Many developers and MMO enthusiasts feel that real-time, twitch-based combat has no place in the genre. Champions Online is proof to the contrary. Barring a handful of powers, there are no click-and-wait attacks, and defense is more than a stat. It’s a button for blocking. Luring opponents to explosive canisters, strafing melee attacks, and picking up and tossing tanks are tactics that make Champions Online more akin to an action game than a RPG.
Like World of Warcraft’s talent-trees, albeit without the trees, attribute-points add special effects and bonuses to powers. With so many variables and real-time combat, balance among frameworks is almost a moot point. It’s fantastic news for someone like me, who has an innate skill for picking underpowered classes. The lack of straight-forward tanks and healers, although you can certainly make them, means that teams need to be dynamic and capable of adapting their powers to new situations. In a worst-case scenario, death costs nothing more than travel-time and, occasionally, a very slight, temporary decrease in healing and damage.
Forming teams has the interesting effect of increasing experience points instead of dividing them. This explains why two days of soloing left me with missions four levels above me, and a bank vault filled with unusable rewards to match. It’s a good concept that emphasizes the ‘multiplayer’ in MMO, but it can be frustrating when playing during slow times or when you don’t feel like repeating quests to bring your teammate up to speed. On the flipside, you can always make your lagging buddies into sidekicks and drag them around to your missions.
PvP can be a deal-breaker for me, and the Hero Games keep me coming back for more. At present there are the team-based matches of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the free-for-alls of B.A.S.H., and the objective-based struggles of Apocalypse. Stronghold is the first of other promised maps for Apocalypse, and has one team posing as villains in a mock prison-break. Even with Apocalypse, PvP in Champions Online is extremely basic, but equally exciting since you never know what your opponents can throw at you until it’s too late, and vice versa. Many of the rewards for PvP are strangely underpowered, which will hopefully get corrected in time.
Crafting is the by far the weakest of activities offered. You can train in Arms, Science, or Mysticism, but you’ll find that they make many similar items. The main differences are which stats the resulting gear boosts. Disassembling unwanted gear is the fastest way to raise your skill level, and most crafted items are of questionable use until the higher levels, thus making crafting a time-sink in the truest sense. The most egregious oversight is the inability to see what a blueprint creates before you purchase it. Even then, the descriptions aren’t necessarily clear. What exactly does a “Level 6 Snowstorm” do?
After running through dozens of missions, PvP matches, and crafting many bewildering items, I couldn’t shake a feeling of confinement. The flow of missions is too calculated, honed to a self-defeating edge. There is little cause to stray from mission-parameters and explore, because there is nothing to be gained. You are funneled with mechanical precision through a scant five zones, of which two are reserved for the final ten levels. The prospect of making a second character and playing through the exact same missions is not an entirely enticing one.
