T w e n t y S i d e d
This week you can play Champions Online for free. Old account. New account. Everyone plays for free.
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I signed in. Star on Chest was just where I left him. The robot cowboy amusement park was right where I remember it being. In fact, I couldn’t find a single thing that had changed. No new content. In a year. (That I could spot.) I flipped through the character creator and after ten minutes I only managed to find one new costume piece. This game really needs more content.
Although, if you’ve never played before they will have enough content to keep you busy for a week. Just don’t read the quest text.
They have a celebratory cake in the super’s decadent city center, where you can gather and emote with other players in a crowded mess of spooling chat text and lag. It’s more fun than I make it sound.
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And yes, when you arrive at this location the game makes a “cake is a lie” joke. Sigh. Everyone knows that only the saddest, most desperate sort of hacks are still making cake jokes.
EDIT: Ah. They have added new content, but it’s in the higher level areas, which is why I didn’t see it during my tour.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Honestly this is a badly timed Free-to-play week. Final Fantasy XIV is entering open beta at 10pm EST tonight.
And PAX is this weekend. That’s going to eat a lot of news space too.
LOL, “there are nearly three comments!”.
Of course by posting this, I have prevented anyone else from seeing that message, muhahahaaa.
It’s now changed to “3 comments, 33% of them are the most recent”, which is a nice consolation prize for the Johnny-come-latelys.
You could also do “THERE ARE 3 LIGHTS!, uh, I mean comments”
But, there are four lights!
Well, this is fortunate. Lately I’d been thinking, “I’d like to play Champions again, but 15 bucks is far more than I’m willing to pay and certainly more than they deserve.”
I’d been hoping they’d switch to a free-to-play model (especially since they already see fit to charge us for costume slots and parts and the like), but I suppose this will do for now.
I’m not a hyper CO fan, but It would be remiss to not point out that I think they added Vibora Bay (lv37-40) and The Serpent Lantern (any level?) since you stopped your LP. But I barely played VB at all, and I considered Serpent Lantern to be pretty miserable and boring content the one time I played it.
Regardless, it’s nice to have a chance to play for free, even if not as much has changed as I would like.
A little off-topic, but any plans to work on a CoH: Going Rogue LP? Personally I found it significantly better than CO, but that may not be ideal for your LP style. :)
I won’t rule it out, but it’s hard to plan that far ahead. Wow Starts in 2 months. I don’t know how long it will run. Several months, I’m sure. After that I’ve got my eye on DC Universe.
Are you interested at all in Star Wars: The Old Republic? I, for one, am extremely eager to play it, despite having to wait into next year.
Hopefully it’ll be a little harder to mock heartlessly. Though I would totally love anything on SWTOR… Maybe something else a little (or a lot) more serious?
A free week? From the same guys whose idea of a trial is to let end half of the tutorial zone? This are grim notices! It means that the end of civilization is near!
Or maybe they are losing subscribers and need to gather some more.
“Losing subscribers” is exactly why MMOs have free week[end]s.
I loved Champions Online… until I realized that I couldn’t play the character I wanted to play (a sword-wielding superhero) because heroes with ranged powers were far more powerful than melee heroes, especially at higher levels. (It makes it far easier to pull individual enemies without grabbing entire legions of alien frogs all at once.)
I was also disappointed at how boring the end-game was.
They lost my subscription because I only saw one way to play it without constantly dying.
I guess “free” makes it worth the time to see if Cryptic added anything interesting to Champions, or if this 5GB download will be a waste of bandwidth…
They rebalanced melee. They are pretty friggin’ awesome now.
Or, were. I stopped playing a few months ago, because of various RL things / generic game burnout / etc.
I suspect people from Cryptic have been keeping an eye on City of Heroes (which they no longer run; Going Rogue is not a Cryptic product, and the quality shows it) and noticed that not only has City experienced a nice user-jump since the release of the expansion three weeks ago, but it has sustained that increased population. Typically you might expect a jump the first week of a new expansion, but if it isn’t of awesome calibre, that jump fades and you go back to pre-expansion levels instead.
