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It’s kind of scary, really.

…Ah, and about the patch: Sounds neat, but I’m still waiting for a “big melee weapon” power set.

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I’m right there with you man. I’m actually looking at my first deletion tonight to make room for the next alt I have a craving for.

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The fact that I am now running around as a terrifying WereBunny also lends good marks.
Combat in CoH was boring and repetitive staring at cooldowns, this at least has stat and resource management with visible gear drops. Not to mention some pretty interesting abilities!

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@Eben

One could claim that Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were very similar because they share some cosmetic similarities, but in actually playing both games one finds they couldn’t be any more different. The same is true of City of Heroes and Champions Online.

They appear similar on the surface but that’s due to a base necessity: That both games need to have a powerful character creation system that allows for a grand amount of customisation. That’s what they share and at the start that can make the two of them seem very similar. But this is something that any superhero MMO would need to have, DC Universe will have it and that will probably be compared to City of Heroes thanks to that as well.

I said it was a necessity though, didn’t I?

Imagine if in a comic book Universe the heroes often adopted mismatching costume pieces based on which was better, instead of the minor changes that we usually see. For example, if Wolverine had a rainbow-coloured uniform. It’s an amusing thought, but it wouldn’t be at all practical.

A comic book character has to be distinctive, clear, recognisable, and individual, and they need a strong design which they can stick with over a long period so they can be visually recognised as an iconic hero (look at Superman and Captain America), whereas in the usual MMO most characters are inherently forgettable as a design aspect of the game.

But forgettable heroes just wouldn’t work, would it?

Interestingly enough, Freedom Force also had a similar kind of character creation system to City of Heroes, wherein one could design the costume of their hero, and this again comes back to that the costume will be distinctive and will stay with the hero.

In World of Warcraft, you may remember my name but you’d never know me if you saw me by anything other than name. However, in a superhero game you’d learn to know me by my appearance. If I were to run past you then you’d recognise me instantly, and that’s why it’s a necessity.

So a successful superhero game will need this element in order to work, and I’m sure that people will say that DC Universe will be a clone of either City of Heroes or Champions Online too based on the merits of the character creation system alone, without bothering to find out how the game plays.

Remember the point I made in the first paragraph? I’m going to make that even more relevant now by tying that in to what I’ve covered here; some games are going to have similar elements out of necessity, but those may be the only similar elements present. If one were to actually play both City of Heroes and Champions Online, it becomes as clear as day by the environments, the questing, and the game mechanics that the two are as different as chalk and cheese.

And I do think you’re making a claim of similarity based purely on the character creator (and perhaps a short time into the tutorial) because you’ve even confirmed that yourself, by saying that the beta was fun for about ’5 minutes’.

In my opinion, Champions Online is nothing like City of Heroes, it’s a very different beast indeed and it plays in quite a different way. The only similarities is that, yes, they’re both superhero games, and yes, they both have complex character creation systems.

But as I’ll stress, it’s expected and necessary for Champions Online (or any superhero MMO) to share that similarity with City of Heroes, is it not? City of Heroes was the first to implement such a system but it did so out of necessity, just as any superhero game will.

So saying that Champions Online is like saying that Phantasy Star is similar to Final Fantasy, that Soul Calibur is similar to Street Fighter, or that Mini Ninjas is similar to Windwaker. Some games share similar conventions, conventions that other games instituted first out of necessity, but it doesn’t actually make the games alike each other.

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