Yeah, I’m waiting for the dam to break on the NDA. I can’t wait to hear what testers have to say.
There’s been some info leakage already, but frankly the sort of person who’d break an NDA is not the sort of person whose opinion I want to rely on.
I am in a semi-unique situation in that I am partially not covered by the NDA. (I have played the game before being covered by the NDA.) (I have also played DCUO.)
But it was a long time ago, and I can say with all confidence without breaking the NDA, that the natural expectation of things would be that the game would have changed substantially since then, and the revealed screenshots do indicate that to be the case.
As far as the NDA breaking? I dunno. Maybe not till open beta. Heck, I think the Warhammer NDA technically never got lifted.
That sounds like 8 kinds of awesome, frankly.
I’m eager for the beta, though I must admit I’m sort of hoping that I’ll hate it because I really don’t have the time to get roped into an MMO right now. I’ve played CoX on and off since just after it came out and enjoy it, but my natural altitis means that I get burned out quickly. Atlas Park gets boring after the 30th time, and I suspect the Champions Online version will do the same.
Here’s a thread over on Penny Arcade wherein a lot of people in the beta talk about the game in detail, NDA be damned.
It’s actually looking pretty good. They really like the more “actiony” combat.
I’m supposed to be getting into the beta on Saturday. Not sure if I’ll be asked to NDA up or not.
Except the gameplay videos for CO indicate mobs have no aggro radius, they just stand around until aggroed by being hit. Mobs in Freedom Force, and CoX, will at least attack PCs when one gets too close.
What rumors I’ve heard out of the beta testing have not been encouraging, at least as far as the type of gameplay I’m interested in. The more video-gamey action and being cross-platform to the Xbox are not good signs to me. But I will be at GenCon next month, and I expect there will be a booth demoing Champions Online, so I’ll take a look at it there and see if anything changes my mind.
Well, I looked at a recent gameplay video and, although it doesn’t show mobs taking their own initiative, it interested me enough to apply for the beta preview.
They’re offering a lifetime subscription for $200, which includes a closed-beta invite for Star Trek Online. Hmm…
And, equally importantly, eight more character slots. So sixteen total. (also some costume bits)
Lifetime subs are a good incentive for me. Have one for LOTRO and still play on occasion, had one for Hellgate, and will get one here if I can get in open beta and like the game.
I’m going to try Champions but I’m reminded of the Hellgate London lifetime subscriptions where the game didn’t last long enough for the lifetime subs to be worth it. I might go for a six month sub at that pricing but I’ve got to try the game first.
I got to play the beta today. Yes, I had to take off work to do so.
As I’m still all NDA’d out, all I can say is that I think I’ll do the six month subscription. Not certain yet. Kinda depends on whether the wife likes it.
So apparently the NDA dropped today. Come on guys, spill.
Playing CoH before Emmerts rebalancing made you feel like a superhero, shocking i know. Afterwards it was just another diku game, you weren’t a hero wading through hordes of villains anymore but an almost regular dude that could be taken down by common thugs.
Come again? It was only in the very early stages of the game that you could have more than 17-20 enemies attacking you at once; the aggro cap was added pretty quickly once they caught tankers rounding up entire maps and crushing them.
I haven’t played City in a few months, but last I did it was definitely possible to plow through hordes of enemies even fresh out of character creation. Hell, they’re even extending the difficulty settings so that a single player can choose to load up maps as though they were on a full team of 8, because so many people already do that now (and in the process annoying people to fill out spaces on their team without benefit). The number of enemies a player can mow through is pretty sick; I recall jumping into the middle of a group of 10 Council with my Brute, hitting Foot Stomp, and watching them all just fall. I could casually screw over any number of enemies.
I haven’t played CoH for years, so I won’t try to compare. I did get a couple of sessions of the closed beta in. I didn’t get all that far in, but it was enough that I was disappointed and do not plan to buy the game.
Right before I got in, they made a fundamental change to the combat system. The original idea was to try and make things more comic-like, where you start with smaller attacks, and the combat escalates until you get to the big stuff. I guess people found that just doing the basic energy-builder attack over and over was boring, so they changed it to give you much more energy to start with, so you could lead with bigger attacks.
But changing the basics of the combat system a month or so before launch is a big red flag, and it showed. I had a dual swords toon that was designed to quickly kill all of the henchmen. He did pretty good for that, in MMO terms, as long as I’m fighting other melee mobs. But then I made an archer toon–I was able to fully charge an attack that would take a minion of about even level down from full to about 1/3 health in one shot, then a half charge would finish it off. And then I spent an advantage point to make it AOE, so I could take an entire group down much faster than the toon that was supposedly designed to take such groups down.
And really, I found little reason to ever want to be melee of any type–no interrupts, no cooldowns, a “classless” system so that ranged can beef up their defenses. If I can be a tank-mage, there’s not a whole lot of good gameplay reasons not to be a tank-mage.
So I suspect there’s going to be a whole lot of massive rebalancing and such going on, happening well through early months of the game–they’re just changing fundamental mechanics too close to launch.
I also did not find the game itself not all that engaging, even outside of the mechanics. The literary cliche “show, don’t tell” kept running through my head every time a quest-giver or other object had an “info” button to get dry facts about the person/thing instead of integrating that info into the quest or dialogue. It often felt like I was reading the contents of an adventure module rather than having a game master running a session, if that makes any sense.
Quick question about the beta: I ran ‘can you run it’ for Champions, and everything passed except my graphics card. I’m wondering if this is close enough for government work: (Quoted from my scan)
Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 / ATI Radeon X700 or HD / Intel Graphics with Dual Core
You Have: GeForce 6150 LE
Features: Minimum attributes of your Video Card
Required You Have
Video RAM 128 MB 498.8 MB
Hardware T&L Yes Yes
Pixel Shader version 3.0 3.0
Vertex Shader version 3.0 3.0
Arr, it may be your card’s only limitation is the throughput. Can it handle the polygons per second the game requires.
Any beta testers want to make comments now that the NDA is dropped?
I found it fun but nothing special. The character creator seems like a step back from CoH, the fact that they are holding back some stuff to sell you on top of charging a monthly fee is a huge negative in my book. Do microtransactions or charge a monthly fee, don’t try to fuck me in both holes. The cell shading effect actually gave me a headache and the bloom was extremely over done, you can turn both off and it makes the game look better imo. Gameplay/combat is fun and very “actiony” compared to other mmos, but can be frustrating if you didn’t get lucky and pick one of the overpowered power sets, and luck it will be because you don’t have a lot of info to go by when picking your powers. Overall it seems like a really mediocre attempt.
FWIW, City is also doing this now. They have an incredible variety of costumes automatically free to everyone, but they also sell booster packs of higher-quality themed costume pieces.