That’s not happening with Going Rogue. The population jump is still around, and the game feels more vibrant and active than ever. This is Cryptic’s attempt to fight that, I think (I also predict it will fail badly, because I highly doubt CO has anything to compare to Praetoria.)
Nevertheless, since it’s free, I’m going to give CO a spin just to see what they did right and what they did horribly. I suspect I’ll be disappointed shortly after the character creation screen; so far I have failed to be impressed by any Cryptic MMO (I only really started playing City of Heroes after it was taken over by NCSoft and transferred to Paragon Studios).
I spent an hour in character creation, and half that in the tutorial, before I logged out and uninstalled. Now I have an intense craving to play CoH. Thanks, Shamus. :p
I spent an hour and a half in the creator, and several hours playing last night. I’m not really impressed, frankly, with most of it. The costume creator is set up poorly; while some of the variety of options are nice, the interface is clunky and the options are hard to find and set up. And while it has clear “sets” of costumes, I could not find a way to just select a set and customise (a vital feature of the City costume creator).
Gameplay didn’t really wow me either. Seemed to involve a lot of running around and overuse of simple attacks. I spent most of my time using my energy-builder attack, with “snipe” shots of my first energy-using attack for flavour. Didn’t really feel like there was a lot of ground for “customising” my character out of his initial powerset, so I didn’t see the “freedom” that the system supposedly had over City.
I can see why this game is failing against its competition.
Yep. From the top of my head there’s Vibora Bay and Serpent Lantern. Of course that isn’t everyone’s cup, I quite like both.
Still, it’s there. And another Adventure Pack is being worked on at the moment. On a sidenote, my SG (Super Group, a guild in Champions Online) Just had it’s 1st anniversary celebration ontop of that huge cake yesterday. It was great fun. All depends on one’s point of view :)
I’ve been vaguely interested in picking up CO (and ST:O, for that matter) to give it a try for a while now, and this would seem like the perfect opportunity, but…
Going Rogue is still new and shiny and I’m still racking up badges that were previously inaccessible to my main hero (or only semi-accessible, like Reformed and Weed Whacker), and football season’s about to start, and new stuff for ME2 comes out Tuesday, so I just don’t see when I can squeeze CO in.
Personally I’m holding out for a Cataclysm Let’s Play!
Oh, and happy anniversary, Champions Online, waaaay too busy to try you out (… nvm), sorry, but thanks for providing such perfect material to mock you forevermore! :)
“Ok… sounds good, Ill have a look.”
I try steam first, since my steam downloads dont count towards my download limit.
“Oh… no mention of free play on steam, guess it must be through the website only.”
I go to the website and follow the links to download CO.
“Oh… it wants me to log in, first. But theres no sign of a link to register.”
Create an account by going to the atari site first, then back to CO, and download with my download manager of choice so as to get the best possible speed…
“Hmm… Only 2MB? That doesnt sound right. Oh well.”
Open the downloaded file, and it starts the proprietary patch/update utility. [Patching – 5000MB remaining]
“Sigh.”
Ugh. I was thinking of trying it (I’ll try just about anything when it’s free), but that sounds like way too many hoops to jump through for something I’m pretty sure I’ll only play for a day. Thanks for the warning.
They have made a melee pass and it’s pretty fun and powerful now. My dual blades is my favourite character. Single blade is now very powerful when fighting against a single high-hp super villain, but for aoe attacks, you might want to grab a power from dual blades.
And as others have pointed out, saying that CO has no new content for a year is just not true, even if you qualify that with a “that I could spot”.
I’ve gotten several emails from Cryptic about this, and honestly I try to remember to reactivate my account, but I keep getting sidetracked by games that are actually fun to play.
The new VB and SL content patched up the holes rather nicely and the content is less absurdly unbalanced. At the moment though they’re aiming to get an hour of new content in every 2 months and seem to be failing. I guess all the effort is going into Neverwinter Nights online, and no doubt when that comes out it will be throttled of support so their next MMO can get released. It’s a pity really if instead of STO CO and NWN Cryptic had focussed on one MMO they could have made something really spectacular.
Wow, this game is so bad, it boggles the mind.
