Champions Online - Page 2

Yeah, that's pretty typical whining. It blows my mind when people freak out over anything 'challenging'. We got that alot during the class rebalancing for AoC too.

Noticing any memory leaks or lag issues?

The only time I've noticed lag is if I Alt+Tab out to my desktop, I'll have some lag when I go back to the game. Other than that, it's been pretty smooth. We did hit a public quest that looked a little bugged (there was a specific villain we couldn't find, but that may have been us being impatient more than an actual bug), but nothing game-breaking.

Some people are complaining about the cost of respecs, as if no game has ever made it expensive to COMPLETELY REBUILD YOUR CHARACTER. And honestly, if you're surprised a patch was applied before the game went live for retail, you just don't understand MMOs.

People bitching about rebuilding your character at launch are pussies. Just reroll the damn thing and start again...it floors me how many people just want to get in there and get to the endgame content right away.

Thanks for the feedback.

Public quests. God bless Warhammer for that alone.

I am actually liking some of the 'nerfs'. Before you could just walk through mobs. Now its more challenging, not in the 'OMG that was impossible' way but in the no longer being easy mode way. They also tuned up the damage of mobs so you actually can die if you just run into a group of mobs without any plan. It feels about were it should be. I think some nerfs are still needed (or mobs buffed).

Yeah that is the best thing to come out of that game. Now I wish more games would copy phasing from WoW.

So far I feel like I've completely wasted fifty dollars.

Yeah, I'm not blown away by the gameplay yet either. I'll put some more time into it and play around with different power sets before I totally pass judgment on it.

The character creation aspect is fantastic, though. I can now understand how you can spend 2 hours tweaking the look/feel of your guy.

It would be awesome if they could just release a stand alone character creator for 10 or 20 bucks. I'm sure people would pick it up, end up creating something they really like and buy the full game.

That what I did with Spore.

For characters: my account name is @vaisatriani, and my two characters (so far) are Double Tap and Single Malt. I should be online tonight.

I'm gonna keep at it. I think my opinion might be unfair, as I can't really judge a game like this based on the first night's lag and launch issues.

Still, I really dislike how instanced everything is. It makes the world feel small and empty.

Right now my character is Stampede@bmillette, but I'm probably going to make somebody else.

I didn't know it was instanced kind of game, is it like Guild Wars? I didn't care for that too much. I just might have to wait till they start giving out 10 day free trials.

Yeah, I had some serious lag and rubberbanding issues last night as well. Also, there was a TON of competition for some of the low level quest items (like saving the trapped civilians) that kinda impacted my enjoyment of the game.

What powersets have you guys been using? So far, I've been only really using the power armor set (up to level 3) and it's pretty cool.

Yeah, but that's stuff I don't think it's fair to blame on the game. That's launch night.

I DO think that the tutorial goes on WAY too long, though. And the areas are so full of annoying mobs that it's just kind of a slog to get from one group of quests to the next, especially considering all of like one thing in the entire area can actually kill you.

I hit some lag last night that went away once I shut down the browser window I had open. And from what I read, there was a patch that tweaked the spawn rate on a lot of the quest items and NPCs so they appear more often.

Oh, I agree completely. It's a first night nitpick that will get resolved. At least I didn't crash or get logged out, and I didn't experience any memory leaks that I'm aware of (Conan, I'm looking at YOU).

If there was, it must have been after I quit playing for the night.

The instancing is the same they do in games like City of Heroes and EQ2. It does have a lower limit of about 100 per map in some zones (with tutorial being a lower limit). You can switch to other versions (to meet friends and such).

I am curious about people,s opinions on the game play. I have been finding it a nice change from other games. The whole mana conservation aspect can be a slogged when soloing, and this flips the equation. But it could be that the game just hits my sweet spot on a bunch of things (building my guy and the customization in power choices as I level, art direction, etc). It feels like a CoH done right.

My copy hasn't arrived yet. Boo Amazon.

