Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Champions Online




Champions online went completely free to play a while back, and I decided to give it a try recently. I played champions when it first came out so I was curious as to where the game has gone since it's release. And after logging in, I've got to say the game has improved.

As a free to play-user you have the choice of several archetypes, think of them as classes. These archetypes choose your skills for you, and you pretty much just level. You still get to choose your own costume, gear, and travel powers, but you lose the ability to pick and choose the best abilities.

Because of this you will be at a disadvantage if you ever face a freeform (available only to gold).

Gold members get a larger selection on costume items, access to all archtypes and travel powers (save one), free access to the adventure packs (end game PvE) and extra character slots and costume slots. This all for $15 a month, initial purchase of game no longer necessary. .

So heading in I was aware of my disadvantage of rolling a soldier archetype. For my experience I decided to create Duke Nukem, because I had the intent to troll the hell out of general chat while blowing up aliens in the tutorial mission. It was amusing for a while, but after two days the one liners got old. I did, however, get into the game.

After two days, and 15 levels, I decided I wanted to give gold a shot. I tossed $15 at Cryptic and unlocked freeform, I created my own power-armor Iron-Man clone. At the same time I ran into a group of roleplayers and found myself a crew of players I could have fun playing the game with.

I quickly hit it off with this group, and have since been playing with them. They had their own Supergroup (guilds in Champions) named Bastion. Through them I was able to experience both the adventure packs, as well as a lot of roleplay.

In the end I've realized whlie this game is quite fun, it's not something that could keep me occupied like the MMO's of old used to. I don't get the same sense of accomplishment from leveling or earning money, nothing really seems rewarding outside of the fighting itself.

Now, the fighting, that's very refreshing. It's somewhere between a classic MMO's take on combat, and how DCU handles combat. Champions has a block button, and all of it's abilities are either 'click and hold to cast' 'click to use' or 'click to toggle'. Toggle abilities stay on until toggled off or your run out of energy, click abilities work like abilities in classic MMO's, and cast abilities increase in power the longer they're held, some only fire once the cast is complete, some only fire if the cast is complete, and some fire for the entire duration.


All in all I've had a great time with this game, and it was worth the $15 for the one month so far I've put in it, I might renew my subscription for another month just because I enjoy playing with Bastion.

If anyone is looking for something new to try out and they don't want to toss any money at something, give Champions a try.

8 comments:

tetcrh said...

ooh, sounds quite good. Might have to check it out. Been ages since I played any MMOs!

Ian Maguire said...

I loved Champions online, but i just got bored of it once i got to the endgame missions.

Eddie said...

Seems like an alright game

serious_nonsense said...

mh, looks nice, maybe I'll take a look

Conzume said...

Seems to be a nice game! Will follow this blog :)

Adventure Person said...

Looks like it could end up being pretty fun, thanks for the post!

Eric said...

used to play this, but it got boring after a while.

WizWayne said...

intese