Anybody playing the Champions Online beta?

[Rahvin]

For those who don't know, Champions Online is a new superhero MMORPG developed by Cryptic, the same team behind City of Heroes/Villains.

They seem to have learned some very good lessons from their previous games - powers are no longer constrained to a single role or power set, meaning you can shoot fireballs and lightning with super strength, telekinesis and supernatural claws. Myriad customization options are available, from choosing the color and emanation point of many powers, to alterations to the basic function of a given power, and the inclusion of actual equipment instead of the powers-only system of City of Heroes. There are no "classes" at all in the traditional sense of MMOs - instead, you can change your role on the fly, though obviously certain powers work better for certain roles. This allows for much more flexible grouping. Imagine a Druid from WoW changing forms to heal, DPS, or tank as needed, without the need for a specific talent build for each role.

They also fixed the ever-annoying "name unavailable" issue - you can have the same name as someone else, the game simply adds "@accountname" to your name in chat. No more meticulous planning of a character only to have the name already taken.

After a painful patching issue yesterday (Cryptic's servers just weren't prepared for the traffic they received, and they had a few minor patching bugs to work out besides), the open beta is now available to any pre-order customers and Fileplanet subscribers.

Because of the patching issues, I wasn't able to get online until this morning before work. I played for about an hour, long enough to make a quick-and-dirty character and get through the 5-level tutorial. Obviously I haven't seen much yet, but the game is very pretty. I like the cell-shaded style, and the effects are what you'd expect from a modern superhero game running on a decent video card (I use a GeForce 260, and I can crank the settings all the way with pretty good performance). Outside of the patching system (which has been fixed as of around 11 last night PST), I haven't yet experienced any instability or bugs.

The combat is fun - you use "energy-builder" low-damage attacks to build up energy to do larger attacks, which you can typically charge up for a second for greater effect. Blocking is also an important addition - when you see an enemy start charging a high-damage attack, you can block to reduce the damage. The effect is that combat feels a lot more interactive and fast-paced than the typical "click button, wait, click button" ability rotations.

Travel powers come at level 5, straight out of the tutorial. No more slogging through 14 levels (or 20 now in WoW) at your base running speed. Travel powers have expanded, too - along with the standard Flight/Teleport/Superspeed/Superjump, they've added Ice Slide, Flying Disc (you stand on a disc and fly, like Static Shock), Earth Flight (same, but with a boulder), Swinging, Rocket Boots, Rocket Jump, Fire Flight, Tunneling, and others. Wings and capes are basic features, not unlockables. Wings flap while flying.

Respeccing is easy for a fee, like in WoW,as opposed to the limited number of respecs available in CoH/V. Likewise with costume changes - you can buy new costumes straight out of the tutorial. Items that drop can now be used to modify your costume - for example, a hero with single-blade melee powers will use a basic katana in the beginning, but if he loots a magic claymore from an enemy, he can now use that item's model for his power - even if he later replaces the sword for a better item.

PvP has been implemented from the beginning, instead of being tacked-on like in CoH/V. You can't be a villain (yet), but team-based and free-for-all PvP arenas are in-game at launch. Obviously I haven't had a chance to play with these yet having just gotten out of the tutorial, but I plan on checking it out soon.

At level 20, you design your own arch-nemesis, down to picking his power set, his mindset (bestial destroyer vs. evil genius, etc),and even the type and look of his henchmen.

Basically it seems like Champions is everything I wished CoH had been. I paid $5 for a pre-order at Gamestop, and I'm basically using the open beta as a demo to see if I want to actually pick up the game. So far, I'm liking it.

Anybody else giving this one a try?

[OmegaChief]

As someone who was in the closed beta of CO I can say that it didn't really impress me all that much, but before I get started on listing my reasons I'd like to say that the entire game is rather subjective and that all I can really recommend is trying it yourself.

That said I did try it myself, and the following are my views on the whole thing:

Let's start at the beginning, with the costume creator, it is pretty nifty and does hive wide range of options though most of these lean towards anime-esq robotics parts or a huge amount of bestial features. However it does fall down in that it doesn't have many matching costume pieces so you either become limited or look like a hodge podge of different character pieces. They do also lean towards the silly and/or extreme, though many of the costume pieces will be familiar to anyone who's played City of Heroes, though with the added problem that a great deal of the costume pieces clip. The sliders for your characters body do allow for a lot of customisation, but conversely also make it very easy to accidentally create a deformed monstrosity; this is most prominent with the face, of which there is only really one of for a (Normal human) man or woman. Credit where credit is due though, the animated tails are quite cool, even if some are ridiculsly huge and stances too are a nice touch, such as the run on all fours bestial, though this may only appeal to a certain type of player. The expressions are good in theory, but in practice all but a few look rather goofy and silly.