If you have a pre-order open beta code, you can still play for the next bunch of days. Not sure when it begins wanting the retail code.

I think you have until September 6 to enter the retail code. Check the website.

Bad zone design and absurd difficulty scaling? Strike two, Champions Online.

It looks like I'm not the only person that's having some major difficulty with some of the missions in Canada. There's definitely some tweaking that needs to be done with that zone, it sounds like.

I've been recommended to try the desert area for a while, so I'll try that tonight. The character I'm playing now is Insurrectionist@bmillette.

Certain builds seem to have more difficulty with Canada than others. My Mighty hero did okay, but my Sorcery one is having a tough time of it. And a lot of people don't realize that when a zombie goes down, they're not done -- you have to hit them a few more times to really defeat them. That leads to a lot of unexpected adds when a zombie you thought was finished pops back up and starts whacking you again.

A lot of people I've talked to also don't really pay attention to their Hero Points (the stars under your portrait). Your effectiveness with five stars is monumentally different than it is with one or none. There's a vendor -- usually some kind of medical fund collector -- from whom you can buy back Hero Points, so if you're having a tough time with an encounter, check out where your points stand and beef them up if necessary.

There's serious balancing problems that need to be looked at, it's not just hero points.

I mean if you have to go to a vendor to buy buffs to take on an equal level quest just because you're a certain build, that's poor design. That makes me feel like the ten levels I spent as my current build were a complete waste of time.

I played for about 3 hours last night, resulting in my level 6 dual swordsman landing in Canada. So far, he mops the floor with everything that he comes across (unlike my power armor guy), but I haven't gotten too far into the Canadian zone yet.

There was a LOT of bitching on the chat channel last night about wanting to change builds, though.

I've basically hit a wall with the quest to take out the two named villains. They're both a level below me, but I CANNOT solo the cat-girl one. I picked a Munitions build, and it feels like it's completely non-viable at this point. That's a huge problem that they really should have addressed in beta.

This game doesn't feel like it was ready for release, especially given that it comes with zero documentation whatsoever. It took my friend and I fifteen minutes, at least, just to figure out how to join a private chat channel, because none of this stuff is listed anywhere. You just have to figure it out on your own.

The lack of any kind of substantial manual in the retail package is a huge error. It feels like a ploy to get us to plunk down twenty bucks for the game guide.

Good, it isn't just me, then. The tutorials in the alien invasion sequence are vastly underwritten to the point of absurdity. Almost every game that you play has a 'this is how you DO this feature and let's do an example' type interface in the tutorial area to get you comfortable with the nuances of the game (it's usually skippable if you're on your second character). Here, there's nothing beyond some general statements of what you'll need to do; there's no real walkthrough at all on the features. Figuring out what it was that I needed to do with the arms merchant was a frustrating exercise in trial and error.

That whole Power Up area in Canada was a mass of questions and frustrated bitching about this. It's THIS kind of shit that turns people off right away.

What sucks is that the game mechanics actually do work very well, but there's serious issues that should have been addressed before now. The engine isn't optimized at all, even people with solid gaming PCs are getting stuttery framerates without even maxing it out. There's no documentation and the interface is a cluttered mess. And there's the aforementioned balance issues that could kill the game within a few months if they're not taken care of.

I know it seems unfair to say, but in the post-WoW market, launching an unfinished product is inexcusable, especially when it's been in development for this long.

Basically if they get this shit cleared up, the game will be really fun. If not, it's going to die by Spring.

Agreed. For all of the bitching about AGE OF CONAN at launch (and there were legitimate gripes to be had, like memory leaks), the first 20 levels in Tortage were well designed and well balanced, and the documentation and tutorial system in place for that level effectively taught you HOW to play and enjoy the game. After Tortage, the technical and content issues were apparent and almost killed the game. CO and every MMO designer should have learned from this.

I think that most people are considering CO to be a diversion until SW:TOR comes out. I don't see this game having any real legs to it, but we'll see.

