Product Description

For generations, brave men and women have answered the call to protect the world from villains who threaten its safet and security. Today, crimimnal organizations use superpowers and super technology in their dastardly plots to control the world. Creatures from outer space and other dimensions seek to enslave humanity. Led by the Champions, protectors of Millenium City. The world's Heroes have launched a crusade for peace, security and justice. But they need allies. A new breed of Heroes is needed to fight in a war against evil that spans the globe - and beyond. A world of heroes awaits. Who will you be?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #741 in Video Games
• Brand: Atari
• Model: 27871
• Released on: 2009-09-01
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Dimensions: .30 pounds

Features

• Endless opportunities for exploration as you break free of the walls of Millenium City and bring justice to a vast array of areas across, beneath and beyond the globe.
• The Champions Online universe is jam-packed with thousands of heroes, facing thousands of threats. Join up with other heroes, create your own superteam, and prepare to take on the ultimate threats.
• Unparalleled customization options allow you to choose from thousands of costume pieces, colors, and powers to create the hero that you envision. The ability to create the ultimate challenge for your hero by customizing and outfitting his/her nemesis
• A creative combat experience allows for fast and furious fights where you see in four color comics with a battle system that's a mixture of exciting action and reactive tactics.
• Includes $5 Cryptic Bucks and a 30 day free online trial

Amazon.com Product Description

Powered by the groundbreaking Cryptic Engine, Champions Online is positioned to become the premier superheroic massively multiplayer online role playing game for the PC*. With literally billions of character options allowing total customization, real-time action combat, the richly detailed Champions universe and an experienced Cryptic Studios team are devoted to working directly with gamers to deliver a great gaming experience. Battle villains with friends. View larger. Or one-on-one. View larger. Patrol all types of environments. View larger. Take control of special vehicles. View larger. Story Earth's first and best line of defense is its heroes. For generations, brave men and women have answered the call to protect the world from the villains who threaten its safety and security, and that threat is real. Today, organizations such as VIPER, ARGENT and PSI use both superpowers and super technology in their dastardly plots to control the world. In addition, creatures from outer space and other dimensions seek to enslave humanity and super scientist Teleios is creating an army of clones and super powered constructs to do his bidding. But the greatest threat of all is Doctor Destroyer. A superhuman genius driven to conquer, Destroyer will not stop until all of humanity bends knee to his greatness. In 1992, Destroyer obliterated the city of Detroit and killed thousands. With years to prepare, his next attack is sure to put the entire planet in peril. But humanity does not stand alone. Led by The Champions, protectors of Millennium City, the world's heroes have launched a crusade for peace, security and justice. But they need allies. Defender is calling for a new generation of superheroes to fight in a war against evil that spans the globe - and beyond. Will you be one of those heroes? Save the world and be a champion. Key Features The First True Action MMORPG Hi-Octane Excitement - Champions Online delivers furious, fast-paced encounters previously reserved for action and fighting games. No more boring auto attacks and lengthy recharge times. Champions Online combat is instantaneous — and electrifying. Brains Required - Every enemy and super-powered threat in Champions Online has its own unique abilities and combat specialties. Use your head — or wind up dead. Bring Friends, Make Friends - The Champions Online universe will be jam-packed with thousands of heroes, facing thousands of threats. Join up with other heroes, create your own superteam, and prepare to take on the ultimate threats. Be the Hero You Want To Be Total Customization, at Your Fingertips - Choose from hundreds of different costume pieces, colors and body types to create your character's one-of-a-kind costume and look. There are billions of possible combinations, and in a universe brimming with the fantastic and the unforgettable, you can still be completely unique Your Powers, On Your Terms - There are a multitude of astonishing powers to choose from in Champions Online, and its flexible character creation system gives you total control over your hero's abilities. You can even pick the appearance of your powers. Do you want purple force fields? Green fire blasts? Jet black claws? In Champions Online, you decide. Keep Your Enemies Close - Every hero must have an archenemy. In Champions Online, you design your character's supreme adversary, choosing a name, powers and costume for a superpowered foe to bedevil your hero throughout his or her career. Bigger and Better - Vanquish evil, and your successes will be rewarded with costume pieces to enhance your powers and abilities. Then customize the appearance of those rewards to your vision of your hero's look and abilities. A Vast Universe Endless Exploration - The battle against evil in Champions Online rages across the world into outer space and alternate dimensions. No other MMOG offers players the chance to explore such diverse realms — from the shining skyscrapers of Millennium City and the frozen wastes of Canada to the interstellar gladiatorial arena on the moon, the hidden underwater city of Lemuria and the foul mystical dimension known as Qliphotic. Evil Most Foul - Battle supervillains, aliens, giant monsters and secret, sinister organizations. Doctor Destroyer is launching new plans to conquer the world. VIPER lurks in the shadows, seeking chances to strike at humanity. The ancient Lemurians are plotting a return to power. And Mechanon won't stop until it has wiped all organic life from the planet. Can you stop these heinous threats to humanity? Make Your Mark - The story of Champions Online is constantly changing, continually evolving. Villains are defeated. Heroes rise and fall. Cities transform. Your actions may decide the future. * Internet connection and monthly fee required for online play.

