In my experience it’s quite stable, but the power retcon system is currently borked (it costs all wealth that you could possibly accumulate to go back 3 choices) and it’s really easy to make a character that doesn’t scale properly and has to be abandoned.

It’s just too easy to make a character that’s great at low levels, then 40 hours later you find out they can’t handle 3 henchmen, let alone the supervillains that solo missions throw at you, all because you picked the wrong Power Stats at level 5 and 10-ish and you need the GNP of a small nation to fix it.

Around level 15 the grind also hits rather hard. There’s tons of quests, this is true, and you have to do every damned one in every zone available if you want to get to level 20. The game should get interesting at higher levels, letting you find new areas, design a nemesis, all that stuff, but it’s stuck behind a week of solid grinding for any character you want to get to level 25, let alone the level cap.

That said, it’s a really fine game sometimes, and it’s definitely a very evolved game from City of Heroes. It lacks some standards from other recent MMOs (like multi-targeting to allow a specific friend and enemy target, crucial for support classes), and the interface is sluggish, but underneath all the warts they’ve taken some big steps.

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Also, Direct2Drive is incredibly slow. I’ve been getting about 50Kbps all night on this download, terribad.

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In a game where you can cherry-pick your powers from all over the place, set their emanation points, and change their colors?

Not to mention the combat system alone…

Seriously, “slightly updated”? It’s a very different game, man. Very different.

Also… judging the game solely on the visuals seems like a scummy thing to do.

Even more lol-worthy is judging an MMO based on the first 10 levels. Yea, because experiencing 10% of the game’s content (I’m serious – the leveling curve climbs steeply after the first few levels) surely makes you more than qualified to judge the game as a whole.

Surely.

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Ha! i laugh at people who say CO is an update of CoX, you can’t experience a game just by exploring, play the game hit lvl 25 at least, make your nemesis, start doing Dungeons, try the high lvl Open missions, form a group and try kill Grond or Kigatilik then you can say the bad or maybe the good things about CO which is a freeking nice game.

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Me, I’m going to have to wait until tommorow, a day when I’m going to be busy. Frankly, I’d rather wait a few months before using my serial key so I don’t have to deal with server crashes and newbie zones being packed beyond capacity when this thing ‘officially’ opens.

I hated Champions the first few days I tried to play it, but since I was already locked into paying 50$ I kept at it. It seemed to me that there wasn’t enough variety in terms of Powers, especially when you’re just started out. Powers were the only way characters were really differentiated in City of Heroes so I figured that was that …

But when I put more time in, I realized the attributes like Strength, Dexterity, Ego, etcetera were another very real way in which characters were different from one another. One character who was all into Dexterity and Ego would crit like mad, but even when he picked up a defense power it didn’t do much good since he wasn’t high in Endurance or Constitution.

There’s also the ‘Role’ system where you choose from one of four roles you play at a given time. It starts out in the balanced role, but there’s also a role for tanks, support, and pure damage dealing.

Since the balanced role was the best thing for soloing (it allowed a Defense self-buff passive slot which you really need to have in order to solo effectively), that’s really the only one I ended up using. The end-of-beta event where robots were all over MC and we had to team up to fight them just wasn’t a focused enough group experience to make the other roles seem attractive. Nobody could really tank since those Super-Destructoids could kill us (probably thanks to our crappy gear) with one good shot, and the constant stream of footsoldiers coming in to assist them made it hard for anyone to run support.

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I bought from Direct2Drive, and I’ve been in the early start from the off, and the beta before that. Although from that link it appears I shouldn’t be :S

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I admit. I didnt play pass lvl 10. I did however level 5 characters to lvl 10 cause i am what they call “altholic” and enjoyed finding how different power sets work.

At level 10 i did cut leveling up. And just went exploring. In order to see as much as possible. Just flying around every bit of map and every zone i could.

And as further i went the quality of textures and level design declined. I found that quite disturbing.

As for game itself. Its not that bad.

Its slightly updated version of City of Heroes. That did some things better and other worse.

I just found it hard to justify being 50$ + subscription game.

Perhaps Cryptic should have considered alternative financial model ?

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Back at you, I honestly don’t believe that you’ve played past level 10. In open beta I was almost at level 18 even before I went to Millennium City, having romped around Canada and the Desert first. And with my headstart character I’m well on my way there again!

So I’m calling your bluff, I’m calling you a liar and a cad! The one thing you said that I agree with is that people should play the game for themselves so they too can be irked by how dishonest you’re being. I like how you tossed that in though to try and make your post look more convincing.

Want to counter me? Give me an example of how the content drops off, just one. And moreover: link your Champion profile, a Champion which is 20+. If you provide a post with both of these then I might be willing to give you the time of day. Though I’d be amazed if you link to a Champion at all though, even a level 5 one would make me raise an eyebrow.

Good grief, you’re going on about the game and I’ll bet you haven’t even seen the Nemesis content, have you? Of course you haven’t. If you had, you’d realise how ludicrous your entire post is.

It’s so easy to toss around baseless claims about how MMO x is like MMO y and that MMO x will fail because MMO y has. Anyone can do that.

The thing is, you could even have mentioned a real problem with the game, such as the AI of the pets being buggy in the latest patch. And you would’ve known about that if you were playing the game (since it’s the talk of the town), as you claim to be.

So, yes … a nice try, but no dice. You made it painfully obvious to me that you’ve either never even installed the game, or you’ve never made it out of the short, starter tutorial area. I’m betting on the former.

@Not Lobotomist

Am I being a bit nasty? Maybe. But he proved himself to be a pathological liar in a recent Champions Online comments thread, and he had one motive in mind: Slam any MMO developer where that slamming benefits Turbine, slander and poppycock too where necessary.

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