Champions Online: just doesn't cut it.
By
Ael Rhiana,
Posted on: 2012-10-06 24:47 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Huh...something just shattered my sarcasm detector. Wonder what caused that?
But still I fear and still I dare not laugh at the madman!
One man's "meh" is another man's "zomg". - Leatherneck
Procrastination meter coming soon.
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How many games has PWE closed?
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Originally Posted by Black Zot
Different base of operations, same MO. Thanks for nitpicking, but I stand by what I said. PWE is nearly identical to NCSoft in every aspect that matters.
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Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader
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Seems very wise for someone with her reputation, otherwise she'd be deluged with messages, PMs, requests, etc. It would have been like one of the Big Red Names giving away their normal player global.
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Originally Posted by BurningChick
On the minus side, Arcanville has a LT, but has never disclosed her forum ID
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@bpphantom
The Defenders of Paragon
KGB Special Section 8
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And that would be from just the game devs, hoping she can help them figure out what's going wrong with the game.
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Originally Posted by bpphantom
Seems very wise for someone with her reputation, otherwise she'd be deluged with messages, PMs, requests, etc.
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"I do so love taking a nice, well thought out character and putting them through hell. It's like tossing a Faberge Egg onto the stage during a Gallagher concert." - me
@Palador / @Rabid Unicorn
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Two.|
Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon
How many games has PWE closed?
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Legend of Martial Arts and Heroes of Three Kingdoms
Currently they are running 12 games and are developing 3 more.
As opposed to NCSoft closing 7 games and having 1 being developed. I'll admit I'm not sure how many games NCSoft has active since several were only released in a single country, but I think they only have 5 international games.
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Which is a shame, because I'm actually kind of curious what kind of powers/powersets she considers to be useful/good combinations.|
Originally Posted by BurningChick
On the minus side, Arcanville has a LT, but has never disclosed her forum ID
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CO's character building is this really weird mix of extremely simplistic-- I have characters who have two attacks they use, period-- but oddly complicated as I try to figure out everything I can reasonably/within a character concept use to make these one or two powers hit as hard as possible as often as possible, made more problematic by the numbers the game gives me being apparently subject to DR behind the scenes.
The best example I have is one of my character is built entirely around making Conflag hit as hard as it can according to concept. My main function during combat is just holding down the button I have it bound to as often as possible, letting up to reapply debuffs, active offenses, and a miscellaneous attack I use to keep my energy up without needing to ever touch my energy builder. All that just so one main attack hits as hard as possible as often as possible, regardless of how many targets there are (I do the same thing for both single and multiple targets).
On the other hand I've got an Elec character who actually has four different attacks, but to be honest I'm not even sure if two of those are a DPS loss or gain when I'm only hitting one target. Granted, one of those two is Orbital Cannon with Anvil of Dawn, so it's kind of hard *not* to want to hit the button that calls a giant beam of death out of the sky onto my target. Of course, Gigabolt is also pretty fun to both spam and charge.
It does, at least, have some outright silly things you can do with spec trees that I like to see in games. They aren't entirely optimal, but doing things like taking both the hybrid tank trees to get your defense to offense twice, or taking a hybrid tank tree and the vindicator tree and watching your defense be applied to offense, which then applies 20% of the new value to defense, which then applies to your offense, which then... you get the idea. Things that are fun to talk about with other people who don't necessarily play the game. I just wish there was more to actually *do* with characters once they're 40.
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And to be fair, 2 of those games that they closed down are still running, because NCsoft only actually ever published them in one region. There were different publishers for different regions of the game (Point Blank and Dragonica/Dragon Saga are the games that I am referring to).|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Two.
Legend of Martial Arts and Heroes of Three Kingdoms Currently they are running 12 games and are developing 3 more. As opposed to NCSoft closing 7 games and having 1 being developed. I'll admit I'm not sure how many games NCSoft has active since several were only released in a single country, but I think they only have 5 international games. |
In terms of Games still running internationally for NCsoft:
Lineage 2, Aion, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2.