Customer Reviews

Major change on launch day
Champions Online was completely changed on the day of launch. Some like the change some don't, but either way it is a completely different experience than it was during the head start period.

According to an interview of the creators, "We decided to swing hard in the other direction so it's like now there isn't enough content for levels, so we really made a big adjustment but we could tell we were close. From there we know we can go back in the other direction and ease off of those changes." Yet according to developer comments they now have the game right where they want it to be. This makes writing a review fairly hard.

In my view, the game before the change was fantastic. The game after the change is average. Theoretically they will move the pointer back to the fantastic side, but who knows?

My advice is to hold off a few months before purchasing and see what the game turns into. Since there is so much flux right now you might not be buying what you think you were buying.

Overall, the character creation is very nice although you are not told that certain combinations are impossible. For example you can't both have a chest piece and have a cap. They are mutually exclusive. There is no notice given so if you don't already know these types of things exist you end up in trouble. The fact that when you change one type of item, it erases your choices of other items without telling you is inexcusable. Now, if you already have a planned look and go from the front to the end, you can pretty much get that look with only a few compromises, but testing out variations often leads to frustration as components disappear and reappear in what, to you, appear to be randomly.

The choice of powers is nice, but after the change, you will probably end up with a set of powers that don't work well enough in the game to be effective. You sort of have to already know what works and what doesn't at this time. Again, parts of the company say it will change, parts don't.

The missions that I've done (maybe 20% - 30% of the content) are mostly interesting. There is lots of fun "tongue in cheek" comedy. Fairly interesting story lines that made me want to see what happens next. For example, who doesn't love Foxbat?

Traveling in game is done (after the first tutorial section) by picking your travel power. Flight is the easiest and most convenient but other have their place. The launch day changed reduced all travel speed to a light jog so don't expect to get across an area quickly.

The in game crafting is fairly interesting but is totally undocumented. Good luck figuring it out on your own. You will have to do research on the online forums to learn how it works. Which brings me to the documentation.

The box contains zero documentation. In fact, the in game manual (basically a hand full of legalese and credits) asks you to click on the paper itself to accept the license. The manual is theoretically provided online at their website. You should defiantly peruse it before you decide to get the game or not. The problem is, the thing they have up there won't really help you much in the game. The tutorial sections on the game cover more. And what isn't covered in game (for example crafting) is never covered at all. If you want information about anything beyond the basics, you have to find it in the game forums.

If you do decide want to play the game from scratch right now. I think you should just jump in with a character similar to your final design, but without really spending tons of time detailing the look and powers. Get through the two tutorial sections and see how the powers you've chosen work out for you. Then change them up for that character and continue until you get a feel for what powers you really prefer. Then, go back and make your 'real' character. Right now there is only a subset of powers you can use and still be able to advance playing the game without joining teams. Currently the only way to learn about this game is to actually play it.

This was the Superman of comic book games, unfortunately on day one, they turned the Sun red and gave every enemy a hunk of kryptonite. Hopefully they'll figure out a way to turn the Sun back to yellow or at least a nice orange.

Almost a month, still digging it
*Updated 9/21/09, possibly final*

Overall, I am still pleased with the game and maintain my rating of it. As an avid WoW player I don't feel that Champions Online is going to be a game for me which will replace WoW by any means but I am pleasantly surprised by how fun it is to play. It has so far served me quite well as a respectably good distraction.

You start off by making your character. The promises Cryptic made in regards to the depth of customization were delivered in spades. In terms of looks you are limited to various costume pieces, of which there are many, but the majority of them can be altered in several ways including material, color, and patterns. I was a little disappointed to find that certain costume pieces can't be used with others (chest armor + cape = no?) but with the shear level of options it was a fading disappointment as I moved on to other cool ideas. I'm immensely satisfied with the creation features. Other costume items can be unlocked through gameplay via random drops, PvP, and such. These unlocked costume items are currently only available to the character which unlocks them but you can change your costume around after creation.

