Champions Online Review

Draenoth and I officially played Champions for the last time last week. We logged out having just completed the last level 29 mission we could find; we were only 3 bars into level 28. Not anxious too do any +2 missions (with no hope of ever catching up again), we decided to log out for the last time. My final review follows below, please see my initial impressions too, as not much changed since then.

Loved

• Powers. Generally speaking, nearly all the power sets had something going for them. There were relatively few really bad powers (although definitely some where better than others). Additionally, the ability that the game gives you to choose powers from any power set really adds to the diversity of your characters. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how different powers would go together thematically and even changed the core concept of my main character twice.
• Missions. While there certainly aren't enough of them (see below), the ones there are are actually pretty decent. While the majority of them are definitely standard MMO fare (kill x, collect x, take this to him, etc), they are decently varied and provide a pretty good amount of entertainment. Also, the drop quests are generally smart enough to give the drop to all party members. The only glaring oversight is when you need to pick up an item off the ground... this had us running around finding twice as many as we EACH had to collect the items.
• Solo Friendly. You can do pretty much everything in this game by yourself. While there are a few quests in the game that recommend groups, most of them become very solo-able after you pass the recommended level by 2 or 3. The game really does allow you to roll just about any character and run out and be a hero all on your own.
  

Hated

• Content. I have definitely touched on this before, but it bears reiteration here, this game does not have any where even close to enough content in it. Period. When you do EVERY mission in the entire game and you still don't have have enough content to stay the appropriate level as your missions, there is definitely a problem. That doesn't even bring up the fact that the game offers zero re-playability in its current form. If I could say one thing to the devs of the game it would be: ADD MORE CONTENT! Perhaps they'll get there in another year or two.
  
• Zones. For the first 30 levels of the game (and there are only 40 total), you spend ALL of your time in only 3 different zones. You travel between these zones multiple times and visit multiple areas, but it doesn't change the fact that by the time I was in the late 20's, I was desperately bored with the frozen landscape of Canada and the barren wasteland of the Desert. City of Heroes definitely did this better, as even though you were in Paragon City the entire time, each of the various zones of the city had a unique feel. I honestly don't know what they were thinking in having such few zones... it felt like they merely did it to meet a deadline.
• Respecs. I brought this up in my initial impressions post as the reason I would probably quit the game. While it was definitely atrocious in its original incarnation, they did make it better over time. As of this writing, you can respec all the way to your first power and you can even afford to do more than 2 of them at a time. Regardless, it is still a pretty dismal system and serves to curtail one of the best features of the game: the customization of your characters. It is far too easy to mess up a character in Champions and not realize it until many levels later. Since you need to undo all choices to get back to the one mistake, it essentially becomes impossible to undo a single bad choice you made early on. All they need to do is provide a way to undo single purchases and I think most of the respec complaints would go away real fast.
• Public Quests. I think the idea of public quests is a great one. Lots of people team up to do something epic. However, the implementation in Champions definitely left something to be desired. The rewards (both in items and experience) just weren't significant enough to warrant doing them... really at all. There was one we tried to do where a cosmic boss shows up at the end. There ended up being about 6 of us fighting him (only because we were yelling across the zone for help) and we ended up killing him only by employing "zerg" tactics (dying then running back to the fight). At the end, I received a single healing patch (like a health pot) as my "contribution" was the least, since I didn't actually damage the boss at all (I was healing). Even the person who does the most damage merely receives a dime a dozen item upgrade which is quickly sold. If they would make these quests rewarding enough that people were actually excited about doing them, then they'd definitely have something amazing on their hands.
• Too Solo Friendly. Perhaps this changes in the very last levels of the game, but there is essentially no reason to ever group up. Other than the few group quests (which are TRIVIAL even with just 2 people), there just isn't any reason to be in a group at all. In fact, it was often detrimental to our questing to be grouped when we each had to pick up 6 of something off the ground. Furthermore, the group mechanics don't feel very fleshed out to me. As a healer, I spent most of my time in a Sentinel role which sped up my energy recovery at a cost of damage output. This allowed me to heal ridiculous amounts. However, Draenoth took a crippling health hit when he switched into a dps role or a crippling dps hit when he switched to a tanking role. Also, I pretty much just pulled aggro ALL THE TIME as a healer, even though my highest stat was Presence, which is supposed to lower your threat generation. We never did any full group stuff (as there was NO reason to up the point we were), but I've read that threat generation and full group mechanics in general just don't work very well even later on.
  