Lineage 1 is still running, but as far as I am aware, it is just for the asian market now, since the closure of the US servers for it.
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Wow. What's sad is that post is nearly three years old and yet still applies to the game as it exists right now.|
Originally Posted by BurningChick
I dredged up one of my old posts, http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/sho...yn#post1462975 , and this quote still seems to capture how I feel about the game:
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You know, there was a reason that we often called Zwill one of the devs, even though he didn't actually work on the game itself. Paragon was such a close-knit group that it felt like he could just wander up and talk to them about stuff that was bugging us, and was truly delivering our messages to people willing to listen.
The more I read CO's forums, the more I get a "feel" for their community, and the general vibe is that Cryptic doesn't have anywhere near that level of communication between their CCM and their devs, and let alone between players and their devs.
Their players are unhappy, jaded, and defeated. "Why bother asking or even hoping for anything, we'll never get it" is the mantra. Nobody there - devs or players - is excited about anything. Updates consist of bland "we increased this power by 2%; we reduced that power by 2%" messages, with nothing big promised for the future other than more ways to milk the players for money. (Okay, even though I'm not into them personally, vehicles seem kinda neat, but not something to build an entire "issue" around with no other additions to the game)
It's really depressing, especially when contrasted with how bright and colorful and over-the-top cheerful the game itself looks. It makes the whole game feel like a run-down carnival with inflated ride prices.
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Thank you for correcting me. I was trying to be accurate as best I could without including any of my personal opinions about either company.
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Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
And to be fair, 2 of those games that they closed down are still running, because NCsoft only actually ever published them in one region. There were different publishers for different regions of the game (Point Blank and Dragonica/Dragon Saga are the games that I am referring to).
In terms of Games still running internationally for NCsoft: Lineage 2, Aion, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2. Lineage 1 is still running, but as far as I am aware, it is just for the asian market now, since the closure of the US servers for it. |
The more I play Champions the more I enjoy it.
However, I have to say that the AT versions that FTP gets are much less fun than the freeforms a sub gets or at least have been so far.
And their market is VERY expensive.
That being said, I am enjoying the powers, the costume options, the various travel powers, and the instanced missions. The instanced missions are fairly short which is nice as I find it easier to do that "one more mission" before bedtime thing there. (Though my highest toon there is just 19 and they missions may take longer once you level up.)
No, it's not COH. If you play it expecting it to BE COH, you are going to be disappointed.
But in of itself, it's a fun little game.
I enjoy DC Online too-- their super speed travel is awesome-- you can run on water or up the sides of buildings. The world is visually stunning and the voice acting is great. (No surprise as they used professional actors.)
The downside to DC Online is that the controls work best with a joystick and their attack sets as a rule don't feel very super heroic to me.
My COX Fanfiction:
Blue's Assembled Story Links
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Plus ca change ...|
Originally Posted by Thunder Knight
Wow. What's sad is that post is nearly three years old and yet still applies to the game as it exists right now.
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The biggest problem with CO is that it seems to operate as a training platform for STO and Neverwinter for new hires / kids just out of school to get them used to the Cryptic Engine and The Way of Cryptic. So there hasn't been continuity with the devs (beyond Tumerboy, at least for 18 months) since shortly after release. That kind of developer churn makes developing relationships a royal PITA (it took months for us to embrace Zwill, f'r instance, and he's a pro who spent a LOT of time building trust with us). And the churn makes it doubly difficult to have solid execution of long-term plans.
This isn't the fault of the devs -- they have their marching orders, and they've been tossed into a tough situation.
It's a problem with Cryptic's management; they misread the MMO market leading up to CO's release (Jack even admitted so in a couple interviews) and thought they could release an unpolished, but feature-complete, MMO to players who would pay it forward to see the game get polished over time. It didn't happen.
And thus the downward spiral: no subs, no dev money; no dev money, crappy updates; crappy updates, unhappy players.
