Champions Online (PC)

9/25/2009 5:22 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 2

It is hard to imagine that the industry once believed superhero games were somehow cursed. If curses do exist -- and they most assuredly do not -- then the curse upon superhero games is long gone, on vacation on some tropical island with its wife talking about the good old days when Superman was a mess on the Nintendo 64 and Steve Barcia was rumored to be such an uncontrollable drunk that it harpooned development of Guardians: Agents of Justice.

No, Champions Online is curse-free, though it does have its fair share of problems that can ruin the experience for players. And this is a shame, because I love a lot of what Champions Online offers: a robust character-creation tool; the Nemesis system, which lets you create your own archenemy; early access to travel powers; combat that is fun and often challenging; and boss battles that require more than just a high level and brute force.

The best thing about this massively-multiplayer online game? The character creator. The options are mind-blowing, and make City of Heroes seem shameful for the way it makes you earn things like wings and capes. Most importantly, the character creator allows you to create (or recreate) exactly the kind of hero you want.

Robots, cyborgs, wolfmen, frogmen, lawyers, cat people, knights, policemen, bug people, game journalists, managing editors -- just about anything you can imagine can be built. The default character is a white man or woman, so it might take a little more work to create an African American, Middle Eastern or Asian character, but the tools are there. You can't currently create overweight characters, for some reason, though word on the street is that the option is in the works and coming soon.

(While it's not really an issue, I wish that Cryptic would allow users to combine elements from the male and female character sets. What if I want to put a beard on my aging female sorceress, or breasts on my male Robin Hood character? I should be able to do this and more.)

In the game, you can also customize how your powers look; if you want green fire instead of orange, or if you want your gunfire to be purple, it's as simple as selecting a color in the Powers tab. It's easy to get lost in the character-creation system for hours, tweaking every single body part and costume piece in the quest to create the perfect character.

But before you can dive into those intricacies, you have to choose a framework (Fire, Ice, Force, Might, etc.) and your starting stats, which won't seem all that important until later, when you have the epiphany that everyone has had: You f***ed up. Champions Online doesn't do a very good job explaining what stats you need for the framework and powers you have selected, and you might decide to take a stat or two that don't work very well with your powers. The conundrum of stat selection is further complicated by Super Stats, which have a profound effect on your damage output. For example, if you chose Constitution and Endurance as your Super Stats, these would now be used to calculate your damage output, despite the fact that they normally have nothing to do with damage output at all.

The system is designed to give different types of characters a way to gain superior damage without focusing on Strength. Unfortunately, I didn't learn this by playing the game; I had to read about it in a forum thread. Someone needs to let new users know what they are getting into when they create a character.

Once you get into the actual game, Champions Online is a click-fest, but in a good way. You spam your various powers (attacks, buffs, debuffs, holds, etc.) to take down groups of enemies, constantly attacking or blocking to build up your energy pool. You'll be faced with a number of quest types after the tutorial: public quests that require players to cooperate to complete, regular quests that are handed out by non-player characters in each of the five regions, random quests handed out by citizens, and quests tied to objects or to places, like an old map or the bank. There are also high-level quests requiring multiple players that you won't see before level 30.

But everyone, no matter if you fly with wings or jump like the Hulk, will ultimately grind through all the same quests. This could be because the entire story arc is fashioned around the idea that you are the hot-shit superhero who has come to save the day -- oblivious to the fact that there are thousands of other caped weirdos running around town, fighting all the same fights. From their perspective, they believe they are the only hot-shit superhero in town, too. Apparently everybody is Spandex Jesus.

It may also be because there are no race- or class-specific quests, as in World of Warcraft. All characters start in the same place, Millennium City, and face the same missions. And if you do every quest at your level, you'll notice that you are forced to start grinding higher-level quests for which you might not be ready. Since fighting random mobs isn't a great way to earn experience in this game, you're stuck going through higher-level quests until you can hit a new level, which in turn makes the next set of quests easier. But this causes a bottleneck in the content, because you start to run out of quests you can do without the help of a team.