Oh, Champions Online, you could have been a significantly greater contender if you didn't undermine yourself with consolitus and then fail to pull through. DC Universe Online has basically done what Champions Online could not. If they had stuck to being PC exclusive and managed to avoid moving onto this unsatisfactory customization design, things might have been interesting. That said, Champions Online was not terrible, just bland, but it's had over a year of refinement put into it and play is noticeably more refined than release. Nevertheless, I was put off by at least two things about it: The action-based, shallow gameplay experience, which left you soloing the greater part of the time, didn't really feel MMORPGish, consequently I really wasn't hooked in such a way as to want to spend a monthly subscription on it. While I like a bit of customization, it seems Champions Online's character progression system lacked a certain necessary structure to make progressing a character interesting. I'd have all the abilities I care for by about 20-26, the rest was redundant, I wouldn't have room in my activation chains for it, and the best picks that remained were often concept breaking (e.g. Orbital Strike, Smoke Bomb). Champions Online going Free To Play has solved both those issues. The first, most obviously, in that I don't need to spend a monthly subscription on it anymore. The second being that the premade archetypes provide a considerable amount of structure that is sorely lacking. This is an ironic observation considering the archetypes were clearly there to price gouge. Somebody over at Cryptic Studios (which may or may not have been completely absorbed by Atari at this point) got the bright idea that, instead of selling character slot upgrades that allow players to freely customize their characters, they were going to use their own hero customization system and sell the individual hero builds. Currently, there's some noticeable gaps: no power armor hero, no psi-blades hero, no electric hero, no force hero, and so on. Not to worry, I'm sure they'll show up as "Special Archetypes" in time. So, here's the breakdown of a cost to play in F2P. The scale is set at 2000 pts per $25 at this time. Note that, until February 2nd, they're having a 20% off sale, so prices will be lower than these. You're going to need some more bags. At least one, as many as three. A bag slot is 200 pts. This is a per-character unlock. If you decide to get a special archetype, that's 920 pts. This is an account-wide unlock. Character slots (after the first two) are available at 1120 pts per two slots, so each character will be 600 pts. At least they stay unlocked after you bought them. If you want the travel powers Rocket Jump, Tunneling, Swinging, Jet Boots, Ice Slide, Hover Disk, Fire Flight, or Earth Flight, that's another 420 pts for each. This is an account-wide unlock. If it's me, I'd probably be reasonably comfortable with just the bag slots (600 pts), the character slot (560 pts). So the overall cost per character is 1160 pts. Previously "gold" (ex-subscriber) players returning to the game as a "silver" (free to play) member will discover from interesting rules apply to them. Like all basic silver accounts, you're only allowed two character slots at first, each additional 2 slots costing 1120 points. All your existing character slots are considered active, even if they exceed your current character slot limit. You can't play your "gold" characters unplayable unless you convert them. Converting your Gold character to Silver character will: Reset that character as the chosen archetype. You keep your level, but now your talents and powers need to match that archetype. You'll respawn in the power house so you can re-slot everything. Remove all your extra bags past the basic inventory, the bags and their contents are mailed to your via the in-game mail system. You'll keep all the bank slots you purchased, but any additional bank slots must be bought via the Atari store. You may probably lose a few costume frills, but you can probably find an acceptable substitute after visiting the costume NPC. There is a game money limit on F2P characters, not sure what happens to the overflow. Probably only affects characters in the end game. If you decide to subscribe to the game, your converted characters are stuck in that converted archetype. You can't turn a silver character back into a gold (customizable) character again, even if you subscribe. If you chose the wrong archetype when you converted your character from gold to silver, you're also stuck in that converted archetype. It's apparently been announced that "archetype retcon" tokens will be sold in the future to resolve the previous two issues. The main point of contention here would be the idea that converting your character's archetype is a one-way street. Also, deleting characters doesn't accomplish anything: you still can't create a new character until your character count is less than your allowed character slots. To a great extent, Champions Online has missed the spirit of going F2P by creating two whole seperate games trying to co-exist: the class-based Silver characters and the classless Gold characters. They're trying to encourage players to subscribe to it in order to unlock the "real" game, but this is foolishness. What makes more money? $15/mo for the 5% of their player base interested in paying a monthly subscription, or an occasional $15 per gold character slot from the remaining 95% of their player base? However, the problems are a little deeper than that: I don't want a gold character, silver characters are more fun. The thing is, I beat Champions Online's default chargen system. Take Chaingun, Orbital Strike (Optional), Circle of Primal Dominion, Invulnerability/Lightning Reflexes, Force Shield advanced with Energy Shealth - all content is now trivialized, you are now an unkillable juggernaut. Min/Maxing such a flexible system is too easy, I'm torn between cognitive dissonance of wanting to play a fun character and wanting not to gimp myself. The silver premade characters resolve that by introducing balanced play experiences I'd never assign myself, even introducing uses for powers I'd never have. (E.g. "The Mind" archetype actually makes good use of Ego Sleep: none of my custom characters would never need do that, because everything I fought would be dead long before they were a threat.) Their decision to gouge players with archetypes instead of selling them gold slots is not the right decision, but it's not the wrong decision, either. Really, it seems what the game needs is a massive character generation revamp but, knowing that they can't alienate their existing subscribers, they chose to do this way instead: it's not a revamp, it's a F2P archetype limitation. Would I choose to play Champions Online instead of Rift? Probably not, Rift has much better levels of refinement and activity diversity. However, Champions Online now has the advantage of being a whole lot cheaper, so it balances itself out rather competitively.
