Anti-Aliased: Champions Online one month checkup
No, you're not hallucinating. That is, indeed, a new name under the column title, but it's still the same insane editor behind the typing. Starting today, you'll be seeing Seraphina Brennan instead of Colin Brennan on all of my articles, thanks to the power invested in Shawn Schuster and Liz Harper to grant name changes. If you're a little confused as to why the change, then feel free to check out this Anti-Aliased where I go into detail.
But enough of that! On to today's topic! This morning, we here at Massively got an e-mail from avid reader JP, asking all of us if we planned on sticking with Champions Online after playing the game for one month. A great question, if I do say so myself!
So great, in fact, that I'm using my column to talk about it. (Also because I had no idea what to write about this week. Thanks for the assistance JP!) The other members of the staff will be doing their impressions as well, but I do believe they're saving them for a later date. So, without any further stalling, let's get talking on Champions!
A bomb more powerful than the nuclear tests in the desert -- the nerf bomb
So, as many of you have probably heard, Champions has had some... issues. And not comic book issues, mind you. The game I loved back in beta is not the same game I'm playing today, thanks once again to Cryptic's insane iteration and patching process. Since then, Champions has been hit by a difficulty increase, power changes, experience nerf and a whole host of changes to make the game "better."
And that's not to say that I don't understand where Cryptic was coming from -- the game was too easy. I would barely look at Seraphina's health bar at times because she was pretty much invulnerable thanks to a high constitution and the power of regeneration. It was fun at the time, but I could certainly see that becoming very boring very quickly. Especially because I was walking into battles knowing full well that I would beat them with flying colors. Nowadays, I actually have to gauge fights because there's a 50% chance that I will kick the bucket. That's coming from someone who has a "good" build. Now think about people who don't have the health and regeneration cushion that I had. Yeah, it hurts for them.
The other thing that has been getting under my skin is aggro. My angel is built to be a tank, but it's really hard to tank things when you can't pull hate off of other heroes. Single target hate, I'm fine, but when we get into multiple targets, my chain swing just isn't going to pull them in and hold them. Sure, when I get more points to sink into the skills I can increase the threat my attacks will generate, but until then I'm a little hosed. It's hard to hold aggro against multiple mobs at once, and many people have found this out the hard way.
And one more thing! Quests!
The other batch of angry sentences that are being directed towards Champions includes words such as "lack," "of," and "content." And, once again, I can't say I disagree.
During the beta, content was not an issue. There were enough quests to get your character leveled and get you on your way while still telling neat stories and giving you fun mission arcs. But then, just as the game started, Cryptic pulled a large change regarding experience values from quests, to set the game to what was said to be the "correct" leveling progression. Leveling became much slower (which, once again, wasn't entirely a bad thing) but a glaring problem came to light -- players were running out of quests.
