So anyone bored enough to visit Champions?

I was in the open beta of CO for a few hours right at the end, and, like most people here, I think, I wasn't overly impressed. There were a couple things that I thought would be nice if they were brought to CoH, but the main part that turned me off was the art style and that Cryptic tried waay to hard to give it a comic book feel. Definitely not a game I'm interested in following.

On the other hand, one game I *am* going to try is Aion. I hadn't been much interested in the WoW style of contacts and missions, but the way they're handled in Aion is a bit more palatable. Plus, the graphics are amazingly well-done for an MMO. I don't know how long I'll stick with it, but I figure I'll give it the first month and see what happens.

Headstart begins in a couple hours. Whee..!

Fusion Force had a few players in closed beta and several in open beta, so we formed a SG over there too.

Squints hit 40 already. LOL

If anyone from Triumph would like to join us over there, visit our website at www.fusionforce.us or contact us in-game:

@Emerald_Fusion
@Dr.Dimension (Parthenon)
@Molecule_Master (Kyle Al'Mordu)
@LadyDarkStar

The zones are beautiful, the costume generator is amazing, and the gameplay is pretty fun once you get a decent build going.

Some of the missions are really neat and The Monster Island Crisis has to be the coolest thing I've ever seen in a MMO! Our devs could learn something from it.

However, I don't see to much replayability with CO, since 1 character can take every power in the game, and you can do all the content on one character. I've built several alts, but just don't enjoy running the same zone hunts again. I took the 6 mth deal to get access into STO Closed Beta.

I'm sure a few of us will check out STO, DCUO, and SWTOR too, but COH will always be our home!

Em

champions nah but i been debating the past couple days to get fallen earth O.o

Minor necropost here. I was in my local Walmart store today, and I noticed that CO is now down to $39.96 and has a bonus 60 days of free time. I'm not sure if that means there's a total of 90 days including the original free month, but regardless it seems that sales might not be meeting expected goals. One of the associates checked it and they'd not sold a single copy of the game there. For those of you who'd been trying it out, what is your feedback on how CO's been going?

There's really nothing wrong with champions online least in my opinion, myself and several others made the move and formed up an sg. People expect way to much when it's only a month old, I'm having a blast over there, it has its ups and downs and there are some cool things that worked better in city. CO is different, combat is not hard in fact fairly easy, graphically its great, tons of options most people don't like it because it's not city and that they spent years here they can't accept another game.

Been playing CO a fair bit and have hooked up with some Triumph folk (hi, Em!). I'm enjoying it...but with some pretty big caveats.

Small stuff:

* Cryptic is still in love with the nerf. They pulled a literally game-changing sweeping nerf on launch day, ferchrissakes! The poo-storm that caused can only be imagined by those who didn't experience it directly. Lots of power-specific nerfs since then...many needed, it must be said. But the result of this constant "power balancing" is a feeling of no firm ground beneath your character's feet. You feel like every patch could mean a complete re-thinking of how to play the character.

* Despite all the above "balancing," there's a huge disparity in character effectiveness, all build-specific. The completely open character building system is fun and in theory allows a huge range of possible builds. In actual practice, however, there are a handful of powers that massively outstrip all the rest...and cookie-cutter FotM builds predominate.

* The UI is laggy, even on a really good computer. It's frustrating to think that your button-mashing is keeping up with the fast pace of combat only to have the display hiccup, some rubberbanding occur...and your character faceplant.

* Not enough content. If you skip anything, you get gaps and have to grind mobs to advance (an excruciating process, as mob XP is absurdly low). If you don't skip anything, you're repeating the exact same leveling path with any alts you make.

* In short, the game still feels like something about midway through closed beta...not like a game that's been live for a month. It was pushed to release too soon.


The not-so-small issue:

All the above is fixable, and I suspect will be fine before my 6-month subscription is over. But I'll still likely not renew it. For me, the reason is immersion.

Or, rather, lack thereof. Champions Online is just not an immersive game for me, and there's more than one reason for that.

Qne is that it's not a very RP-friendly game. Partly because it's attracted a fair number of WoW-kiddie smacktards who like to mess with RP'ers. Not that big a deal for RP-on-the-fly types like me, but for the "hang out in the club and gab" sort of RP'ers, they're a pain.

