Champions Online: Preview Weekend

Over this past weekend I had the chance to try out Champions Online during a press preview weekend.  This was not closed beta, but instead a small slice of the game that had about 2 hrs worth of gameplay for us to try out.  Having been called a DC Universe fanboi in my last post where I compared the two games, I was really hoping the preview would show me something exciting so I could please the CO fanbois.  While there were a few things that surprised me and I enjoyed, I didn’t really see anything in the game that won me over.  Sorry, I can’t post screenshots, it’s not allowed.

First lets start with character creations, of all the MMOs I’ve played up to this point Champions Online has by far the most options to create a unique character.  I spent about 20 mins creating mine, but I could have easily spent an hour or 2.    Once I got into the game, I was thrown off by the movement mechanics.  Every MMO has slightly different controls, Champions is no different.  I didn’t really like the default options, but they offered Action and FPS controls which was nice and I ended up using Action which was more up my alley.  Although it still didn’t feel 100% right, but I got over it pretty quick.

The preview takes place in Millennium City which is under attack by aliens (I think).  A huge mother ship is hovering over the city and has placed a force field around it so nothing can come in or out, so it’s your job to rescue the city.  You start out with some basic intro tutorials to help you learn the game, then you move on to more gathering and killing missions.  They’re basically the run of your mill MMO quests, nothing really worth writing about.

Aside from the character creation, I really liked the look of the game.   It’s sort of a mix between cell shading and normal textures, it definitely made you feel like you were in a comic book, so Champions gets a big plus for that.

On the other end of that, one thing that bugged me was the size of the interface.  The mouse pointer and action buttons were too small for me since my res is pretty high and I would lose my pointer from time to time or I’d miss clicking on the action buttons when I was quickly trying to switch moves.  I didn’t see anything in the options to increase the size of it, but hopefully that will be something that will be added by release time.

Once you play through a few quests you get to a public quest which sorta works the same way as Warhammer Online public quests.   You enter the area and everyone works towards the same goal.  Once you complete this you’re taken to a instanced boss fight where a NPC hero joins you.  The fight was pretty easy and by the time your done, you reach lev 5 where you can now upgrade your heros powers and select a traveling power.

Not sure if traveling powers will be available at lev 5 in the official release or they just did it for the preview, but since I hate walking I hope it’s lev 5.  There are about 10 or so traveling powers to pick from, flying, teleporting, super jump, super speed, ice slide and a bunch of others.   I decided on flying and since I had completed all the quests, I just flew around the city for a little while taking in the views.   Flying took a little bit to figure out, but once I did I loved it.  Again, hopefully players will get their traveling powers early since there’s nothing worse than being a superhero and having to walk everywhere.

I didn’t have a chance to try out PvP.  I did notice there was a PvP system similar to Warhammer Onlines scenarios so I put myself in the queue, but it never launched since there were only 3 other people playing at the time I was on.   I really would liked to have tried it as I’ve never played a MMO where I could fly around, so I’m not sure how that would translate in PvP.  I’d imagine the guys that could fly and have ranged attackes would dominate in PvP.

So while my opinion of Champions Online has gone up, it still has not won me over.