City of Heroes players, are you interested in Champions Online?

I played Champions from HS and through college in the 80's. The MMO version definitely appeals to me. I did play CoH/CoV for a couple of years before I got bored with it, too. I'm certainly going to try it out. It will depend on what the actual gameplay is like as to whether I keep playing it, though.

Champions Online is still very much a beta but, so far it is virtually a clone of CoH/CoV. Take that for what it is: a natural progression for CoH or it could be seen as the same game redressed... The graphics and such aren't very different and the cool cell shading effect from the screenshots is toned down alot in the game now as of the latest beta client (too bad). Missions, even the powers and costume sets are all pretty much identical.

To decide between the 2 you could probably just flip a coin. CoH is much older, can be had cheap, doesn't look bad at all, it already has a Mac client, existing characters and player created missions- and performance even on older systems is great. Champs Online plays fine on the same MacBook but will be Windows only at release, all players would be starting at the same level and the graphics are better with the cell shading on oh and the iTunes playback thing is kinda cool. Although Champs Online did go with an even worse looting system...

Anyway - those are my impressions for what their worth.

kntgsp said:

What did they end up doing to the looting system? I somehow seemed to have missed that.

Click to expand...

For whatever reason you do not auto loot as in CoH or Rt click on the mobs to loot them: If they drop loot it is in the form of a "firefly" that hovers around the body. The fireflys are moving too so it's not that you just click on a different object to loot; you have to click a moving target :/ You would then click on it to again to open it and then click to loot. 3+ clicks to grab loot as opposed to a Rt click?! The Rt click is almost second nature to any/all MMO players at this point so it seems rather unintuitive to me... Not a gigantic deal by itself of course, which is why I only mention it above but it is annoying

Hmm... since I got bored with CoH/V, if Champions is mostly a clone of it, then I don't see much appeal to trying it out then. I do think I'd enjoy the character creation process more in Champions, though, since it sounds like it is more flexible than CoH/V.

I haven't posted about this game in some time now but I thought I should post an update to treat the game as fairly as I can.

The loot bug and other issues listed above from beta have had fixes although some are better/worse depending on how you view them :/ The loot bug for instance got a quick key to use - you can just hit the corresponding key when close enough to the mob and then click on Take All -This is much better than before and is a welcome improvement IMO. Other things like leveling though have not seen much improvement; ie. you still have to do basically every mission in every zone for every character you create= no variety. I wouldn't call any of the remaining issues game killers but, to some people they will be deal breakers.

The current state of the game can be found in several online reviews now so if anyone is curious about this game, read through 3 reviews from sites you trust and go from there. This is/can be a fun game and really - the things they did right, they did SO right that its astonishing (like single game world with multiple local instances) while other things will have you cracking your keyboard in frustration. The graphics today are a better mix of the comic look and a modern MMO than in the last weeks of beta so I can't fault the look or sound at this point. It's really just design decisions and bugs - this one is definitely still "teething" and has not had a very smooth start. I have to show Cryptic respect though as they have patched and patched this game since launch trying to rectify alot of the problems. This *should have been done before release but, at least they genuinely seem dedicated to supporting this game.


Edit: I also wanted to add that this game can already be found stupid cheap so: at £7 ($14.99 roughly) or so buy-in I'd say its definitely worth trying out. At £14 ($29.99) I'd say you would really have to dig the comic MMO setting and at full retail £29 ($49.99) I'd say wait for a buddy pass or free trial.