Champions Online: Beta Now Open to All

And you can check it out at FilePlanet:

http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/champions-online/beta/?_cmpid=fp191

See for yourself if the game is truly innovative, or simply City of Champions!

Champions Online: First Impressions

Let me begin by saying that it took me pretty much half of Monday to get the game working. Yes, the Patch servers were being hammered (it's expected in any game), so I don't hold that against Cryptic, but I do feel gypped that I had pre-loaded an unbeknownst to me broken ass copy of the game from FilePlanet like a good little lemming, only to find out I had to download another version. That was also broken. Slightly. Add into the mix that it took about three hours to download the final 200 KB of a 74 MB patch (it would restart itself at 99.6% over and over again), suffice to say I wasn't a happy camper.

But I, like many others, trudged on, after a good 12 hours, made it to a shitty loading screen with a giant flaming monkey on it.

Queue my internet crapping out on me.

Yay!

So, in rolls Tuesday and I finally begin to make my character.

Character Customization: As promised, Champions Online has an extensive Character Creation System. It's pretty awesome, down to adjusting just whether you want your left or right eye pupiless or what not, to the cool looking 'Mecha options for your Super Hero Gundam dude. But if you have ever played the CoX series, you will not be *that* impressed. For as many things they added to adjust, it seems that Cryptic also recycles as much from CoX which while annoying, is not a game breaker in anyway. Additionally, I found the face selection--even with the sliders--lacking, and that only by scrunching the crap out of my character's face (I had to use a Mood to trick it), could I make an Asian sort of character. Plus, I couldn't really give her anything but ho bag skin tight pants, which wasn't the look I was going for. On the other hand, there were more power sets to choose from, from Force to Sorcery to Gadgetry and more, so I ended picking up dual blading, just because it seemed to go with my whole generic Asian super hero concept.


Graphics: I wasn't that impressed with the game world that I saw, and I did have stuff jacked up to the highest setting that I could. The environment looked cardboardy and plain to me, but I think that's because you can't get that detailed when you can break most of the scenery (lamp posts, boxes, rubble etc). As for the character models, the faces really aren't that great, but the over all characters themselves, and the effects surrounding them look pretty nice, in a cell shaded way.


Gameplay: Once your character is made, you get thrown into a Tutorial area, just like in CoX. You begin with 2 skills, an energy builder, then a bigger attack you can only do if you have enough energy. That means that you're always attacking, and the more energy you have, the more you can chain in your bigger and stronger attacks, ultimately ending a mob's life with a huge finisher. Pretty simple, and very fast paced--no real standing around in this game. You also have a "block" button, because every so often, mobs will do a BAM! or some other cheesy Batman Comic Book SFX attack which does a ton of damage. You will get ample warning, not to mention this giant bubble above your enemy's head.

As you level, you get talent points to buy more abilities, improve your abilities, add stats and so on, so forth, and as you do improve your skills, they get flashier and flashier. Pretty sweet, though some of the skills kinda' suck, but I imagine, those are a work in progress. You also get a travel ability at level 6 (pretty fuckin' soon), ranging from the standard super jump, flying, and then, tunneling. Like a mole. Stupid looking yes, but it gets you there and safely.

Leveling: Questing is done through the standard kill, collect and FedEx quests. AND, if you've ever played WAR, a complete and utter rip off of the PQ (Public Quest) concept, except without the ability to win sweet lewtz. It seemed to go pretty fast though, leveling you up within a handful of quest turn ins.

Lewtz: Since your outfit is whatever you created in the Character Creator, there's no real "gear". What you instead get are items you "socket" into primary and secondary categories. These are 1X each of a Primary Offense, Defense and Utility socket, then 2x each of a Secondary Offense, Defense and Utility. And example item would be, Wand of Magic Missile, Primary Offense, +10 Nerdiness +5 Geekiness +1.5 Spell Damage. A secondary version of this would be weaker.

PVP: Can't write much about this as I don't know how the PVP is first hand (the days I was playing, the queue was broken, but from what I read, it's not a huge part of the game). There is a camp of those who have tried it say it's super (no pun intended) fun...while the another group blames it for causing a bunch of unnecessary nurfs to their PVE power sets and hate it. I'd like to try it later on this week before the end of Open Beta to make a decision for myself, but I'm thinking big ranged boomers will dominate over charge-less melee types like myself.

Miscellany: WTB new voice actor for Witchcraft. Oh, and you can't play a villain, which is much much MUCH more fun. And probably reserved for an expansion of some sort. (Maybe you get to play as your Nemesis in the future? Hmmm?)

