The Champions Online play continues for me this weekend. I’ve gotten another character leveled up to the teens — a Sorcery user, pure Sorcery. For anyone interested, this power set is focused on magic (duh, right?) with plenty of options to choose from. There’s direct damage, crowd control, healing, buffs… and the coolest part — pets!
There’s a few different choices here and they all have one thing in common — they are uncontrollable, without a certain upgrade. This isn’t much of a problem, but there is more — with the exception of the undead all the pets are very temporary and you need to stay within the summoning circle or they will disappear (after a short period of time). This may sound terrible, but it’s really not that bad. Summoning doesn’t cost much or take that long and the pets are quite effective on their own — typically they can easily take on henchman rank mobs solo.
The choices for pets are: a demon, angel, arcane construct (golem), mystic wolf, and undead. The undead are different in that there are no summoning circles and you summon three at once (think the basic undead summon in City of Villians), however, they do seem to be temporary and uncontrollable always. Instead of getting a talent to control them, you instead get one to increase the length of their summon — from 22 seconds to 45. Increasing the rank of the undead summon will increase their strength and change their appearance (they basically get a bit bigger and stronger looking, still zombies). Increasing the ranks of the others seems to increase the health, and possibly the damage — though when I tested this I couldn’t tell much much difference, apart from health. With the angels, at least.
As to the name of this post, I have spent some time in Millennium City — post tutorial. This zone is quite large and familiar — it feels just like the city zones in City of Heroes (no surprise there, huh?). Within the beautiful city is many, many dangerous foes and lots of citizens that need saving. This zone seems to be for levels 13+ as you get sent here after doing most of the beginner zones, however, I have had trouble finding a lot of quests to complete — that were level appropriate. It might be my lack of luck in finding them (no contacts is not that nice, nor is not having the newspaper missions from CoV). It really is a glaring difference between CoH and CO in this very similar zone, and not one that I like that much. CoH was great in that you always had some mission that you could do, that was level appropriate and as challenging as you wanted. The lack of instancing is certainly a personal taste, but I don’t enjoy it as much. Competition over certain quests and spawn camping has been pretty normal in CO so far. That’s not something I like. In a way it feels like Cryptic took a few steps back to make CO, relying on a more WoW-player friendly style of game play. This may cost them. Well, that and the bugs.
Yup, there’s quite a few bugs still in the game — in Canada especially. There’s several quests that can’t be completed because they don’t work properly — that’s frustrating, and a huge problem. This game is only a week or so away from launch. This open beta is what will determine people’s interest in purchasing. You can’t have bugs in the beginner areas that are this obvious. I haven’t purchased a lifetime subscription, and will likely pass on it and the six month option — I don’t know if they’ll be worth it yet.
With this negativity there is some positive. The powerhouse! This instance is where you train up your character and select your perks/powers. Here you can respec and test your character. Some tips: while in the beginner zones you can respec all your powers — travel and starting, it costs to respec powers that you have taken outside the powerhouse — but inside you can respec for free (as long as you don’t go outside), there’s several rooms within the powerhouse that allow you to test various things — there’s dummies to attack; lasers that harm you; throwable objects; and a large room to test travel powers — make use of these! If you want to try out all the different possibilities of your early character without making a zillion alts, go here and try everything. If you character changes drastically from what you envisioned and no longer looks like what you wanted — go to the tailor, you can change your look completely. Customization is a lot more accesible in CO than CoH, they got that right.
The last subject for now is going to be PvP. I’ve run a few matches in the Hero Games (CO’s arena) and had some fun with it. Here’s the low down: you queue up from anywhere using the handy interface located on your mini-map, you join a match, you’ll be on either the red or blue team, you kill the other team members in an arena style instance till one side gets 15 kills. This is how the lowbie PvP is, at least. I can’t say about higher levels or if it changes at all. Still, it is pretty fun and a good way to test your abilities. Also, there are rewards in the form of equipment items that give decent stats and costume pieces — Mexican wrestler pieces. It’s pretty interesting.