City of Heroes was at least 2 times better than this, and it had a better art design. It’s hard to believe Cryptic made both those games.
This game will probably shut down the next year or so, or when DC Online is launched.
Seriously, City of Heroes is miles above this game.
EDIT: I just had a genuinely laugh out loud moment when I looked at the ERSB rating for this game and saw “drug references”.
Anyone remember Shamus’s character creation misfortune when he inadvertently referenced “heroin” ?
Cryptic is really good at making MMSPO games… Massively Multiplayer Single Player Online games. Neither Champions or Star Trek merit the online presence. Both play exactly as if they were an offline game… neither seems to encourage grouping or even really help you do so. And the lack of content in general (especially STO) really means that they feel like non-subscription games.
I came back for the free week, and was dismayed to sit at character select and realize that I had no desire to play any of these characters, even for free. The game was a bit of a chore to play, not because of difficulty but because of tone. Even if you don’t read the quest text (for the love of Cthulu, don’t), it just has an underlying slapstick quality to it that make me ask myself: if the creators don’t take this game seriously, why should I?
The underlying slapstick feel is exactly why Hellgate London failed miserably.
Among other reasons……
I honestly get the idea that Cryptic should stop working on licensed games and do original IP games instead. Star Trek Online, particularly, is notable in that they simply have no grasp of how to make a game that feels as if it’s taking place in the Star Trek universe. My list of gripes is long indeed, but in the end I have to do boatloads of mental hoop-jumping to justify the game universe, from aesthetics, to politics, to missions. (Wait, I’ve got to beam down to this planet to
stealretrieve another culture’s artifacts, except wait, they’re trying to prevent me to, which is all well and… oh, wait, Starfleet wants me to exterminate them.)There’s a simple reason they use IPs: Brand recognition. It’s why crappy games are always made every time a movie manages to pull down even an average box-office figure, or worse, the games made to coincide in release to the latest “blockbuster” movie. Simply point, they’re cashing in on the name, and like it or not, it sells better because of it.
Now that said, Champions wasn’t much of a name to cash in on, but that was an emergency grab from Cryptic. CO was originally Marvel Universe Online before Marvel pulled out. Tho I do agree you’d think CO would have reflected the advances and “lessons learned” from CoX better. Of course it doesn’t help that Atari (Who bought Cryptic almost purely for the access to the Star Trek license IMHO) have become the masters of “Shovelware”, milking stuff for all it’s worth with minimal effort and severe lack of post release support.
Oh, I know WHY they use IP. It’s just that they do such a shoddy job of it, I think they need to be excused from future tie-in games, until they’ve proven they can make a game that’s actually worth playing, and more importantly, that can actually be played successfully.
The most recent STO patch finally fixed a bug that makes it possible to group in their “random mission” zones. Grouping. Isn’t that an integral part of the game, or am I missing something here?
Well a lot of the “shoddy job” came from the fact Atari snatched up Cryptic fairly early in the development cycle (It wasn’t even in Alpha) and forced them to release it far before it was ready. Even now they’re yanking devs from both CO and STO and putting them onto the next project (a Neverwinter Nights based MMO if I remember correctly). Unfortunately Atari has permanently changed how Cryptic is doing business, and not for the better.
THAT IS NO ORDINARY CAKE!
Agreed. It is far too big to be an ordinary cake. Plus it seems problematic to eat it if a lot of people are going to be standing on it all day long.
I’d be scraping off the icing before indulging myself, no telling what some of those people have stepped in.
I would check out this game, but I’m having too much fun slowly accruing achievements for Starcraft 2 while improving my skills for a possible eventual online match foray.
But who gets to blow out the candle?
Awww man, I coulda run into Star On Chest and I missed it? Sad day!
In honor of this birthday and Hurricane Earl bearing down upon me, this is the perfect time to say:
THIS IS NO ORDINARY STORM!!!!!!!
I’d quit CO a while back, but am going to log on for a while so I can play my old dual-sword wielder and my old fire-based character again. I enjoyed “knocking out” villains by cutting them apart with swords or causing them to burst into flames.
Wait, what?