That said ...
Cryptic didn't close the game. It still gets updates (even if most of them are through STO and Neverwinter, propagated down through the shared engine). And it is undeniably a better game now than at release.
But I still don't like the game and view my LT as a monumental waste of money because, sucker me, I believed in paying it forward.
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I'm hoping that's how I'll feel, but I fear I'll get sick of the community and lack of updates long before too long. I'll just have to see.
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Originally Posted by BlueBattler
The more I play Champions the more I enjoy it.
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To borrow a line from Argo, it's the best bad replacement we have.
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Originally Posted by Thunder Knight
I'm hoping that's how I'll feel, but I fear I'll get sick of the community and lack of updates long before too long. I'll just have to see.
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Originally Posted by BlueBattler
The more I play Champions the more I enjoy it.
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It was quite the opposite for me. The more I played it, the more I hated it for mostly the same reasons I've seen here so far. It's generally a neglected game, or at least it has that feel to it.
That, and the fact I cannot STAND the art or cell shaded graphics. It's TOO corny/cartoonish/oddly proportioned for me.
I'm hoping Neverwinter isn't that way.
Truth, CoX was my first MMO....and it'll be hard for any other game to measure up, but on the flip side...I'm not burnt out on fantasy settings like I've seen others say they are. CO definitely failed in the measuring up part, though. I even went so far as to buy a three month sub to unlock all the goodies....but it just didn't help. The art thing was too big an obstacle to overcome for me.
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As I'm sure has been pointed out many times before, the cell shading can be turned off (in fact, it lightens the graphics load to do so) but even without that, the game looks bad. It's so sad, they clearly put a lot of graphical resources into modelling and animating the faces, but it's like nobody stood up and told them that they were using Mr Potato Head as their reference until it was way too late.|
Originally Posted by mercykilling
That, and the fact I cannot STAND the art or cell shaded graphics. It's TOO corny/cartoonish/oddly proportioned for me.
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If only you could take the faces (hell, the character creator in general) from EVE online and the costume options from CO, you'd have... Well, you'd have a character creator that's only marginally better than CoH...
But it would be alive dammit!
All that is planned fails. All that is born dies.
All that is built crumbles. This will always be true.
But memories remain, And that is beautiful.
After attempting Whiteout solo on as a silver Night Avenger I now look fondly on the ambushes in CoH that used to be annoying.
At least CoH tended to ambush you with minions and maybe a lt on normal difficulty. CO sends wave after wave villain+ and lesser types, without a pause. (So no health regen or re-stealthing to use the NA's schtick). The boss battle where one master villain became three master villains (and couldn't be targeted until aggro'd so no assassin's stike) was where I was thankful there are no nega-stars once you run out of normal stars. Stars are another thing I'm not entirely happy with. That mission is going to be sitting in my log for awhile.
Not being able to easily find what things look like is yet another but that's an issue with the wiki.
But it's that or nothing and for the $25 I've spent on it (NA, the account wide costume slots, a costume set and parts) I've got my claws stalker mostly existing and my staff tanker is now a scythe scrapper (heavy wizard's staff a> does not have a nob on the end and b> is more like giant's cancerous legbone, but the batwing scythe looks nice). If freeform slots weren't so outrageously expensive, $50, I'd have been hard pressed to resist buying one to make a more tanker version of the Devastator/heavy weapons, $5 is impulse money, $50 is not
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Originally Posted by Ogi
After attempting Whiteout solo on as a silver Night Avenger I now look fondly on the ambushes in CoH that used to be annoying.