For your powers you can choose from pretty generic comic book archetypes like a fire user, or super strength, or telekinesis etc. You also have the option to custom tailor your power set which at creation allows you to choose one "energy builder" (a spammable basic attack which builds energy) from any archetype, and then another actual power from any of the archetypes (an attack which uses stored energy, think mana). This again allows for quite a bit of customization but there is an obvious limitation of 2 abilities upon creation.

Following power selection you pick a talent which basically gives you a sizable stat bonus. There are plenty of different combinations to choose from. The stat system is drawn from the Champions pen and paper game and comes across as a little vague and foreign compared to other games but if you take their stat recommendations and hover your stats it's pretty easy to figure what you need and what you're getting. Stats affect various powers and builds in different ways but there are some core benefits to each. For example my main character derives their damage from endurance which also effects my energy pool but on another character of mine endurance simply affects my energy pool and Ego grants me my damage.

Alright, on to gameplay.

My first look at the game left me a little gutted by how low the quality was. Following that I had to double check the settings to make sure something wasn't wrong and sure enough the game defaulted to much lower graphics setting and resolution than my PC was capable of. So after turning the settings up I went about my busines. The graphical styling probably isn't for everybody and doesn't scale down very well at all but on high settings I feel that they are actually quite good. At lower settings a lot of the nuances which I feel polish the look of the game are lost and in turn makes the game look exponentially worse the lower you go. If you don't have a great computer and highly value the look of the games you play you may want to pass this over but otherwise I feel that the game performs and looks great on higher settings and is certainly playable otherwise.

So off to great adventures.

The game can be played natively with a wired X-Box 360 controller, a wireless 360 controller for Windows, or a keyboard. I have wired 360 controllers for just this reason so I will be playing that way. This has worked well for me thus far but there are some annoyances in using a controller. Many of these issues have been addressed in patches but it still seems awkward and somewhat undoable to select from multiple NPCs and/or objects using the controller.

Questing is pretty typical, find people with big yellow exclamation points, take their quests, pound some aliens,???, profit. It doesn't bug me much but I imagine some folks were hoping for a change of pace. You won't find the questing in this game particularly refreshing unfortunately. You can get quests by finding items certain items, stumbling up an area granting a local quest (Fallout 3 radio transmission style), take part in "public quests" Warhammer Online style, and then your run of the mill quest hub. I have been encountering sporadic glitches with quests like not being able to take them and there are a couple of the public quests which are undoable right now. The vast majority of them work flawlessly, and an increasing number have been fixed in patches, but again this game isn't without its faults.

Combat is very active and plays much more like an action game than basically any other MMORPG. You can run/jump/fly/teleport in and pound on whatever you're attacking because with the way you build energy (attacking) and your general abundance of energy it seems as though you're always able to keep your head in the combat. The challenge level of enemies in an area can often be quite erratic, an issue which has been methodically addressed in patches. Blocking and playing defensively can be a much more integral part of combat than other games. You can see enemies charge there attacks and that's generally a sign that something dangerous is about to hit you. In these situations it can be quite devastating to not take a defensive action so again this is an element of combat which adds to the immersion of most fights.

You can equip armor, weapons, and such. Equipment itself doesn't change your look that I know of, but again certain pieces of equipment do unlock costume pieces. You can change your costume for a nominal fee at any point in the game and you can actually save multiple costumes. There are 3 equipment fields which are science, arms, and mystic. Each type has one primary equipment slot and 2 secondary slots. Aside from that you can basically consider them unique slots like any other paper-doll equipment method you've seen before. You also have a bar for "devices" which are like items with charges and trinkets that do interesting things. I haven't messed with them much but you can get things that give you various buffs or do attacks as well as healing items which can be nice.

After a bit of questing you will eventually gain levels. At that point you'll have various points saved up. At set levels you can get points for new powers, new travel powers, new talents, and new power advantage points. Again you can choose powers from any school provided you meet the requirement which is typically "X non-energy building powers from this school or X+3 non-energy builders from a different school". Powers come in all different types so you can mix and match defensive and offensive powers from all over. Travel powers are pretty self explanatory, that's where you get flight, teleportation, super jumping, super speed... They're all quite varied, I chose teleportation which allows me to zip in and out of combat with the downside of not being able to attack while teleporting vs. flying which allows you to shoot enemies from the air. Talents are just like at character creation only there are many more of them at this point and obviously off many more stat options. Power advantages allow you to take powers you already have and modify them in certain ways (like WoW glyphs sort of). Each power has very different things you can do to it so again there's a lot of customization to be had here. Powers and talents can be undone via the "Retcon" option but you'll still want to be very careful of your decisions. Unlike other games where you re-do your whole tree, in Champions you buy your powers back one by one in order with a cost based on your level. Typically this is going to be far more money than you have to backtrack all the way through your choices.

