CO Headstart begins today!
I really, really should have taken the day off today. I'm sitting here at work, thinking about nothing but what I'm going to do in game when I get home tonight. Apparently there is another event taking place as well. I guess the Qularr, the insect like aliens, are invading the low level zones, and are supposed to drop items and grant perks that are unique to people in the head start!
Anyhow, here's a couple characters I created in the open beta. It shows a bit of how flexible the character creator is.
Champions Online open beta day 2
Ok, so after the damning review of the patching process and over all mess that the Cryptic team made of the first day, the second day was completely different. Now take this for what it's worth, but after a night of playing, I'm completely infatuated with this game. It's just a blast to play.
The game makes you feel like a hero the second you load it up. The effort they put into making it feel like you're actually playing in a comic book universe is impressive. Everything from the music to the art style screams super hero comics. I mean, I wasn't really into comics that much growing up, and I just love the feel of the game.
Getting Started - The first thing you'll do in CO is create your champion. The character creation in CO is just staggering, but coming from Cryptic (the makers of CoH/V) it really comes as no surprise. They took what was great about the CoH character creator and built on it. It seems like it has at least three times the options CoH has. You can easily spend hours just making your character.
Choosing your powers in CO is not like other games at all. There are predefined powerset themes you can choose from, but there are no true classes in this game. If you choose to build a custom character, and you should, you can pick and choose powers from any pool in the game.
After you choose your powers, you be able to choose what stats you'd like to start off with. Stats define what role your character will fill more than powers do. When choosing, read what each stat does very carefully. Like powers, there are a lot of stats, so it can get a little confusing.
Biff wants YOU!
Welcome to Millennium City! - After you create your character, you'll find yourself in Millennium city, which is currently under attack by some sort of insect aliens or something. I didn't pay much attention, but they're cool looking, and that's really all I cared about. No snakes or rats here folks!
The first thing the game teaches you is how to interact with everything. Your 'Z' key is going to get worn out, because you'll use it to do just about everything. The best part about this in game less is messing up what you want to interact with. The first time I tried to talk to someone, I accidentally picked up a car the guy was standing next to. That's right! You can interact with the environment!
I was giddy the first time I ripped a telephone and beat some aliens to death with it! I yelped in glee as I tossed an armored car on to a group of bug men harassing a civilian! I frowned when I found a tank that was too heavy for my character to lift. But as time goes on, and my strength goes up (lifting is based on your characters STR value, obviously), I've eventually be able to toss tanks around at will.
Combat - Combat is very fast paced. If you've played MMOs in the past, you'll have to adjust your play style for this game. The biggest change for people is going to be the fact that you never have to stand still, ever. Also, you generally mow through stuff without having to stop. Mobs usually drop either health, energy, damage or defense power-ups when they die, allowing you to fight almost nonstop.
You're skills boil down to these different types (and this is a very basic explanation) , energy building attacks that you basically toggle on or off, charged skills where you hold down the key and the effectivness of the ability is based on how long you've charged, maintained skill that are effectively the opposite of charged where the use more energy the longer you use them, and tapped skill that most MMO players are accustomed to.
The is also an active blocking system in the game, and any character can block. You'll know when to block, because different indicators will show above a bosses head when he's about to unleash a devastating attack. There are several different indicators that can show, and they all mean something different. I won't go into that here.
Myself and Defender attack Black Talon
Missions - So far I've encountered a couple different types of missions. You have your normal world quests that are found in most every MMO. Solo instanced quests where you crawl through a "dungeon" by yourself, and maybe with the help of an NPC ally. And public quests such as those found in WAR.
Quest NPCs and areas are all marked on your map, so you won't spend hours wandering around looking for X. Quests so far have included the "Kill X", "Get X", "Save X" and "Talk to X" types so far. Pretty standard stuff, however they are well done. Especially the public quests, which are actually tied into the story line instead of being just a random event happening in the world, like they were in WAR.
I could keep going, but most of what makes game fun really needs to be experienced, and not read about. Plus I actually have work to do today, so I'll stop here.
Do yourself a favor, and spend the $5 for an open beta key. You'll enjoy yourself.
Champions Online open beta day 1
Well, I wish I could give you a rundown on the game play, character creation, combat system or anything else you'd be interested in. However, yesterday was filled with large quantities of suck on the part of Cryptic, Atari, and the CO patcher.
Now if there's one thing that can be learned from past MMOs, it's that people like to test drive games before release. And make no mistake, open beta is a test drive. Sure, Cryptic apologists will spout the usual "It's still beta!" horse shit, but they're delusional. This is not a beta, it's a paid demo, and that's how customers will treat it. That sound you hear? That's the sound of people rushing to cancel their orders, because of the patching issues.
Last night Cryptic put their ineptitude on display with their attempts at solutions to the patching issues. The first was to re-download the original client from FilePlanet, which luckily I chose not to do, putting thousands of people back in the waiting list for something they already had.
The next was to manually move some random ass files around in the game folders, which did absolutely nothing. Following that they went into their IRC channel, and actually started asking their customers for solutions. Now, I get that nobody knows everything, and it's good to get new eyes on a problem, but this is just pathetic. It screams "Hey guys, we don't know what the fuck we're doing, have you found a hack to get this to work yet?".
Finally, they realized they pushed a flawed file to FilePlanet to begin with, and the patcher was looking for files in places they didn't belong. As a developer myself, this blows my fucking mind. An error like this makes it blindingly obvious that they did no internal testing on the installer before releasing it. If they had even run through the install from scratch once, this issue would have been caught. Completely amateurish.
Their biggest mistake however, is going with the outdated patcher model they're using. For fuck sakes people, it's called Bit Torrent. Use that shit to your advantage!
With all that said, I'll still be going back for more. I want to give the game a shot before passing judgment on it as a whole, though this is a pretty big black eye to start things off. If I actually manage to get in game tonight, I'll post my impressions in the morning. If it's more of the same from last night, I'll bitch some more.