At least CoH tended to ambush you with minions and maybe a lt on normal difficulty. CO sends wave after wave villain+ and lesser types, without a pause. (So no health regen or re-stealthing to use the NA's schtick). The boss battle where one master villain became three master villains (and couldn't be targeted until aggro'd so no assassin's stike) was where I was thankful there are no nega-stars once you run out of normal stars. Stars are another thing I'm not entirely happy with. That mission is going to be sitting in my log for awhile. Not being able to easily find what things look like is yet another but that's an issue with the wiki. But it's that or nothing and for the $25 I've spent on it (NA, the account wide costume slots, a costume set and parts) I've got my claws stalker mostly existing and my staff tanker is now a scythe scrapper (heavy wizard's staff a> does not have a nob on the end and b> is more like giant's cancerous legbone, but the batwing scythe looks nice). If freeform slots weren't so outrageously expensive, $50, I'd have been hard pressed to resist buying one to make a more tanker version of the Devastator/heavy weapons, $5 is impulse money, $50 is not |
Okay, I think I've said it before.
Whiteout is MASSIVELY bugged (and pretty much uncompletable as-is).
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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Bugged for just solo play or teams as well? Hopefully just solo since there are only 5(?) TF like things in CO (the comic series and adventure packs, if there are more repeatable multiple mission TF like things I'm all ears, need selling points).|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Okay, I think I've said it before.
Whiteout is MASSIVELY bugged (and pretty much uncompletable as-is). |
On a broad scale I've liked the idea behind Whiteout so far, the implementation, let's just leave it at I like the idea behind Whiteout.
Is there a better wiki than CO-Wiki? (If only NCSoft had realized, strike that, cared, just how far beyond the competition CoH and its community support were. Tomax, paragonwiki, so far I can't find their equal for CO.)
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But is still a helluva lot of fun. I even wrote fan-fiction for my character based on the bugs that turned a "routine training mission" into a life-or-death struggle for survival for the young trainee.|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Okay, I think I've said it before.
Whiteout is MASSIVELY bugged (and pretty much uncompletable as-is). |
I did manage to solo it with my Behemoth. It's proving to be...difficult with my blaster/tank(ish). But we'll see.
I mainly use the world for RP and for getting my "hero" on when I'm in that kinda mood and need a break from the un-ending darkness that is my new life in The Secret World (which I highly recommend).
I think Champions is plenty good - just not in comparison with CoH. I'm hoping (probably in vain) that with the fresh blood coming into the game, there will be more updates and bug fixes and refreshes to that world that'll make it more CoH-like.
But honestly, it's fine the way it is. It's a poor sub for CoH but NOTHING could replace it.
E.
A'KO SMASH!!!
When CO started into it's beta I was excited. I liked what I played, and figured that like CoH, the game would improve and expand over time to be something really special. I bought a lifetime subscription for it.
And then it came out and was a mess at launch, and continued to be a mess. More content got added here and there, the Comic Series/Adventure Packs had some cool stuff once they got good at those(Resistance is legitimately a lot of fun I think). But the game remained buggy, every new patch broke as many things as it added, and the development team remained silent all the time.
With CoH shutting down I decided I should go try it out again. Like, REALLY try it out, see everything there is to experience in the game(without being a crazy completionist). I took three or four different playstyles of characters to roughly lv25, stuck with one to 35, and another all the way to 40 and played through some of the 'endgame' content. I've played the different holiday events, special things like the Nighthawk vehicle mission(I even bought a Hawkwing jet), and dug into the Nemesis content as deeply as the game will let me.
Every single aspect of Champions Online has been so close to good that it's just depressing. The game's not awful, it's very close to being something enjoyable, but it's just short of that. The game's a heartbreaker. Every idea they've had and designed content around is great, in concept, but the execution is always lacking. The worst of this is the vehicle 'system' set to release this Friday. Early on they were talking this up, that it'd be a whole alternate character progression and playstyle, have it's own extensive set of missions and be just as customizable as your characters.
Instead it's shipping with 2 different vehicle types that you can get 'variants' of, and the only customization for those is being able to slot in a few different gimmick weapons like tractor beams or railguns. And that 'extensive set of missions' is a whole single mission. Once again, they took a great opportunity to expand and improve the game and instead just wasted a bunch of development time on glorified "turn into X" device powers.
