Champions Online Hands-on Preview

Character customisation in Cryptic’s superhero MMO Champions Online is brilliant. And it can only get better. This claim is based on a mere weekend’s worth of solid play in the closed beta, currently running on and off as we speak. It will be improved between now and the launch of the open beta in August, and between then and the game’s official launch on September 4.

It really is remarkable. I’m not talking about choosing your class, or your race, or your gender, or any of that bog standard stuff you’re asked to decide upon in your average MMORPG. I’m talking about costume creation. The tool that’s used to design the various superheroes that are already flying about Champions Online’s various zones is a wonder. You can get into the nitty gritty of tweaking this and that and everything in between, but there’s an unbridled sense of childish joy in just spamming the “randomise all” button and seeing what the game spits out at you.

The sheer variety is what impresses most. Robotic limbs, demon eyes, dragon tails, mech armour, skin-tight suits, Kill Bill helmets, Rorschach-style trench coats, hulking giant Hulk-like tanks, flying vixens, or even good old spandex and cape combos. You can even tweak how your heroes walk and the hue of their powers. Cryptic has taken the good work done with its previous game, City of Heroes, and turned it up a notch.

All these things are possible, in any combination – male female, tall, small, fat, thin – whatever. In Champions Online there are no classes in the traditional sense, although the game does ask you what feels like a “pick your class” question right at the start, calling it instead your “power set”. While this decision does seem to determine your base aesthetic, from there it’s really a case of doing whatever you want.

You hear MMORPG developers claim the following a lot: “you’ll never see two characters the same in our game.” Usually it’s nonsense. In World of Warcraft, when you get to the end game most players of the same class are after the same loot, so the only thing that distinguishes them from each other is their race and class. In Warhammer Online Mythic at least implemented a paint system that allowed you to change the colour of your armour. With Champions Online, perhaps for the first time in MMO history, Cryptic would be able to say: “you’ll never see two characters the same in our game” and it wouldn’t be tosh.

Here’s what I did: I selected “Might” as my power set – described thus: “Everything around you is a tool you can use. Every enemy is a potential toy to knock around. You excel at slow heavy attacks, massive knockbacks, and locking down your opponents. The longer you fight, the harder you hit and the less damage you take.” This description appealed to the child in me, the fan of the Hulk, Juggernaut, Bane and all superheroes big, bad and ugly. Funny then, how my hero ended up looking.

After dipping my toe into the various aesthetic affecting sliders (I find in-depth character customisation tools somewhat overwhelming and intimidating), I settled on hammering the “randomise” all button. It’ll be like love, I thought to myself. I’ll know my hero when I see it.

And so it was. When the short, sexy female popped up on screen it was love at first sight. She was wearing some kind of bicycle helmet thing with a black visor – and a deep crimson skin tight suit. That’s her. She’s the one. She’s my hero.

Despite the fact that I could have spent hours in the hero creation tool, it was time to finally enter the game world and play the game. Champions Online’s opening couple of levels will play out similarly for everyone – Millennium City, the futuristic metropolis built on the ruins of Detroit following its destruction by the lore’s main villain Doctor Destroyer, is under attack from an alien race called the Qularr. All hell is breaking loose – the local police force and armed response units are struggling under the weight of the invasion, and it’s your job, along with all the other new players, to help out.

The first thing that strikes you is the art style. Cryptic has gone for a comic book style, with bright, bold colours outlined in thick black lines. It looks like a comic book, which is great, because it fits. Your first few hours of play are a combination of fetch quests – go here, kill X amount of enemies, grab X amount of loot – and escort quests. Pretty uninspiring, simple and easy stuff, but it does afford you the time to get accustomed to the combat and the controls.

As a Might hero, my two starting super powers were “Clobber” and “Beatdown”. By targeting an enemy and clicking the tooltip for Clobber or tapping the associated hotkey, my character simply does the action, doing damage. But the main purpose of this first power is to generate energy. Energy is used for the more powerful, er, powers. In my case, this was Beatdown. It hits a single target with one strong punch, doing good damage.

This premise is the foundation of Champions Online’s simple but engaging combat system. You’ll be doing some powers to generate energy so that you can do others. Layered on top of this is an interesting charge system. Some powers, like the “Mighty Leap”, require you to hold down the hotkey, triggering the filling up of a meter. It’s up to you when to release, sending your character leaping after an enemy and stunning them for a short time.

There’s also a Block ability – assigned to the Shift key. As enemies charge up their more powerful attacks, an icon will display above their head. Press Block in time and you’ll escape most if not all of the damage. There are some powers you can buy that are Block specific – triggering combos for example.