Overall: I played CoV for quite a bit a few years ago. I loved my Mastermind, and I loved seeing the goodie goodie two shoes Super Heroes get beat the fuck up--unfortunately, after a little while, for a hard core gamer like me, there's only so many times you can beat the same Super Heroes the fuck up, so I moved on. And CO, unfortunately, gives me the same feeling. Don't get me wrong, the game itself is quite a bit of fun...as in a burst of fun. But will it have long term potential? (By which I mean, longer than it takes to create your character?)

The other thing that I've been alluding to, is that Champions Online is nothing really new. If they said CO was the new expansion for CoX, I wouldn't blink. I bet if you got someone to play COX and told them it was CO, they wouldn't blink. Heck, even the names, CO and CoX are similar. The gameplay and ideas are just not that new to me. That being said, if you haven't played the CoX series in the past, you'll probably appreciate CO much much more than me. As for whether or not it will make you want to plunk down money for the game, a sub AND THEN possibly the in-game shop too...is a whole other can of worms.

And I happen to hate worms.

But still a week to go before the end of Beta. Maybe Cryptic will find a way to WoW me. ;) Or maybe WoW will WoW me again with some seksi reports from BlizzCon.

Champions Offline: The Patcher Boss Strikes!

I've had this downloaded for almost a week now and boy, was that a mistake. I guess Cryptic decided to release a different version of the download half an hour before the game went beta live and screwed the diligent folks. Silly me for thinking ahead.

And if you decided to download late, don't worry, the Patcher is fucked up too, so if it even starts up for you, you're in for a treat.

But first, a fix for anyone is in the same fail boat as me:

Patcher fix. has worked for me!!

---

Ok to much dismay and typical mmo release fashion.. champions online launch was far from flawless.. anyone who downloaded the fileplanet pre release before, you're slightly luckier then anyone who didnt.

Basically 2 weeks ago they released a pre launch was about 1.8gb to download and unlocked today, today they sent another prerelease version to fileplanet which is 1.9gb to download and was uploaded and hosted pretty much 5min before the game went live for open beta... if u did download the old version, you need to download the new version too, if u didnt download the old version, u have to download both versions to get the game to work with minimal frustration.

basically you have to install the old version first, then run the launcher, cancel it straight away and go into your game folder. in the folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Cryptic Studios\Champions Online\Live

or wherever you installed it to, you will see a heap of .hogg files, you need to cut these and paste them in the directory below overwritting the old files

C:\Program Files (x86)\Cryptic Studios\Champions Online\Live\piggs

you will notice not all of the files will be overwritten (as in, they may have been left out of the release, who knows it's a mix up either way i'm guessing) and if you attempt to patch now, there is another 985mb waiting for you. at this point what you need todo is install the newer version of the beta client over the already installed game

go back into the

C:\Program Files (x86)\Cryptic Studios\Champions Online\Live

folder and you will see those .hogg files in there again, cut and paste them into the same folder as before overwritting whatever isnt already there and then you should be good to start the patcher and find you only have to patch about 78mb which ill pause at regular intervals causing you to close and reopen the client untill it's completely updates and playable

I had to repeat this process twice because I soon found that the last step just ruined everything I had previously done for me. So just ignore it; do not go copy pastaing if you don't see any files, just run the patcher after you install the new copy of Champions.

Now let's talk about patching shall we? I kid you not, I only had 74 MB to download, but it's been about, ohhh, 3 hours now and I'm only at 35 downloaded. Again. Yes, since the patcher randomly decides to STOP THE FUCK UP AND NOT DOWNLOAD WITHOUT WARNING ERASING ALL YOUR PREVIOUS PROGRESS, you have to be on the ball and keep closing it, and reopening it again until it decides to load everything up. Trust me, this is HOURS of fun. Better than having to watch "Legally Blondes" or the fuckin' "Hannah Montana" movie.

So in the meanwhile, I've been reading all the Open Beta reviews that have been showing up, and WOW, there are a shit ton of bad ones. I asked my friend who skipped work and managed to get his game going in 7 hours as opposed to my 12, how it was, and he said, "If you like CoX, then you'll like Champions. You'll spend hours on the character creation alone."

And so I sit here, leveling my lowbie Warrior in hopes that maybe, sometime tonight, I'll get a glimpse at all the shit I'm missing. :(

Champions Online: State of the Game Letter

As open beta draws closer (Aug 17th, 2009), thought this would be of interest! INNNNTARESTING read.