Champions Online is the abusive spouse I keep coming back to, thinking THIS time it'll be good, THIS time they'll treat me right, THIS time the game will feel right and make me happy. And then I just leave a few weeks later with a lighter wallet and feelings of regret.
It's got so much potential, but they're just squandering more and more of it as time goes on.
Gonna miss you a lot, CoH.
Animation major and old-school CoHer.
Art, Animation, and Stuff:
DA Tumblr Vimeo Youtube
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Currently the final mission of Whiteout is uncompletable.|
Originally Posted by Ogi
Bugged for just solo play or teams as well? Hopefully just solo since there are only 5(?) TF like things in CO (the comic series and adventure packs, if there are more repeatable multiple mission TF like things I'm all ears, need selling points).
On a broad scale I've liked the idea behind Whiteout so far, the implementation, let's just leave it at I like the idea behind Whiteout. Is there a better wiki than CO-Wiki? (If only NCSoft had realized, strike that, cared, just how far beyond the competition CoH and its community support were. Tomax, paragonwiki, so far I can't find their equal for CO.) |
The enemies in the hall spam hold until it's essentially perma.
There's supposed to be a fix coming for this...eventually.
When it's actually going to happen? Dunno.
There's also other problems in there that can only be classified as "bugs".
The "free the prisoners" mission near the ship early on?
DON'T use anything that generates knockback. If you toss an enemy into the area the ship occupies? They get stuck. You can't attack them. But they can still snipe you. Preventing you from actually being able to click and free the prisoners (it's a click and wait X-seconds).
The investigation mission (the part that runs like "The Thing"), you sometimes have to completely exit (thus restart) the mission because the clickable doors fail to work right.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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When, exactly, did you run it? Because as of last month, the final mission was bugged to the point of being uncompletable.|
Originally Posted by Evanescah
But is still a helluva lot of fun. I even wrote fan-fiction for my character based on the bugs that turned a "routine training mission" into a life-or-death struggle for survival for the young trainee.
I did manage to solo it with my Behemoth. It's proving to be...difficult with my blaster/tank(ish). But we'll see. I mainly use the world for RP and for getting my "hero" on when I'm in that kinda mood and need a break from the un-ending darkness that is my new life in The Secret World (which I highly recommend). I think Champions is plenty good - just not in comparison with CoH. I'm hoping (probably in vain) that with the fresh blood coming into the game, there will be more updates and bug fixes and refreshes to that world that'll make it more CoH-like. But honestly, it's fine the way it is. It's a poor sub for CoH but NOTHING could replace it. E. |
And yeah. It IS a lot of fun.
And yeah. Unfortunately, it's always going to suffer by comparison to CoH. It's just a testament to how great the Paragon staff actually was.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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I don't feel so bad about giving up at the boss of mission #4 now.|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Currently the final mission of Whiteout is uncompletable.
The enemies in the hall spam hold until it's essentially perma. There's supposed to be a fix coming for this...eventually. When it's actually going to happen? Dunno. |
It took more tries than I'd like to admit to finish #1.
#3 with the three sets of Mot knows how many waves of multiple villains was brutal but the crews at the shield generators weren't nearly as squishy as the guy from #1.
After getting through #1 and #3, I didn't want to call it quits on #4 but there are limits to my stubbornness. I'm sort of glad that I gave up before I got to #5 now that you've described the bug. That might have induced some table-flipping.
Are the other comic series and adventure packs able to be completed (solo) at this time?
Honestly, unknown. I found most of the bugs I outlined The Hard Way (ran into them, asked about them, was told about how bug-tastic that one happened to be, and finally dropped it).
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
Now exactly where did I see a company investing money in a game and suddenly fire all the employees and pull the rug out from under it's customers just 2-3 weeks before the next major update came out.
No, no, don't tell me. The names right on the tip of my tongue.
I think it was a super hero game, originally developed by Cryptic.
Damn, just give me some time. I'll remember the name eventually.