OPIE
Lost Soldiers
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« Reply #3 on: October 20, 2009, 10:03:48 PM » |
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I started playing about a month ago. I was being very sarcastic in my comedic sort of way with the review. I can touch on a couple more details.
What Grizzly said is true, there is not a ton to do in the game right now and PvP is a joke. If you are not a ranged class you're screwed! They need to fix PvP, unfortunately to do so means major changes to all the current power sets to balance it out, which would drasticly change PvE as well. However Champions is primarily a PvE game.
There's differences with missions then from City of Heroes. CoH use to be all instanced missions. You would go into the sewers, a cave or a warehouse and a science lab and do your mission. There was difficulty sliders, the leader of the team set the difficulty and the sliders worked also by how many were in your group and the levels of the people in the group. You could side kick which would take someone of a lower level and raise them to 1 level below the person side kicking them allowing you to play at that level but only with your current powers. There was also exemplar which did the opposite. Lowered a higher levels, level down to the lower level.
Champions just has sidekick which works both ways. This allows you to play with your friends should you not be the same level or out of the level range so you do not hinder their experience. Now with the missions, there are instanced missions but most of the missions are open world like WoW. It's not stream lined like WoW, there are zones. But to counter the effect of so many people being in one zone at a time it lags you out, its split up to many different servers. 100 people per zone. And when you are zoning into a new zone you get a list of all the active servers for that zone and how many people are in it. It will also tell you if someone on your friend list is there, in your supergroup or on your team so you can go to the correct zone if you are teamed or just want to physically meet up with someone. You can change the instance server of that zone at any time out of combat. There are no difficulty sliders now. Instances are set and built the way they wanted it to be built and how hard it will be.
As for content, yes all there is to do right now is to level your character and run instances to get better accessories. It works a little like wow in the fashion that there is better accessories used with the whole color system. White, Green, yellow, blue, orange, purple ect... The thing about only being able to level your character is its done in a better fashion then WoW with how the game plays out. Yeah its grinding and turning in missions but its a lot easier to do. You enter the game with the choice to go through the tutorial and learn the basics. Or you can go right to the crisis and gain an automatic 5 levels that you would have gained in the tutorial. You are awarded a travel power right after the tutorial so traveling is easy. But as I stated, Cryptic is quick to add in more content and you will find that constantly doing missions is actually way more fun then in WoW given the extreme flexibility to play your character how ever you want to. Also you are allowed I believe 8 or 10 character slots and let me tell you. Making new characters, testing them out and creating stories is half the fun of the game. You can generally tell within the first 10 levels of that power set if you will like it or not and can delete him or keep him. Currently the level cap is set to 40. CoH and CoV never went over level 50 in the cap. Cryptic countered never raising the level cap by focusing on new gameplay in encounters and just quite frankly....lots of encounters with super villains. They challenged and strained all the possible combinations of power sets by making all of the main content very difficult but yet not frustrating. Another cool thing they added in Champions is things called Perks. Think achievements in WoW. but instead of just pointless points you get to spend these points on new costume pieces or accessories. The costume pieces are interesting, you have to complete THAT perk and have the points to unlock a certain piece that you will see NPC's and Mobs wearing. So instead of just leveling your character it gives you something to work towards if you really want that costume for your character.
As for builds its interesting how it works. You are allowed to set your character for offense, defense, balanced, or support. Going into a different mode has pros and cons. Offense means you do more damage but practically makes you paper thin, going into this mode requires a tank built character that knows how to keep aggro. Defense explains its self, less damage dealt but your defensive abilities are superior. Balanced...do I have to explain that? Support, if you have support type powers like Debuffing, buffs or healing it enhances those powers but also lowers your damage done and physical defense. You get a total of 5 builds which unfortunately doesn't let you pick new powers for each one, but does allow you to swap out accessories for which build will best suit different stats. You can also make several costumes and if you want you can link certain costumes to certain builds if you want a specific look to the roll you are full filling. Obviously certain powers need certain stats. You can decide if you want to go pure and just stick to every single power in that specific power pool you picked or you can go hybrid and space it out between as many power pools as you want. It's important you read power discriptions though because certain powers enhance with different stats. So lets give a scenario. I choose a melee type power set which will base its damage off of strength and dex, but I decide to pick some defensive powers that will build off of constitution (stamina) and endurance. I stay in my balanced build but now I have to choose which accessories I want to wear...do I go all strength and dex and be nothing but DPS and my defensive powers will not be as useful as they could be...or do I actually balance my stats out with different accessories. The choices are almost limit less and it really comes down to how you want to play your character. It is possible to gimp your characters but even gimped characters still remain an asset to the team. It's Cryptics way of catering to the casual gamer while still giving those hard core gamers their fix of immersion from reality to fantasy.
Penalty for dying. The accessories do not have durability so you don't have to pay anything for dying. The more you complete missions and stay alive you earn stars, up to 5. After two stars are earned you start doing bonus damage and healing. When you die or get knocked out, what ever your imagination is telling you what happened you are restored at a spawn point and half or all of your star is now missing, lowering your bonus damage but never taking you into the negatives in damage, meaning you never do below the amount of damage your powers dish out.
As for cost, the game is still $50 with the first month free play. After its just like WoW. $14.99 per month with the option of saving money for paying ahead of time. I.E 3 months or 6 months.
Champions fits a casual gamer very well as I explained in the previous post. You can actually sign on for 30 minutes, progress your character and enjoy yourself. There is no raiding and finding groups for tougher missions or missions recommending multiple people are easy to find. There are countless story arches. There are "gathering" missions like HEY GO KILL 15 OF THOSE GUYS! Or RETRIEVE 20 OF THOSE THINGS! But if you read all the mission descriptions and follow the story arch its like reading a mini comic book while playing the game. They all have unique stories to them and let you use your imagination.
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