While I definitely had a lot of hates in this game, it is still a fun game. My main concern can be wrapped up in a single phrase: "This game is not done yet." While you can probably say that about most MMOs, it definitely holds true here. Perhaps in another year of tweaks and content patches, there will be a complete game here, and even one that provides an actual reason to keep playing, but that game does not exist in its current form. At best, the game has 1-2 months of play time on nothing more than 1-2 different characters. It was definitely an enjoyable month, and if that is all you want out of it, you honestly can't go wrong, but if you want a "real" MMO that you'll be playing for months to come, this game is definitely not it.

Escape from Butcher Bay Review

Last night, I finished my play through of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. All in all, it wasn't a bad game at all.

Loved

• Price. It was $5 and included not only Escape from Butcher Bay, but also Dark Athena. That is an absolutely steal no matter how you look at it.
• Side Quests. While the game was more or less strictly linear, there were at least two times in the game when a section of the prison was fully open to me. I could chat with various inmates/guards, take quests, and do other similar things. It definitely added something to the game that I'm not sure would have been there otherwise. Unfortunately, the majority of these side quests were largely forgettable or uninteresting with poor rewards. The fact that they existed at all though, definitely added something to the game.
• Setting. The gritty, futuristic setting was done very well. It's also a setting that doesn't make it into games quite as often as I would like.
• Vehicles. For two different sections of the game, you have the ability to pilot vehicles that are essentially mechs (think Mechwarrior or the awesome suit Wikus puts on in District 9). Both have unlimited ammo and unlimited ass kicking abilities. These sections of the game were definitely a blast, although in general they were quite easy.
• Riddick. Riddick was voiced by Vin Diesel (as he was portrayed in the movies) and in fact looked just like him. In short, Riddick is a card carrying badass. As one dimensional the character is, I definitely enjoyed his attitude and mannierism, so much in fact, that playing this game actually gave me a desire to watch the movie(s) upon which it was based.
  

Hated

• Cyclical Story. I'm going to drop two Butcher Bay spoilers on you right here: first, you eventually escape from Butcher Bay. Second, it takes multiple tries. Without spoiling too much, the game consists of you trying to escape, getting caught at the last minute, trying to escape from a more secure area, getting caught at the last minute, trying to escape from a more secure area, getting caught at the last minute, then trying to escape from a most secure area and actually escaping. When I got caught that last time I was actually yelling at the computer, "BUT I WAS ON THE SHIP!" It was annoying the way the story flowed and it was easily my least favorite part of the game.
• Inconsistent Difficulty. When melee fighting with another melee character, the combat is so easy it fails to be challenging at all. When fighting melee with a range character (something that happens ALL THE TIME, due to the fact you keep getting recaptured and losing your weapons), the combat is almost impossibly hard. The enemies have immaculate aim and even the most basic assault rifle wielding trooper can mow you down in no time. While this mechanic is almost certainly in place to force you to use stealth (something you HAVE to do on occasion), in some places you are given no choice. Two instances in particular come to mind:
• At one point in the game, I found myself with a single path that led me straight through a riot guard (small mech) with nothing more than a club and a tranq gun. I eventually just ran like hell past him while tranq-ing his two solider friends. I lost most of my energy in the process, but was alive on the other side.
  
• Another time, late in the game, I was without any weapon whatsoever and forced to get past a gun toting solider at the end of a hall way. After 2 or 3 attempts of trying to run him down while he reloaded, I exploited some sort of weird path finding bug and managed to get him to run down the hall towards me and perform a quick kill.
  

Escape from Butcher Bay is definitely not a perfect game, but it is without a doubt a very solid shooter experience. I could easily recommend it to anybody, and even at it's current $20 price tag, it would be well worth the cost.