State of the Game: August 6th, 2009

Posted by Chronomancer

Greetings, heroes!

I’ve been traveling all around this crazy continent telling people about the game. So much so, that I completely forgot that I was going to be in Los Angeles yesterday showing the game to the Associated Press and Game Trailers and wouldn’t be at Cryptic HQ to put out this week’s State of the Game. The good news is more and more people are hearing about the game at the same time we’ve been getting more beta testers in to play it!

Nemesis Clues

Heroes should start seeing clues at level 20 in the next week that lead them to creating their Nemesis at level 25. There’s something dastardly happening in the background…

Planning Your Pre-Order Rewards

Many of our retail partners are offering Cryptic Points as part of their pre-order incentive programs. These points can be used to make micro-transaction purchases from our store, thus allowing our players to choose their own pre-order rewards! We wanted to give you a sneak peek into some of the things you’ll be able to get when the game launches:

Special Edition Action Figures

• Defender
• Ironclad
• Witchcraft
• Kinetic
• Dr. Destroyer

Special Edition Toys

• Army Man
• Clown
• Pirate
• Robot
• Army Helicopter
• Civilian Helicopter
• Submarine

Crafting Specializations

Heroes enter into the research and development in one of the three crafting schools by talking to a trainer. After this, they also now choose which of three specializations within that field they want to pursue. There are different items available to craft within each specialization, and even some of the items that are similar across specialization may have different visual effects that players can choose to display.

A hero can change specializations at any time. To change specializations within a school, simply talks to the trainer and choose to switch to the new specialization. Be forewarned that there is a cost, however. All accumulated skill points will be lost when switching to a different school OR a different specialization within the same school. The skill point cap will also be set back to 100 in both cases. And don’t worry, blueprints are not be lost as a result of changing schools or specializations. They can, however, become temporarily unusable if your skill points are too low. Also, you can only buy blueprints that are in your field of specialization.

You can manufacture any item that is in the same school, even if it is a different specialization, as long as you have the blueprint and you match or exceed that blueprint's minimum required school skill points. This means that you never lose the knowledge required to craft an item, but if you want to hold more than a single specialization, you will need to rebuild your overall ability to create items within that school. Dedicated crafters can learn all three specializations within a school and then be able to craft everything within that field of research and development.

UNITY Missions

For players planning their Omega careers, here’s a quick rundown on the UNITY mission flow:

1. At level 40 heroes complete the perk Worshipped.
2. They then receive an e-mail from Dr. White inviting them to visit UNITY HQ.
3. This e-mail has an item attached which grants a mission with a waypoint to the UNITY door and has a UNITY key card.
4. Inside the UNITY instance, the hero talks to Dr. White to complete the mission. Dr. White offers membership in UNITY.
5. Accepting the offer enables use of the consoles and teleport pad in UNITY HQ.
6. Each day the hero can get use the UNITY console to gain a mission that sends them to 5 different global Hot Spots. Taking this main daily mission enables the hero to take the 5 missions that correspond to those Hot Spots.
7. If the hero completes all 5 Hot Spot missions, this completes the main daily mission and makes that hero eligible for the day's Special Assignment. Heroes must return to the UNITY HQ to turn in the hotspot list mission and get the Special Assignment.
8. Each hot spot mission gives 1 UNITY Merit as a reward. Each Special Assignment missions give 3 UNITY merits as a reward. Each mission also has a rare chance to grant additional UNITY merits, so a hero should average around 8-10 merits a day if they do all available missions.
9. Merits can be used to purchase rewards from Mentiac, the UNITY quartermaster.
10. There is a chance that Hot Spots and Special Assignments may have a Qliphothic tear. Players can gather Qliphothic energy from these tears to use in special UNITY crafting recipes.

Champions Online: Open Beta Beings August 17th, 2009 (FP Subscribers & Pre-Orders)

Exactly what the header says.

And yes, there will be QQ about paying for Fileplanet, but I've been with 'em for a year now and it's one of the best investments I've made!

Anyhow, the blurbage with exact date which I don't think was there before:

FilePlanet will be exclusively hosting the Champions Online open beta starting Wednesday, August 5th. Open Beta gameplay will start August 17th. Will you be ready?

Subscribers will be able to get a key and download the game early starting Wednesday, August 5th. Be ready to jump in the moment the game launches by subscribing today.

I will be there...will you?

Ever since I read more about the customization and feature list, I've been pretty excited about getting to check the game out. The Nemesis system sounds cool and being able to choose where I shoot my pew pew fireball out of is even more awesome! Hope its good so I can decide if it's worth plunking down the $49.99 come September 1st.