The missions in Millennium City are initially uninspiring, but things soon pick up when you find yourself in your first “open quest”. Set outside the Champions HQ, this open quest takes its cues from Warhammer Online’s excellent public quest system. You join in simply by entering the area. Champions Online’s open quests, like WAR’s PQs, are divided up into stages that get progressively harder. Here, all you need to do is fend off some more invading aliens as famed Champions hero Ironclad works on preparing a huge gun that’ll blow the Qularr mothership to smithereens. We’d almost say Cryptic nicked the open quest idea from Mythic, but then every developer nicks a little bit from someone when they create games, so we’ll let them off.

Once completed, you enter your first instance – a joint effort inside the HQ with iconic Champions hero Defender. You run about killing Doctor Destroyer’s robots and face off against a mini-boss of sorts. After that the gun is fired, the mothership is destroyed and you exit the HQ to a guard of honour from all the NPCs you helped out along the way. Absolutely, unequivocally, sweet.

Them you get to do something you only normally get to do in other MMOs when you’re two thirds of the way towards the level cap – fly. It’s called a “Talent” power in Champions Online. You don’t have to pick fly – you can pick tunnel, or super leaps, or super speed, or Spider-Man-style swinging, or all the other classic superhero methods of transportation, but really there’s only one choice. That you get to fly so soon in Champions Online seems incredibly generous, almost devaluing the experience really. But it’s welcome. Very welcome.

Firstly, it helps you get around a lot quicker because you don’t have to walk. Secondly, it allows you to survey the battlefield from on high before getting into a scrap with NPCs. In a player versus player environment it’s incredibly chaotic – the PvP area on offer in the closed beta at time of writing is nothing more than a large cage in a cylindrical room – imagine trying to keep track of ten wasps in a glass jar. Keeping superheroes in your sights as they dart about is like trying to catch a fly with chop sticks. Daniel-san might be able to do it, but mere mortals might struggle.

Out in the player versus environment area though it’s great. It’s simple, pure fun. Just flying about Millennium City, taking in the impressive vistas and, if you’ve got a decent rig, spiralling draw distances is oddly therapeutic. You can see why Superman spends so much time in space. This is what being a superhero is all about.

There are problems and concerns, as you’d expect. When creating your hero, the power set descriptions don’t give you a good enough idea of what you’re letting yourself in for in terms of play style. Of course I can guess that a Might power set will be melee focussed, and probably a tank, but the game doesn’t explain that you’re able to take powers from any set as you level up. I only discovered this through online research.

In fact, confusion is one of the game’s biggest problems – at no point are you really told how it works. I went 11 levels unable to work out how to buy powers. I got to the point where I thought I was experiencing some kind of bug. It was only by chance – transporting to a new area via a gate – that I discovered where and how to do it. The crafting system is equally bemusing – my inventory is currently full with components I have no idea if I should keep or dump.

Quests are another problem. Almost all I experienced were fetch quests or escort quests or kill quests. Only the instanced quest at the end of the Millennium City tutorial grabbed me. Quests look like the bedrock of the Champions Online experience, so hopefully there are some crackers down the line that make the grind feel of levelling worth it.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the fact that the game world is divided up into zones that need to be loaded individually. One of the best things about World of Warcraft is that you can pretty much go from one end of a continent to another without a load. Simple exploration, heading off the beaten path, discovering an area you really shouldn’t be in, marvelling at some giant dragon that’s so many levels higher than you, you can’t actual tell what level it is, is one of that game’s strengths. From what I’ve seen you won’t be able to do this in Champions Online – travel is done by walking up to a chopper and pressing F to select your destination – and that’s a crying shame.

Still, you’ll probably be too busy gawping at the incredible superheroes other people have created to find flaws. Some of the heroes I encountered during my time with game were nothing short of mind-blowing. Thankfully the Superman/Spider-Man/Iron Man clones were few and far between (fingers crossed it stays that way when the game officially launches). For the most part, Champions Online is filled with astonishing-looking heroes that put Marvel and DC to shame.

In short, I haven’t had this much fun with an MMO since I did my first few PQs with my flatmate in Warhammer Online. Champions Online has the potential to be great. I haven’t touched upon the interesting Arch Nemesis system, which comes at level 25 (City of Heroes fans will know what to expect). And I’ve not tried grouping up in any meaningful way. As with all MMOs it’s impossible to cast judgement based on a playthough of just over ten levels with one power set, but it’s a good start. A very good start.

Champions Online for PC is currently in closed beta, which will run till August 16. We’re giving away 200 closed beta keys, so be sure to get your key as soon as possible.