Why I quit playing Champions Online

The title is perhaps a bit inaccurate, because as of right now, I am technically still playing it. However, I have already canceled my subscription, and I'm fairly certain I won't be changing my mind. So the lingering question: why have I done this? The answer: lack of content.

My main character in Champions Online is Scry of Newt, a healer/dps hybrid character that combines darkness/force/sorcery/telepathy powers to heal and buff and provide some minor dps required. He is just a couple bars short of level 28 right now (40 is the level cap), and has been played nearly exclusively as a duo with Draenoth's Dual Blade martial artist of death.

At this point, we have done EVERY quest in the game up to where we are (as far as we know anyway). Take a moment for that to sink in. We've gone out our way to look for drop quests, out of the way quest givers (which there are definitely WAY too many), and we've even completed all the group content up to where we are. So at level 27, we've completed all the quests the game has to offer, and all the rest of the quests in our list are level 29 (other than 2 level 28, 5 man group quests). If that seems a little broken to you, that's because it is. If you to start a character in WoW, you'd have a choice of as many as 4 different areas to level up in (per side!), although admittedly that number drops a bit as you progress. However, even in Northrend, an average character could get to level cap and have two full zones left to quest in. I should also point out, that this is not the first time while playing Champions that this has happened to us. At level 23, we were doing nothing but level 25 quests. I've also read that this problem actually gets WORSE in the early 30's.

In short, Champions has between 1/3 and 1/4 of the content that it should have launched with. While it is still new, and it'll *probably* get more content over time, all it will ever really do is get up to the amount that it should have had initially.

While the costly respecs are definitely something that still annoys me, they are pretty easy to get over in comparison to this. Not only do I not have content to do with my main, but I have no desire to roll an alt, as I'll have to do all the exact same quests over again that I already did.

Perhaps it'll eventually get to a point where there is enough content to not have leveling gaps and map alts viable, but by the time that happens, I'll have been long gone for quite some time.

Despite my quibbles, I've enjoyed the last few weeks I've spent playing Champions. Expect a full review in the next week or so.

Chronicles of Riddick Initial Impressions

Never one to pass up a good deal, I recently picked up the Chronicles of Riddick from Direct2Drive for $5 as part of their five-year anniversary sale. While my previous experience with Direct2Drive wasn't great, it really wasn't that bad this time. Turns out they use the Fileplanet download manager which I had installed to obtain the Fallen Earth and Champions Online betas. With that installed properly, I must admit the experience was much smoother. However, given equal pricing, it offers me NOTHING that Steam doesn't already provide, with a loss of a friends list. In fact, I enjoy the friends chat there so much, that I actually added Riddick into Steam so I could still use the overlay.

As for the game itself, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. Movie-licensed games are often notoriously bad (as my own game, The Tale of Despereaux, can attest); however, I'd heard good things about Riddick. I was not disappointed.

The version I purchased came with the original game, Escape from Butcher Bay, as well as the sequel, Dark Athena. Escape from Butcher Bay is a five-year-old game at this point, nevertheless, the graphics have held up surprisingly well. I instantly turned the settings most of the way up and found the game to not only look quite nice, but also run smoothly. Furthermore, the game doesn't even have any annoying graphic glitches on my ATI card... something that has become increasingly common lately.

The basic premise in Escape From Butcher Bay is that you have been captured by a bounty hunter and are dropped off at the high security prison, Butcher Bay. The game plays from a first person perspective, with all the typical trappings you'd expect from a shooter. There is a decent variety of ranged weapons (shotguns, assault rifles, etc), as well as melee weapons (shivs, clubs, screwdrivers, knuckledusters, etc). Additional, there are some basic stealth elements in which you can sneak around and perform some "stealth" kills. I've been quite pleased with the combat variety so far, and the overall difficulty also seems pretty good.

The place the game really shines though, is in its "adventure" features. Besides being able to fight, you also get opportunities to talk to other inmates and guards, taking quests for them or just being snarky. You can collect cigarette cartons to unlock extra features, collect money from hidden caches, and even gamble in a simple craps game. My favorite thing so far is when one drug addicted inmate asked me to gather some moths for him that were flying around the yard. When I got back to him, he was VERY happy; I must admit I chuckled a bit. While it's certainly no Fallout 3, it does provide quite a few interesting diversions and even some alternate solutions at times.

