My incessant obsession with Modern Warfare 2 was turning me into a pretty unsociable guy. I go around talking about how pro I am; spending hours prone in a bush shooting people in the head. Or shooting people in the face. And how I'm always constantly on top of every round's scoreboard (I'm shamelessly taking the opportunity to boast here).
Yes, Infinity Ward was slowly converting me to their throngs of brainless gamers. A mass army of zombies, typing "gg", and dissing all those who don't play Modern Warfare 2's cold and ruthless multiplayer as noobs. Fiercely defending the game in the face of criticism like "'No Russian' is so lame' or 'this game's so unrealistic, that could never happen in real life'.
Well.... fuck you...
... noobs.
But, in a last bid to save my own humanity, I stumbled upon superhero MMO Champions Online (wordplay!). They have a trial demo in which you can play to level 15 with one character, no time limit. "Ooh, how generous of them," I thought and with the awesome convenience of Steam, it was as simple as a click of a button, and I was in.
I don a cape, get buff, and speak in speech bubbles! Laser-beam below the cut to follow my exciting adventures!
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The first thing I realized when I opened the game was... it's very blue. There's blue tint EVERYWHERE. From the buildings, to the sheen of glass, to water, to the sidewalks... everything just screams bluish. And the graphics are kinda' of an eyesore to be honest. Cel-shading is nothing new now, but Champions Online's version of it seems more garish than what other games are offering like Street Fighter 4 or Borderlands. I get that it's to keep spec requirements low for the masses, but even so, I don't really like it much. Yeah, and I know it's trying to do the comic-book look. Still sucks.
But what I DO like is the character creation! As many other critics have drooled over, CO's creation capabilities is one of the most comprehensive ever. True, other games like Dragon Age and Oblivion let you create anybody you want, but it doesn't even come close to CO's. You want to put wings on your dude? GO AHEAD. Want to look like some anime-inspired Mecha warrior? GO AHEAD. Anything your limitless imagination can come up with, you can make.
My dude is called Striding Cloud, shamelessly ripped off of a character from the famed Chinese wuxia comic series Storm Riders. He's a buff dude with long, flowing hair and pecs that could kill. Yes, and don't even talk about his biceps. Anyway, he's a sword-wielding guy. I wanted him to also have martial arts but apparently that and swords are two separate and distinct abilities. Anyway, you can choose from a myriad of skills, that's part of the fun of the customization - anything you can think of that superheroes have had, you can have - laser beams, kung-fu, immense strength, etc.
It's the most entertaining thing about the game, running about the world and seeing what sorts of oddities and tributes to real life comic/film/novel/tv/music creations people come up with. I saw an Orange Clockwork dude, it was superbly accurate. Also Hancock, aka Will Smith. It's great that from the very beginning, you're not just a faceless dude cut out of the same template as every other noob, having to scurry about and make a name for yourself eventually with epic loot or garbs.
But that's all the fun I had with the game. There's a whole lot more wrong with it.
The user interface is so cluttered, all sorts of strange things that I have no idea what it does, sitting there screaming at you to look at it. The map is horrifying, half the time I got lost - it doesn't indicate quest markers clearly, it doesn't BLING BLING me in the right direction so I just "hoped" I was going the right way. Any game that leaves you "hoping" is not a good game.
I wandered about aimlessly talking to some random NPCs standing stock still in the middle of a war-torn city overrun by strange aliens. Between telling me that I'm a "sight for sore eyes" or "much needed help", they also tell me to go over there and click on some enemies to death. So I go do so.
The combat system is different from most RPGs, in that it removes the need to ceaselessly click the mouse to kill an enemy. Instead, you click an enemy once to target them and then spam hotkeys for skills. Which means there are no bog-standard "attack" button, and it's all taken care of by abilities.
And then they've got this Blocking ability, but I don't understand when I'm supposed to be using it. Early on, a tutorial mission had me standing in front of a bunch of NPC ally troops, to get shot at by their laser canons to "calibrate" them. It was a cover-up to teach me to "Block" but how am I supposed to know which button to press if the game doesn't teach me it in the first place?!? I finally learned that it was the Shift key I had to press, thanks to the help of a passing superhero.
