Out of the tutorial now. Very, very warry about crafting. Other than a small minority of superheroes, I don’t see many ‘crafters’ in the comics. Almost all of the travel powers are painful on a low-frame-rate machine. Beyond that, though, I love the customization of powers and such.
Oh, and Area Effect powers? Hugely unbalanced. I’d been playing melee’ers, and then switched to a lightning thrower. HUGE change.
AFAICT, the crafting here is basically the same as what was originally intended for CoX universities.
I don’t play much CoH anymore. As I love Champions RPG, I was very excited for this game. That wore off quickly.
- I’m not a fan of the graphics. Purely subjective, but I prefer CoH.
- I’m really not a fan of the crafting
- I prefer CoH costuming (by a small margin)
I do like how I can mix and max powers. For example, if I want Powered Armor offenses with Brick defenses, it is doable. I did miss having a pure “energy projector” (not fire, ice, or lightning). I only played with powered armor and a martial artist/brick hybrid. I do think that in design, they said to themselves, “What don’t players like in CoH?” and went about changing those things, but forgot to think “What do players like about CoH?” so that they could improve upon that.
I’ve been playing in the beta, and it’s looking good, although there’s a ton of minor bugs. The most game-breaking is your keybinds get reset every time you change zones. But I’m willing to ignore such things when evaluating a beta version. I think I’ve entered at least a dozen bugs.
The overall play is good. I like how combat works. It feels frantic, but doesn’t require the twitchiness of a shooter game. Attacks never miss, and you turn to face your target automatically.
I like the selection of powers. The problem is there is not enough information to make informed choices. And the limited respec options make that worse. They better start releasing complete info about powers (effects, stat scaling, advantages) or allow complete respecs or there will be much whining on the forums.
The costume creator is good. It’s better than CoX in some ways, but worse in others. The lack of choices for faces disappoints me. There are costume sets that are incomplete (art deco, samurai, ninja, e.g.). The choice of material and colors and the sheer number of places costume elements can go is great.
I’ll definitely be playing this at launch. For how long depends on how quickly they fix what’s still missing.