change the fact that Champions has such a wonderful costume creator that one could find themselves spending hours just playing with it.

Because Champions is based on a pen and paper game (The Champions, published by Hero Games), there are no classes in the typical sense. Instead, you choose a powerset, a predefined set of powers based upon a theme, such as Electricity, Ice, Munitions, and Power Armor, just to name a few. The player is not required to choose a default powerset - in fact you can mix and match powers from any powerset as long as you meet the requirements.

Beginning Your Crime Fighting Career

All new heroes start out in the Millennium City tutorial where you will spend the first 5-6 levels learning the basics of the game through a series of missions. Players will learn about the controls, what the combat is like and how the mission structure works. Once you are ready to move on, you will be given the option to go to either the Desert Crisis Zone or the Canada Crisis Zone where you will spend the next 4-5 levels. The crisis zones are basically extended tutorials where players learn about the crafting process as well as teaming up with other super heroes to take on much tougher enemies. It doesn't take long to get past the tutorial and crisis zones, but having to do both seems rather superfluous.

Champions uses a quest hub system like what you find in World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online. There are some random missions scattered throughout each zone, including Open Missions and escorts, but once you step foot into the tutorial it doesn’t take long to realize that Champions is all about mission grinding and not much else.

Open missions resemble the popular Public Quests that Warhammer Online introduced about a year ago. Open missions are just that, they are open to everyone, and require multiple steps in order to complete. Unfortunately, open missions suffer from a lack of balance and can become bugged at times. It’s true that you don’t need a group to participate in an Open Mission, but there is little chance that you will be able to solo one to completion.

In World of Warcraft, there are different starting areas based on choice of race and, as such, there are many places to quest and visit. This alone makes the game world feel extremely large, and it is. In Champions, it’s almost the exact opposite. You start in the Millennium City tutorial, and then you’re off to either the Desert or the Canadian Wilderness crisis zone. Eventually you finish the crisis zone and find yourself back in normal Desert or Canada, and then to Millennium City, and eventually to Lemuria and Monster Island. Altogether, there are five zones that you will be dishing out justice in and you will be going back and forth between them during your crime fighting career. Unfortunately, with everyone getting travel powers early on and being able to travel from one end of a zone to the other in just minutes, the world of Champions begins to seem pretty small.

The world gets even smaller when you realize that there is just a general lack of content in Champions. There are only so many missions and more than likely there will be a time when the missions dry up and you are forced to grind out mobs and random missions from the crime computer till more become available. For a game that is almost 100% mission grinding, it’s unacceptable to have a game with such a lack of content.

Combat

Champions lack of content is almost compensated by its combat. New heroes always start with two offensive powers. One is your default auto attack that builds Endurance; the second attack will do more damage but uses Endurance. Powers can be activated in one of two ways; you can click on the power's icon in the powertray, located at the bottom center of the screen, or by pressing the key bound to that power.

Some powers only require you to click the icon or press a key to activate, but others require you to charge or maintain the attack.  To charge up an attack you must click and hold on the icon or press and hold the appropriate key. A charging meter will appear on the screen and you can either wait for the bar to fill and release the power at its maximum strength, or activate it at anytime by releasing the mouse button or key. Maintained powers also require you to click and hold an icon or press and hold a key, but have a maximum duration based on the amount of Endurance a super hero has. When you activate a maintained power, a meter will appear with a full bar that empties while the power is active.

One feature that may be unknown is that Champions Online unofficially supports the Xbox 360 controller. Because the controller is not officially supported, the player cannot customize or remap any of the controls.  Nonetheless, you get the sense that the combat was designed with this controller in mind, and is arguably the better way to experience Champions Online.

Controller or not, the combat is fast and furious and requires active participation from the player.  Regrettably, it is also the only thing that will keep players interested in Champions till more content is released.

Crafting

No MMO would be complete without crafting and players are introduced to it early on in the crisis zones. There are three schools to choose from - Arms, Science and Mysticism - and you can only learn one of the three crafting skills at any given time. To raise your crafting skill you will need to both research items and interact with skill objects.  Research is the process of breaking down items into components that can be used for crafting. Skill objects are crafting resources that are scattered throughout the world and analyzing them will get the components needed in order to create devices, upgrades and even power replacements.
Overall, the crafting is not very complicated and is easy to learn. The main draw for crafting will be creating power replacements that grant costume unlocks.

PvP

Champions Online does feature Player vs. Player combat in the form of Hero Games. You can queue up for the Hero Games anywhere and at any time by clicking on the red fist icon on the mini-map. The Hero Games are reminiscent of the scenarios found in Warhammer Online. You have four tiers and a total of five maps.  When you participate in the Hero Games, the player can gain Acclaim and use it to purchase outfits from the Hero Games promoters.  However, overall, the PvP is nothing more than a nice diversion for those wanting to take a break from crime fighting.

Pow! 

Champions is a beautiful game and is a vast improvement over the dated City of Heroes look. All the environments are full of color and detail, and the character models are fantastic. Cryptic went for a style they call ‘comic shading’ which combines bump mapping and texture mapping mixed with cell shading. The end result is that you have a great looking game, but at a price. The game is prone to lots of terrain pop-in and general slowdowns; chances are that you will need to tweak the graphic settings in order to get a playable frame rate.

There’s not a lot of audio.  Powers have a distinct sound, birds chirp, cars honk, and there is the occasional voice-over from a super villain, but that’s about it. What Champions really lacks in the audio department is background music. Occasionally, there will be some music when travelling to different areas of a zone and during combat, but mostly what you get is ambient noise… and that’s just boring.

Odds and Ends

Cryptic decided long ago not to have multiple servers, but one server (aka ‘shard’). What this means is that each zone in Champions will have multiple instances that can sometimes have a max of 100 players in them. Because there is only one server, Cryptic has done away with requiring players to have unique character names. Instead all characters are identified by a player’s account name. The down side is that dealing with multi-part names can be a hassle, especially when sending mail or adding a player to your friends list.

Finally, Champions Online had an extremely successful open beta period that generated large amounts of buzz for the game. But on September 1, Cryptic greeted players with a launch day patch that rebalanced the game, effectively it more difficult and rendering some characters unplayable.  Unfortunately, that’s not all as the patch also introduced a few minor bugs including one that rendered some Open Missions unplayable. Since then, Champions has been patched on a consistent basis as Cryptic continues to balance and fix parts of the game.