For those who came from World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, or any other RPG for that matter, Champions Online is going to seem horribly underwhelming in one regard. It's loot. There is practically none. I was expecting things like epic swords of might for the sword-wielding hero, or gloves of kung-fu pow pow for the martial artist, but zilch. Instead, CO sees fit to reward you with accessories which apparently boosts your stats. But little is explained in terms of how exactly to use them, and why you can stack some, and not others, etc. I just left them well alone, at the risk of getting my ass handed to me by low level monsters just because I refused to play the game the way CO wanted me to.
The fighting itself is very grindy. For a game that tries to do things differently from other MMOs, albeit confusingly, the combat is just like the 90s all over again. You stand there and swipe at the enemy, whittling away its hit-points, and it does the same to you. Kill one, move on to the next one. There's nothing exciting about that, and it's especially disappointing when you realize this is supposed to be a game about whiz, bang, pow as a cool superhero. And just to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong, I read up on the interwebz about the combat mechanics. Apparently, there is one. A sort of charge up of power through standard attacks, and then unleashing it with your super stuff. Which once again, CO failed to explain to me.
Throughout this mind-numbing tutorial experience where I had to help the city fight back against invading aliens, I felt like Superman wearing underpants that were one size too small. You keep getting this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you aren't playing the game completely right. And you just don't know what to do about it. So you either keep pushing forth or quit trying.
I'm personally the kind of gamer where, if a game didn't hook my attention from the first play, it's very unlikely I'd visit it a second time. I was finding it very hard to be interested in CO's lack of inspiring game play but since it was withholding my super-"travel" powers till level 5, I figured I'd bash enough aliens to level up till I got it. But once I've tried it, I'm outta' here.
After doing some mundane retrieval/rescue missions, I arrive at what appeared to be a mega event taking place with many superhero players congregating. A "crisis hot-spot" where any players in the immediate vicinity take part in the defense and building of a mega cannon against an imminent alien arrival. All the whilst, as you scurry about dumbly holding Z on crates to collect the requisite number of cannon parts, this NPC hero spews cheesy lines like "Millennium City is my home and I won't see it being torn apart by aliens" or some nonsense like that. He does this repeatedly, grating ever so badly against my already frayed nerves at the game.
I know CO is trying to be self-aware of the cheesiness that comes with the comic book genre but it feels a little too much at times. The voice acting is also too exaggerated. Either that or you're just turned off by the massive amounts of text to read from each quest-giving NPC. The whole game screams poor accessibility, in my opinion.
So far, I've told you readers very little about what the world is like, or the atmosphere, but honestly there isn't much of anything interesting. There's a lot going on in the environment, civilians in need of rescue from bad guys, buildings on fire, things flying about but it's just too much noise and not enough focus.
The last bit of the tutorial was a boss fight with some robot that stomps around and shoots you with a chain-gun for a hand. It was pretty straightforward, and as it was a tutorial boss, he wasn't at all hard. Then I discovered upon completion of the tutorial that I couldn't upgrade any powers in this trial version! I had braved utter boredom to level 5 but that travel power I was hanging around for was only available if I went to the next city, which was locked in the demo. What a waste of time!
Maybe the game gets better after the tutorial, but first impressions always matter. And my first impression of the game kinda' sucked. I played a few other MMOs before and my suggestion is this: starting up a brand new RPG is always going to be a daunting experience to players, if they aren't doing traditional Diablo-esque things. So making it easy for a new player to learn the mechanics should be top priority. But Champions Online pretty much throws you into their world expecting you to be all super-heroic from the get-go. Even Clark Kent had his Smallville. Give us ours.
In the end, I uninstalled the demo and went back to Modern Warfare 2. I can't shake the feeling that I may be missing out on some fun stuff in CO, but alas, that was not available to me in the demo. So I can't regret the experience I did not have. Plus, it was just all too confusing. I hung up my cape and strapped back on my helmet. Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a superhero, but at least I'm good at shooting stuff.
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