It seems this post-lotro wave of free to play transitions don't quite understand that they're supposed to allow people to play the actual game for free, not offer an expirationless trial account. And what's up with the pricing? Both this game and PotBS require that free players dump 3x as much money into buying what one month's sub gets you. Do they not think the average person will notice or something?
I can sort of see where they're coming from with F2P. The thing is, what you buy in F2P stays yours, forever. In a subscription model, you're only renting. Frugal players can get by for months off of $20. On the other hand, if money is not much of an object for you, go ahead and buy all the frills. Regarding Champions Online, I'm slightly better off than I thought. It turns out that I can convert as many characters from Gold to Silver as I want, and play them, so despite having only 2 character slots my Gold account legacy actually gives me a considerable amount of extra slots. I'll have to modify that section of the previous post. Overall, it's good news for me, as it means all I really need to buy is a bag slot or three for each character and special archetypes until I'm out of character slots to convert. I can always change their costumes, even rename them for the price of a rename token (250 pts), so there's no real reason to shell out for more character slots. Pity I deleted one of my characters out of an experiment... it ruined the symmetry of the character selection screen I had, and I gained absolutely nothing from doing it.
Are there any power-sets as mechanically interesting as that one Bowlingball powerset (Kinetics, I think) in CoH?
That would probably be a matter of opinion. Silver characters have two less powers than Gold characters (out of 14) so there's 12 powers across 40 levels... tough to say that leaves much room for mechanically interesting stuff to go on. Force was the big bowling ball power set, Force Cascade and Force Detonation are the premier "bad guys = bowling pins" powers in the game. Unfortunately, they've yet to add a Force-based Silver Archetype. I predict it's only a matter of time, though. Speaking in terms of finding a "mechanically interesting power set," my advice is to avoid the ones that have a glut of attack powers. Since attacks rarely have a recharge time in Champions Online, you're only really going to need your power builder attack, a solid single target eliminator, and a solid group eliminator. Sets which have more than one of these waste a bit of power variety. I'd say your best bets from among the Silver archetypes would be: The Glacier - Controller's offense: freezes foes in blocks of ice, then shatters those blocks for bonus damage. Tank's defense: the invulnerability passive allows him to shrug off minor attacks. An interesting mix. Quite a bit of knock up and knock down as well - Ice Burst knocks foes around like Force Detonation, but not as far. The Mind - Controller with healing and armor boosting aura. Puts packs of foes asleep, is able to damage sleeping foes without waking them with a AOE DoT. Later on, gets a hold and a pet summon. Perhaps the most varying number of effects across the current Silver archetypes. The Grimoire - Sorcery has a bit of a "stationary caster" approach to it. The Grimoire places a circle to generate his power, sigils to add periodic damage to enemies that approach too closely, has a "Pillar of Poz" power that knocks everything that gets within melee range back up to 25 feet. Has an effective healing spell. Good single target and cone damage, too. Level 32 powers are a disappointment: it should have been a pet summon, not more sigils. Level 40 power is redundant supplemental damage. The Behemoth - Lots of redundant attacks but, if knocking things around is your style, perhaps you'd like to take things into your own hands? Sort of the Incredible Hulk type, the Behemoth has a number of melee attacks that send things flying. Although, with only 12 powers to span 40 levels, chances are you'll run out of unique uses for your powers long before you run out of levels. You can mix things up a little through slotted device activation, but those tend to be few and far between. If you set your expectations on Champions Online as being a shallow, casual brawler, that's a good assumption to have. Guild wars, this is not. Rift, this is not.
In the loss of CoH many have gone over here, Champions has been working to try and make the transition comfortable. I don't have many opinions yet but exploring to see if it will at least scratch the itch.
I'm playing this at the moment, and I quite like it. Mind you, I didn't like CoH at all when I tried it a year or so ago, so my opinion might not be of use to any CoH vets. I've just got a silver account, so I can't make my own builds. I had a lot of fun with my Glacier last year though, and I'm liking my Radiant at the moment. They did a big overhaul earlier this year, and the starter zones are more streamlined and flow better then they did before. The free archetypes have received some improvement as well. It's worth checking out, and available from Steam. .