I honestly can't think of any real complaints I have with the game so far, but will definitely point them out in my final review.

Scared to Choose

Another week has passed since I started playing Champions Online and while I'm still enjoying myself and think they did quite a few things right, there are still some lingering issues that are seriously detracting from my enjoyment of the game.

Without a doubt, the biggest issue in the game is the retcon system.

Champions Online offers the player a LOT of choices. In all honesty, it probably offers too many choices. If you had no idea what you were doing and didn't research your character at all, you could VERY easily make a character that would be completely unplayable. While this isn't inherently bad in and of itself, the fact that there is no way to undo these choices, is where the game is broken.

As mentioned previously, the respec system (retcon) in Champions is unbelievably expensive. While their last patch did make a change to allow people to respec more than their last ten powers, the price of doing so is so exuberant, that it's pretty much impossible to respec all but the last 3 at most. Furthermore, since the price to respec previous powers is a linear-ish increase, the cost of undoing a mistake made relatively early in the character build is astronomical. I wish I could throw some hard numbers around it, but it easily turns into 10-20x the amount of money a character at your level would expect to have. Also, the price of respeccing increases as you level and the respec costs are based on possible powers (meaning ones if you have an unused power point it still affects the price of respecs) rather than actual powers. The combination of these two things basically means that respeccing is just plain and simply impossible. Even if you spent all your time just grinding for resources (something I would NOT recommend) you would essentially be fighting an uphill battle as you would level up (thus increasing the respec costs) faster than you would be making money. The system is absolutely and completely broken.

The side effect of having a broken respec system is that I find myself terrified to buy any new powers. How do I know it won't suck in 2-3 levels? I literally spent over an hour in the power house last night trying to decide which power to take and eventually logged off not having purchased anything. At the end of the day, they have made the game less fun for me because of this limitation. That is honestly all there is to it.

I think the smart thing to do would be to price respecs based on overall number of powers respecced, rather than per respec. Let me see if I can explain:

The first time I respec any power (and I can undo ANY choice I made, even an early one) it would cost me say 1000 resources. Then, the next time I respec any power, it would cost me 2000 resources; similar to the way respecs in WoW cost 1g, then 2g, etc. The beauty of this system is that it allows a person to relatively easily undo a single bad choice. If I made a bad decisions 14 decisions ago, I don't want to undo the past 14, just that one. They could also implement a cool down on this so if I don't do any respecs for say a month or so, the price of respeccing halves. While I can't vouch for everyone, I don't think the general populace really wants to be able to afford to undo EVERY choice made; that would be analogous to being able to respec in WoW from a Rogue to a Warlock. That would be silly. However, if I took a Rogue skill at level 10 that I don't like, I shouldn't be forced to pay to undo 70 levels of good choices just to fix that one.

In its current form, the retcon system is enough to make me want to stop playing the game. Unless it changes, I will NOT be paying for a second month and that is the reason I will mark in the cancellation form.

Expect more of my thoughts on the game in the next few days.

Champions Online Initial Impressions

Draenoth and I preordered Champions Online last week and started playing last Friday as part of their head start weekend. I've now put in 4 evenings of play time and have leveled 3 characters all the way through the tutorial zones (takes a couple of hours).

While this isn't a review per se, I'm going to structure it similar to my reviews as it seems to make the most sense.

