See what I did there? I’m very proud of myself.
I guess I am becoming increasingly grumpy, but I am really trying to enjoy my time with Champions Online and failing. Everyone else seem to enjoy it, to a degree, but the more I play it the more I realise that I am not having fun. My character looks really cool, wearing a short skirt, a bowler hat and touting two large guns, and I guess that the hover board she’s flying around on is kinda neat, but…it’s not enough. The more I play, the worse it gets.
Let’s get the regular disclaimer out of the way – I am not far into Champions Online. I just dinged level 10, I’m stuck in the dull wilderness of Canada, and still have a long way to go before I can start exploring the world proper and craft my own Nemesis. This is a MMO, I have barely scratched the surface. But the fact remains that I have no real incentive to keep playing. I know I’ll get to Millennium City sooner or later, but do I really want to? If I’m not enjoying the game now, what is there to say that I will in a few levels time?
So, what’s my problem? First of all, the game feels slow. Not frame-rate dropping slow, just slow paced. I am sure the action gets better when you got more powers to play around with and the enemies become trickier, but so far combat is dull. Travelling is also slow and doesn’t flow the way I was hoping for and the graphics leave a lot to wish for even on near-maximum settings. Questing is boring as well, the same old MMO quest grind that we’ve seen thousands of times before – innovation is not Champs Online’s strongest point. Perhaps it’s my power set and chosen travel power that are not fun enough, but if I want to try something completely different I’ll either have to retcon (i.e respecc) my character completely, which I can’t afford, or play through the tutorial area again, which I don’t ever want to do again. Also, I like guns.
I did enjoy PvP for a bit, until I noticed how certain power sets and travel powers made it more or less unplayable for my chosen type of hero. Munitions against crowd control-heavy characters that use teleports? Boom, splat, gone. I know Munitions do have a CC-power, which I’ll try to pick up and see if I can even the odds a bit. I did consider rerolling just for the PvP, but since you don’t get experience points for PvPing (oh, how I miss that from WAR in every game I play these days) it would still force me to play through regular PvE. And creating a new character only for teleports and CC, knowing that the PvP-side of the game probably will fare victim to the usual nerf-fest that Blizzard perfected in the Arena, seems utterly pointless. I will just try to enjoy the PvP as much as I can without that edge, comforted by the thought that no particular power set will stay on top forever.
Yet, I am not sure if I will make it that far. I try to log in and play for longer periods of time, but I keep finding myself bored and log out after a few missions. There’s nothing in the lore that interests me, the world isn’t exciting and the crafting feels like a complete waste of time (that’s what you get after playing too much Vanguard, Ryzom or Everquest II – you get spoiled by interesting crafting systems).
Maybe it’s the setting that puts me off? Perhaps super heroes are not cool enough, or not the type of characters that I want to play when I play MMOs. Perhaps, since no matter how cool my char’s bowler hat is, I don’t feel connected to her at all. With both Fallen Earth and Aion releasing this month (Fallen Earth on my birthday, no less – nudge, nudge, wink, wink, Icarus Studios), I am not sure for how long Champions Online will be able to keep up my already low interest.
I will keep playing, perhaps things will change. I just need to get out of Canada, since that zone is starting to drive me crazy.
At level 10 I went into UTC caged matches and won them all with my Munitions character.
The secret? Mini mines. Get that power and the game is going to feel completely different for you,
Awesome, I will give that a shot as soon as I get a new power! I still want to PvP with my guns out.
I feel the same way. I finally got my main character up to 27. Dual TK Blades user. Mini Mines are definitely the power to have. And at level 27, just about EVERYONE, no matter the power set, can get those mines. It’s a bit of a hassle to zig zag your way through a PVP match in order to avoid the mindless floating explosives.
And don’t even get me started on the “Roles” that the game has. If you aren’t in Guardian or Defender, you will die. If you don’t have regeneration, you will die. If you don’t have some sort of massive damn near unbreakable CC, you will die. If you cant’ somehow heal yourself (Lay on Hands, anyone?) in an instant, you will die.
Face it…the heroes in Champions aren’t SUPER. They’re just guys with nice outfits.
I tend to heavily favor the classical medieval fantasy setting for MMOGs. I am also not much into Science-Fiction, with exceptions. I quite liked EVE and all BattleTech related Mech games make me happy. I quite like that Cryptic’s Star Trek Online looks a bit like the good old Starfleet Command III which I played a lot.
But Superheroes just don’t do it for me.
I did not like City of Heroes, then how should I ever love Champions Online? But I really like their one server model and the @name system that allows duplicate names.
BTW & off-topic, I just read that Guild Wars 2 is going to have “more standard” type servers on Massively. But they want to allow easy transfer. I am a bit confused and concerned what this will actually mean in practice.