I think it could have legs, I mean City of Heroes is still running. If anything kills it it'll probably be DCUO, not TOR. TOR is going to be the secondary MMO for most of the WoW audience, I'd wager. CO is more of a niche, built-in audience.

Valid points. Anecdotal evidence suggests that SW:TOR will pretty much kill AGE OF CONAN; everyone that I knew on that game (in my guild and in other guilds) is pretty much biding their time until it launches.

I'm surprised Age of Conan is even still going. I hear they fixed a lot of the issues, but I can't be fucked to try it again.

TOR I'm only vaguely interested in right now. I'm sort of just tired of Star Wars in general, and the only thing that's got my eye is BioWare, but I'd much rather play Dragon Age and Mass Effect from them.

Frankly, I'm just biding my time until Cataclysm now. I just hope that Champions can get its act together, because for all its faults right now I really want to see it succeed.

But on the documentation, I mean here's a question, what do the different Roles even do? I have no idea. I can switch between like four or five, but I couldn't tell you what any one of them gives as a benefit or a drawback, because there's no manual or help file for this.

AoC isn't the same game from launch. They fired the original game director after about 4 months and brought in a new guy to turn things around. The memory leaks are gone, most of the technical issues have been fixed, and alot of the classes have been redesigned for the better. Content has been added (there aren't any dead zones for leveling, now), and they just announced an expansion.

I really liked what the game became but I got bored with it. I had several maxed out players with full Tier 2 armor sets and I just wasn't motivated to wash/rinse/repeat with any more characters.

My main worry with TOR is that it's going to turn into Jedi and Everybody Else, both from a player standpoint and a development standpoint. At least the game is set in a time where it makes sense to have thousands of Jedi running around, but they threaten to overshadow everything.

I'm a little disappointed with Champions' interface as well. No way to change the background opacity on the chat and quest windows, so the text can be hard to see. No easy way to save and load bind settings from character to character (you have to type in a slash command and the entire directory location for the saved bind file). Mouse key binds don't work unless the cursor is off the interface -- I have my left and right side mouse buttons set as Next and Previous Enemy, and if the cursor is over the powers at the bottom, it won't select anything. I have to move it into an open space.

I have a little more patience than most with these games -- I remember not even being able to log on to WoW for days at a time when it launched -- and I'm still having enough fun to keep going. The main thing will be to see Cryptic's response to all of these issues. If they act swiftly and decisively and keep good lines of communication open, things will be fine. If they hem and haw and drag their feet, they're doomed.

Once again, I hope that they learned from AoC on this. The original game director failed to address any of the major concerns for months and became very antagonistic against the players (it literally turned it into an ugly DEVELOPMENT VS GAMERS type atmosphere on the forums). It's ridiculous that all of the endgame content was broken AND that we were still fighting catastrophic memory leaks almost 5 months after launch. It's a miracle that the game survived, frankly.

Well, they announced today that they're giving a free retcon to all characters created during the Early Start due to the changes made at launch, so that's a good start.

In the beta at least you could mouse over the different roles and get sort of a vague description of what each one does. Im incredibly broke at the moment so I cant justify a new MMO addiction to know if its still the case. Even in the power screen at level up the descriptions seemed to lack a great deal of useful information. You could see the full effects of a buff once you'd purchased the power but the preview just gave general info.

Well, that was fast. The first expansion has been announced.

I'm assuming this is like the free CoH periodic megaupdates.

Yeah, that's not really an expansion, just a content update.

And the servers are still down with no update. Off to an auspicious start, CO!

Hopefully whatever they're doing actually fixes some of the glaring performance and balance issues.

Damn, I was planning on hopping on CO tonight after work. How long have they been down, Brad?

Well the downtime was scheduled to end at 12PM Pacific, not sure when it started. I just got home from work a little bit ago and thought I'd check it out. No updates or anything, just two hours over the scheduled downtime and still no game.

This thread does not make me want to try this game. Just sayin'.

However shall the world deal with such a loss?