Love

• Being a hero. The game does a remarkable job at making you actually feel heroic... at least in certain builds. City of Heroes never really seemed to grasp this for me; I'm not quite sure why. I always just sort of felt like I was playing an MMO with super heroes as the characters rather than actually being a super hero. Champions definitely steps it up a notch and has some really heroic powers (the AoE force blast is definitely one of my favorites).
• Character creation. Champions is made by Cryptic, which is same studio (new name) that made City of Heroes. And it shows. They basically pulled every good feature from City of Heroes, especially the character creator. It is ridiculously rich in features and allows you to create all kinds of different looking heroes. Of the three I've made so far, one is a skeleton with wings (that actually flap when he flies!), the other is a very traditional looking hero with a cape, and the third is some sort of amphibian looking character than actually moves on all fours. I'm blown away by the number of different options there are (this coming from somebody who played CoH), however I will say that same categories are really limited, such as cowls and neck pieces. Generally speaking though, you can make a hero who looks like just about anything or anyone.
• Power house. The power house is one of those things that once you understand it, it makes so much sense that you wonder why nobody has ever had something like it before. Basically, when you need to level up, you go there and purchase your powers/advantages/stat boosts, etc. Then, you can test out your powers on various levels of dummys, lasers, obstacle courses, etc and decide if you like them. If you don't, you can undo the purchases and try something else out. Once you find something you like, you leave the power house and lock in your purchases. I can almost guarantee that this is a feature most future MMOs will borrow (if they're smart). It is amazingly good at helping you find things that work and are fun.
• Travel powers. The travel powers in Champions are excellent. There are also quite a few more than in City of Heroes. They range from various types of flight (normal, fire, hover discs/earth/ice) to tunneling and even include things like teleportation (my personal favorite) and swinging Spider Man style. Also, they give them to you at level 5, which means you only play the game for about an hour before getting them. I've never understand why games make you play for so long before giving you traveling powers/mounts. This is something that Champions definitely did right.
  

Hate

• Retcon (respecs). I have NO idea what they are thinking here. The respec system in its current form is completely broken. First of all, there are no full respecs. You can only undo the last 10 choices you have made. These include not only powers, but all stat and advantage choices. You can VERY easily mess up your build and not realize until it is too late. If that was the only problem, however, it wouldn't be that big of a deal though. The absolutely game breaking issue here is the cost. In my opinion, respec costs are about 10x what they should be. For example, you get new powers every 3 levels. I went to the power house at level 8 and checked the respec costs. Respeccing just one skill was 500+ resources. Then they increased backwards from there. At this time my total net worth was right around... 500 resources. Basically, in all the time I've been playing, I've never had a character that could afford to respec more than 1 to 2 powers. While I would hold out hope that I could do it later, the respec costs increase as you level, and you still can only go back 10 actions. Cryptic promised to drop the prices of respeccing when the game officially launched (yesterday), however the changes were so minuscule, most people couldn't even tell the different. The respeccing system is so bad, it makes every choice you make a time of actual stress and has actually caused people to call customer support and cancel their lifetime subscriptions. (NOTE: Looks like they patched this again just today. I'll write another post tomorrow with my new impressions on it).
• Tutorial zones. Every character you start plays through about 6 levels in the first tutorial zone, then the next 3 or so levels in one of two "Crisis" zones. While it is nice to have some option between the crisis zones, that very first zone gets old VERY fast. I've only taken 3 characters through it so far, but I'm already absolutely bored by it. When you compare this to a game like WoW that has so many different starting areas, it really doesn't stand up well. Also, Champions is a game that sort of begs you to make alts. The power sets are so different and the character creator is so fun, that I think everyone will have at least 3-4+ characters, even people who are generally anti-alt like me. They desperately need to give you some other tutorial zone options or at least let you skip that first zone altogether and spit you out in a Crisis zone at level 5.
• Where are my villains? It took a standalone expansion to get villains in the City of Heroes universe, and it was something I REALLY thought they should have done at launch here. It would have provided some more starting zone options, helped out the overly simplistic PvP quite a bit, and even just allowed for some variety in general. I've got a horrible feeling that they will add villains in an expansion, but quite honestly, I don't think I'll still be around when that happens.

Just some other things to note: there are a LOT of power sets. I'm actually kind of surprised by how many there are. Furthermore, Champions has a "classless" system which means that you don't create a tank, you just create a hero and then switch him to "sentinel" role. While some heroes would obviously be better suited to tanking than others, it is definitely an interesting idea. I've yet to see quite how it plays out, so won't comment on it much more.

So far, I'm definitely having a pretty good pile of fun with the game. Other than the retconning issue (which it sounds like they are working on), I don't have any big beefs with the game. I'm really curious to see how it progresses as I level up and will definitely be back here filling you all in.