There is also crafting. Initially I dismissed crafting a pretty worthless but I've come to find it's quite easy and yields some pretty solid rewards. It isn't as grindy as crafting professions in other games and you come across enough materials as you quest to make it so that you typically have, or are close to having whatever it is you're looking to build. Materials are gathered my breaking down various equipment pieces you gather (called research) like WoW's disenchanting or by finding boxes, crates, or artifacts relevant to your profession. Researching can give you several points and quite a large amount of materials so I've found that it makes leveling your profession more of a way to supplement your adventures vs. a race to highest skill and best stuff.

The nemesis system is pretty neat, once you hit level 25 you get to make your rival. You can create the way they look and make some pretty general choices about how they act and what their powers are. Once this is done you will randomly encounter their henchmen and periodically get quests to foil his various nefarious capers. It's kind of an interesting sensation of "when and where will they strike again" that adds a very unique dynamic to wandering around the world.

My experience with PvP so far has been lackluster. I'm a casual hardcore PvPer if such a thing exists. I enjoy it, and can take it quite seriously when I participate, but for the most part it's just another thing to do for me rather than the focus of a game. With that said in Champions it often feels that the battle is decided beforehand in how well the player chose their powers/advantages giving an endge to theorycrafters over skilled PvPers. I don't really want to go as far as to say some stuff is just broken, but there are definitely powers which have very specific answers to them and in many cases you'll find there isn't anything you can do about it. There are some pretty specific things which need to be nerfed through the floor, but on the whole I do feel that most power sets are competitive. I feel that they're at least on the right track with PvP but it does need quite a bit of work before hardcore PvP players will find much amusement with it I think. The spirit of the game is that you can be any hero you want to be but that philosophy simply doesn't translate well to PvP at the moment.

Lairs/dungeons/instances are pretty cool although there doesn't seem to be very many. You don't necessarily have to fit a role such as tanking, healing, or DPS depending on the group but those are options available and many people can function as dual purposes. I find this to be quite fun, again it keeps the focus on action which is refreshing and appropriate for the game. Just as an example the groups I've found myself in have mostly been I guess what I would consider DPS. 5 of us enter in to a dungeon and start killing everything in sight. In the event that somebody starts to get attacked by a tougher mob the player generally had some defensive options available to them until the rest of the team could bail them out. For me I found myself falling back to a blocking power, healing abilities, and life draining. This typically didn't need to be maintained for very long, and was very effective for that time, because eventually one of the other team members pulls the aggro off you and a cycle of threat juggling persists. People do die, especially when caught off guard or simply having no survival options, so perhaps a traditional team (Tank + Heal + DPS) would work much more efficiently but I like that they've kept the composition choice up to the players.

On the note of lairs I will voice my one major complaint about the game thus far and that's the shard zoning. The way the game works is rather than a single congruent world there are instanced zones (sometimes called "shards") which a limited number of people are allowed to be in. Generally during peak hours this is about 70ish players with a max of 100 I believe. This would be all fine and dandy but the level variation found within those zones makes it very difficult to find people working on the same stuff as you such as dungeons and quests. You can switch shards freely but there are no shared chat channels or anything so if you're attempting to hop around for help there's no real logical way of doing it. While I have no qualms with the system itself I feel that they should at least have a few shared chat channels for looking for group type requests.

Pros:
Highly customizable
Very active gameplay
A surprising number of people playing

Cons:
Perhaps performance issues
Nothing particularly new, just repacked ideas

All things considered it's a pretty fun game. I don't know that I would recommend it for everybody but my experience with it thus far has been mostly positive.

Great Character Creation but it's not going to hold you
It has by far the best character creation system for any MMO with being able to choose all sorts of ways to do things. Just about everything you can think of a Hero can do they seem to have made a way you can do it in game. It is very amusing to pick up an SUV and bring it over and start smashing NPCs with it like a club. Great wooden dialog you would expect from comic book heroes :)

I find it entertaining but the lack of a large online base everything is thrown into small sort of instance servers (typically about 20-30 people), so it's just not going to hold you as its going to tend to be a lot of soloing. So I would say buy it just to create characters but expect the entertainment to only last about 2 months.