Champions Online Beta Wrap-up.
Posted by nefchast on August 25, 2009
It’s been a fun week in tights, running around Millennium City. The beta is closing later today so I thought I’d go ahead and finish the posting (to get a few more hours in after work). My one sentence conclusion:
The game is fun, needs a bit more polish, and has some great ideas along with some not so great.
Pretty vague? Yup, but it’s also quite fitting — there’s a lot to the game that I haven’t seen yet. I love the powers, the power set customization, the character customization, the lack of kill stealing/ownership, and the ‘single server’. I dislike some of the open world missions (particularly ones that result in camping), the lack of defined boundaries in maps (one side of a frozen lake has level 8 mobs, the other side level 26 — easy to walk into on accident), the PvP (it’s not a PvP-centric game, though), and melee damage vs. ranged damage (there’s a big difference).
Let me delve into the last two dislikes a bit: the PvP is ok — it’s fun, but seems like it was just tossed in there. At least at the lower levels. The biggest complaint I have with it is the lack of auto-teaming your side when you enter, you need coordination and it’s already hard to do that with a PUG. Getting a bunch of super powered lowbies to stop flying/running/jumping around long enough to team up is a pain. Especially when there’s something to shoot or stab nearby.
The melee damage vs. ranged damage is a bit different. Melee damage is clearly superior DPS-wise, in many cases it’s surprising to see the difference. Certainly this was done for a reason — melee characters have to be close to the monsters to deal damage and thus should be in a more dangerous position… however, many — if not most — of the monsters I faced also had plenty of ranged attacks that had my ranged characters tanking just as much as the melee ones — the danger is pretty even between the two builds, even when the damage output is not. Now, there are certain ranged abilities that do quite a bit of damage — Condemn and Eldritch Blast were two that I used quite a bit, but both require a stationary charge that costs a good bit of time and energy. Basic ranged attacks need a bit of a damage boost.
That’s about it for the complaints, and they’re not really that big of a problem either.
For the end of beta there is an event going on. If you haven’t heard about it, Dr. Destroyer’s robots are attacking Millennium City! Giant Mega-Destroids and hundreds of smaller robot infantry are laying waste to the city. It’s a pretty fun event with lots of fighting and explosions. I think this could be a decent showing of what end-game content could be like, and a smart move by Cryptic. People love using high leveled characters to blow things up — this gives them that chance and throws giant robots into the mix. A good time to end the beta and increase pre-orders.
I’ll have screenshots of the event up later sometime, I took quite a few. Being auto-leveled to 40 was also quite nice. The event seems to still be going on till later tonight — perfect time to try a few more builds and characters. The one thing that I did notice with a maxed out character was the relatively few number of powers that I had cluttering up my hotbars. Some of this can be attributed to passives, but it really wasn’t enough to fill up two smaller (the bars are only about 7 slots long) hotkey bars. I think I had three or four full bars filled up in Everquest 2 by the time I was 40… It’s kind of nice.
Another feature that maxed levels and powers brought out was the use of builds. Builds are essentially… builds — you can assign your equipment and powers to a build number (along with costume and stance) and swap between them with a single click. It’s great for characters like my sorcerer that have healing and damage based builds. I set up a couple different builds on my maxed out gunslinger last night — single target and AoE based. Worked quite nicely when fighting the Mega-Destroids and then the minions.
Can’t really think of much else that I might of not talked about yet… Haven’t tried the nemesis system, might tonight — nor any of the other higher level content. Anywho — the game comes out in about a week so now I just have to find something to do till then… Oh, like EVE and my Necropolis campaign. (oops)
*Update: Screenies*
End of Beta Event
End of Beta Event
End of Beta Event
End of Beta Event