They've done a good job of making the PvE in Champions much better than it was upon initial release, to the extent that I actually like their "comic modules". Everything looks great, and the power sets are varied and solid. Sadly they've poleaxed PvP, which I thought was Champions' best feature, so it's dead to me. If PvP isn't your thing though it's worth a try. I definitely like it better than CoH and DCO.
Essentially. Made most of the queues only pop if you have 5 v 5, and since that only rarely happened the people who did PvP left, and so now I would guess it never happens. And the only reason it was so thin to begin with was the poor team balancing which would happily send you 5 v 2, plus a handful of quite obvious balance issues. The sort of thing that one competent programmer could have cleaned up in a week, maybe a month tops. Strangely, I get the impression that the outcome was desired, due to some bizarre PvE vs. PvP issue in house. Doubly bizarre because PvP was the best part of the game given that their PvE content was fairly crappy (though it's better now!). Sad, as the core game itself is good.
I couldn't get over the stick animations when running. There are some great animations otherwise but that really broke the camel's back for me. I don't like seeing only my hips move, the upper body locks in place. Secondary factor was the buddy I was trying this with experienced a hard crash that about killed his graphics card. The card is known for that sort of crash, and the game is known for a memory hole that leads to a crash. The combination makes it unplayable for him.
So is there any indication they may change the ftp model anytime soon? I really want to play this game again, but I don't want to pay for the fist/master archtype, which is really what I want for my main guy. I don't think there's an in-game currency I can earn to unlock it either.
The model isn't "free to play". It's pay at a non-scheduled rate, so you're not locked into a subscription. And no, there's no indication that it will change to just plain free.
I wasn't quite sure what you meant because I didn't remember any bad running animations back when I played. Looking at Youtube now and I still don't see it. Super-speed uses that anime-style 'arms to the side pointed backwards' type of running. Is that the one you're talking about?
Actually it was any run animation. The default moving animation did it too. Your hips move, reasonably ok though the feet don't seem to be in touch with the ground. Your upper body does arm swing but there is no moving between the hip point and the upper back, it sort of turns slightly then pulls the top around to what you are turning. Like you take a person's waist, legs and movement put them on one of those wooden pose dolls. Animate it all up, but leave the top moving in default mode. The anime run only made the issue worse, Lineage 2 had a reasonable anime run animation, CoH had a nice one too. I will say the wonderful backward flips and turns were a surprise (Champion's) but the overall animation is in starts and stops. I find it jarring.
Not saying you're wrong, I just don't see it. I might be too distracted by the awful human faces. I only ever made robots and animal people because of that. You could play with the facial sliders and get something less hideous, but that was pretty limiting.
I agree about the faces, it wasn't the last straw deal for me is all. The wings were horrid to. Their idea of angel wings leaves me confused and lost. I kind of like the concept of bird wings but they were far oversized for the body, the flying flapping animation grated as well. Ugh its like some one knew how to make ,animate design and worked with someone else who could not but tried. Then someone who didn't care came in to make it all work.
That was really one of my biggest issues with Champions Online. I could never, ever manage to get a costume that I felt really genuinely happy with. It always looked too goofy, too cartoony. I guess they were going for a semi-silly vibe with the game, but it really, really put me off. Everything felt like it had been created to a child's sensibilities.
I found it to be mostly a matter of crappy defaults: - Good faces are possible, but are a pain since you need to tweak a bunch of parameters at once. - Bodies are dramatically improved once you realize the default monkey arms hang down to a hero's knees. For a long time they just looked wrong yet I couldn't quite place why... - Several further minor tweaks are needed to make body proportions less exaggerated; different tweaks for male vs. female heroes too. :-/ - Costumes I actually had little trouble with, though it takes a while to get the hang of the possibilities. I had a dozens or so costumes I was quite happy with, and got far better results than I ever did with City of Heroes. Or any other game really, though it's a bit difficult comparing to things that are meant to look realistic. Hell, I would still be playing this game if the PvP wasn't dead, and a large part of that is the fun of making new characters.
Besides the overly-fiddly interface (and awful human faces), I thought the costume creation was great. They allowed a lot more customization of individual pieces than CoH did, even if the overall number of options was smaller. Being able to layer costume parts was a huge advantage over CoH.
I loved the *potential* of the costume creation shop - I could just so rarely get them to quite match what was in my head, whereas I never felt like I had that issue with City of Heroes.
There are a ton of options, but if you're dead set on something in particular you probably out of luck. To an extent I had my best luck working with what was there, so that while I had an idea in mind I often adjusted it to take into account what costume pieces I found. It also takes a while to become familiar with all the visual effects of the powers, as they too can effectively be part of a costume.