If you haven't really researched the game, check out this feature list from the official website. The only thing that I'm kinda' iffy about is that while CO is supposed to follow a standard MMO subscription model, it will also have microtransactions as well.

The official word on these microtransactions:

I know everyone has questions about microtransactions – what are they, how much are they, etc. I’m sorry we didn’t post something earlier; we’re really heads down in development right now. We’re going to release a WHOLE lot of information in the very near future about not just about microtransactions, but pricing in general. That said, here’s some basic principles about microtransactions to at least answer some of your concerns:

1) Microtransactions enable us to have a larger development team
2) Microtransactions are mostly aesthetic (costume pieces, pets, etc.)
3) If a microtransaction does have any sort of in game effect, then it can be also be earned in game.

I promise we'll read this thread, note any questions, and answer them more in depth soon. Heck, I'll try to answer the easy ones today/tomorrow/this week.

But I guess we shall see come August 17th, shan't we?

Champions Online Beta - Coming to FilePlanet

Champions Online Beta - Coming to FilePlanet

Lovers of super powers and spandex, pay attention because your moment is arriving! FilePlanet is proud to announce we'll be hosting the beta for Champions Online - the upcoming powerhouse MMO from the same fine folks that created my obsession for Cities of Heroes. Check out our Champions Online Mini-site HERE!

Fueled by the amazing Cryptic Engine, you'll have billions of possible character creation options from the start. The battles are based on brain-power, not dull recharge times and auto attacks - so keeping your wits about you is paramount.

[MORE SCREENSHOTS HERE]
FilePlanet Subscribers will be first to play, so don't miss out on a single second of gameplay - sign-up today and prepare to save the world and become a Champion.

VISIT THE CHAMPIONS ONLINE MINI-SITE!

Champions Online: Beta Coming in Mid-August?

Aion or Champions Online? Or both? I've already pre-ordered Aion. I really enjoyed CoV for a while (well, while there was content), so if CO is going to follow the CoX formula...will it be worth it?

Not to mention I'll be sucked into BF1943 and MW2 in November. OohhhHhhh yeaaahhhhhh! CO better have monkeys that pick up lizootz to regain my interest!

Champions Online Open Beta - Some Clues

By: Colin June 26, 2009

Yesterday, I spent the day hanging out at Cryptic HQ in Los Gatos. Despite the pressure of the impending massive launch of Champions Online, the development of Star Trek Online and, reportedly, a ’secret’ third project, the team have found time to make some physical moves, with community, marketing and customer services shifting offices, albeit only across the road. Champions Online developers have stayed right where they are. Nobody in their right minds would try to move those guys at this particular juncture.

The launch date of September 1 looks to be ON, despite the fact that Beta feedback has been coming in thick and fast, and the team are wasting no time responding to player notes on the game. Trust me, there’s a lot of work going on right now and responding to feedback is much more than a mere formality. I interviewed half a dozen people yesterday, and they were all working on stuff directly germane to Beta feedback.

At one point, I spotted all the Big Bosses holed up in a meeting in the aquarium (large glass office) staring balefully at a ferociously complex chronology chart projected onto the wall. Every function of the game’s polishing and release phase slotted into place, each in their own colors (greens and purples are favored). They were in there for a while. There wasn’t much in the way of jolly japes going on. It looked like nitty gritty.

We’re still two months away from the September 1 launch of the PC game, so there’s plenty of time to get things done. Within that time-frame, an Open Beta needs to be organized. I can say that a firm date has been penciled in and although it’s not 100% confirmed it is slap bang in the middle of August.

My advice is if you have a vacation to Outer Mongolia, or maybe a fishing trip in the mid-Atlantic planned for central August, cancel it now!

As you’re probably aware, lots of detail has to be finalized before final announcements are made, mostly technical and legal stuff, but also the partners who’ll be involved in the Open Beta.

The Open Beta is really just there to make sure the technical infrastructure works, and there are no Snafus pre-launch. As far as game design and major bugs are concerned, they should be done by then.

Generally, Open Beta comes with some sort of special offer on the retail release of the game and subscription, so watch out for announcements along those lines in the near future.

Oh yeah, I also spotted a room full of large brown boxes, located in the marketing dept. After investigation, it turned out that these were stuffed with Champions Online T-shirts (very simple design - logo on a dark background) which I expect to feature in media and live-event contests in the very near future. I grabbed one, for research purposes.