More importantly to me, there's the fact that there's no space for RP...literally. The game relies heavily on open missions instead of instanced ones, and the spawn density is really close. Enemies have long aggro ranges and their attacks tend to have greater range than your own. The net result is that if you stop to RP, or even get a slight bit distracted from precise character positioning, you will be attacked, probably from multiple directions. That's tense and fun...sometimes. But it also increases the likelihood that your team will rush madly through missions in a grim, closed-mouthed sort of way. Social interaction will get you killed.

Worse still, the game is really, really, REALLY campy. The look is cartoonish in comparison to CoX, the fourth wall is made of wet tissue paper (constant, corny self-referential NPC blather...), and the target "feel" the devs seem to be shooting for is The Tick. What they actually got is more like the 60's Batman TV show. Yes...that campy.

Again, fun for a little while...but it wears thin pretty quickly and it just murders immersion for a-bit-too-serious RP'ers like me.

The net result? I'll play out - and enjoy, to be fair - my 6-month subscription. And continue to enjoy CoX until the switch off the last server.

It's been where I have been playing for a month or so now. I didnt quit CoH by any means although I been on a little break for a while. CO is still changing a lot but that is to be expected with it being new.

Im waiting on Going Rouge to come back to CoX


Global is @Vego over there

I'm on day 3 of a 14-day trial key. There's a lot I like, and a lot that I don't, though I'm still trying to figure out if those things I don't like are such because they really do suck, or I just don't know how to do what I want. I'm also working to decide if the things I like are really that cool, or I like them just because they're new and shiny.

One thing that isn't working right, and I discovered to my chagrin, is the Threat system. We manage aggro in CoH with dedicated powers (Taunt, Placate), Gauntlet (if you're desperate), or attacks slotted for Taunt (if you're a Brute). In CO, you generate threat through any attack, and it's effectiveness is measured through the Presence stat. Boosting Presence takes away from points that could be better spent on awesomeness. What's more, the whole Threat system is still not working right; the devs have said so, and I found out when I repeatedly failed to capture the attention of foes despite having spent a fair amount of points on Presence and dishing out a mountain of damage.

The game is also melee-unfriendly. They say melee attacks do more damage than ranged to make up for the difficulty in getting into HTH range, but I saw ranged fighters repeatedly eat mobs that would pound my sword-swinging behemoth into the pavement. I shared my thoughts with some folks I teamed with, and they all (!) commented on how they shared my opinion and even went so far as to respec out of melee attacks altogether.

What is cool is being able to pick powers from any set. What's not cool is that there are some uber-effective powers that everyone will go for, so the variety works against the game as people find out what's optimal and build for that. Oddly, the AT and powerset framework in CoH may provide more variety of builds than the open build system of CO.

Still experimenting and exploring. There's certainly room for improvement in CoH, and CO has some nice things I wish could be copied here. More insights to come later.

edit: global is @Grog_the_Big

Grog the Big

I'm going over to one of my friend's house tonight to try out both CO and Aion, so I'll share my limited input later

Back from my friends, and I must say neither of them impressed me at all. Aion was graphically stunning but that's the only thing that had me. With an interface and system that's basically a WoW clone and a limited fly time to boot, made Aion very hard to get into. Although I must admit I only tried it for an hour on a toon that I didn't make and was already lvl 14 or something. As for CO that was equally unimpressive, although I will say it had some really cool things that I would like to see CoH implement. With the entire city part(s) that I saw (and am aware of), its easy to see why the game doesn't require zones....the whole city is no bigger than Grandville or Independence Port! The fact you could go under water was pretty neat but was boring after 30 seconds which leads me into the coolest thing I saw in the game (which is absolutely pathetic if you ask me) When you jump out of the water, and you have fly toggled on, you burst out of the water like missile launched from a sub then your character does this little transition movement from going out of the water to flying. . . .yeah thats about all I can say for CO. Other than when your wandering around certain grassy areas you can startle a flock of pigeons and watch then scatter and fly away.

My current rating for each game, or until they release more content and updates is - EPIC FRIGGIN PHAIL.

Tell us how u really feel PoS.

Yeah my one month ended yesterday and I didn't reknew. Deffinetly some neat features I think CoH needs to steal, mostly just aestics too like costume pieces and animations really. It was a neat little few weeks got a character to 22, and mostly only got that far cause Syn joined me over there and we level'd up together.

So when does GR come out so I can be re-addicted to CoH? Cause right now console games are dominating my free time. And everybody should play Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. They are all freaking amazing!

<- still over on CO workin on my second 40. I'm still playin it for two reasons a) imo the game has potential, but ill agree it feels like it should be mid beta right now b) my ice elemental is so freekin awsome! I immagine ill be over there for the time being. -@malkore