Having danced around the issue there it's time to confront one of the most obvious things you'll see when looking at CO, the graphics. Cel shading is still a pretty decisive style from what I've seen when discussing this game, and in my personally opinion it doesn't look that bad, though I will advise you to turn off the black outlining as soon as you get into the options screen the game looks far better with them off. The animates too can feel a little choppy at times and some things, such as the much touted non-rooting combat (Especially for melee attacks), can look quite ridicules at times.

Which leads me onto powers, you're going to be a Tank-Mage, everyone is, if you were looking for things like a character built on crowd control or the likes think again, there's not much if any of that to be found here, sure you can mix it up with lots of kinds of ranged or the odd AoE centred on you but that's it really. The power customisation isn't all the grand either, though I'd stress this was my opinion, you can indeed choose the origin point of most kinds of ranged attacks, but every origin point shares the same animation, so your throw little fireballs from your hands will look the same as someone throwing little energy balls from their hands.

The aforementioned little ball power is something you'll be using a lot in combat (Or it's equivalent in whatever build you choose), as it's the only way you'll be able to replenish your endurance, sure you can open with a nice meaty attack, but then you'll have your endurance building attack on for a while as you run around to build up enough power to hit something with a meaty attack once again. Also blocking, when something like 'Freem' appears over a bad guys head you'll need to block, which you do by holding a key, and if a bad guy manages to entangle or hold you need to rapidly mash a button to escape, all in all it feels very much like a consol button mashing game in general, so if that's not your thing CO really isn't the game for you.

The tutorial you have to do every time you make a new character, no option to skip, get stuck there until level five, and then you're carted off to a "Crisis zone" which has a big problem you have to fix, before finally being carted off to the zones proper. I will say here the whole Crisis zone idea is pretty neat, and it does give you the feel that you're changing the world, though they're about the only thing that does, the rest of it falls into the classic MMO trap of encouraging you to pick up a bunch of quests and go off to that area to do them, with lots of kill x or y, kill x of y until it drops z and click x number of y.

The zones themselves are big yes, but there's not many of them. You have the vast artic wasteland, the vast desert, the vast monster filled island, the vast under sea kingdom and the vast New Y- I mean Millennium city. That's it. There is a fair bit to see, and there are some genuinely good bits, like a civilian in Millennium City running up to you and alerting you of a kidnapping or a demon summoning or some such, it's all pretty nifty.

With the whole thing on a "Single shard" this means there's going to be half a dozen versions of each zone at one time, good luck finding your friends to team with! Not that there's any want or need to, you can solo pretty much everything, there's no rewards for teaming, and say you're teamed and you need to collect x every person in the team needs to individually collect x! But as I said, it's Tank-Mage Online you don't need anyone else!

I believe the Nemesis thing is implemented at level 25, why there and not a the start of near there I'll never know, and personally I never made it that far, the game just did no appeal to me, a repetitive solo game is what it felt like, nothing leaped out to say "Quick help these people" and I hope you like working with the military, because you do that a lot in this game. Military heroes online might have been a better title! Or maybe Super soldier online.

If its power customisation that you really want, and a super hero game with a lot more content, pick up a City of Heroes trial once Issue 16 comes out, it has pretty much the same level of power customisation as Tank-Mage Online then.

Anyway, in short, the games not for me, though if anyone would like some clarification on any of my points I'll be glad to give them

[Oskuro]

Good to get a couple reviews on this. I tried to sign up for the beta, but no luck apparently. I'm hoping this game does not fall to the all too common "early release" problem (aka the Age of Conan Syndrome), and it gets its own voice. Hopefully the pressence of more Super-Hero MMOs will encourage an improvement on the games.

One question though. How's the control scheme? Is it sticky like CoX (where your character would freeze in place to fire powers), or fluid like WoW (where it feels like your playing a 3rd person action game)? Or is it *gasp* point-and-click?!
Is positioning and movement important? Or you just need to be in range and start mashing buttons?

[Minischoles]

On the controls, you can pick different control sets, I forget what they are, but there is a 'fantasy' control set, which is essentially the WoW control set. As far as i've played with my more ranged class, as long as you've got energy/mana and you're in range, you can attack. You've got your basic energy building attack and more devastating ones, but thats about the extent of the combat i've seen so far. The charging up of for more powerful abilities is nice, but some of the powers feel a little underwhelming vs the more powerful goons.
Movement seems to be important, as does positioning. Attack an enemy and you should down him, but if you get any of his mates come along, you'll start losing hp, and you're going to have to hightail it away and heal up. However unlike WoW, the mobs don't seem to de-aggro unless you run halfway across the map, which can lead to you barely damaging a set of goons, and then someone else swooping in and finishing them off and you still getting credit.
One of the very annoying things so far is that even the slightest attack or bit of damage completely interrupts your healing. So in the few pvp events i've done, if you're not completely offensive based (eg dual blade or single blade) you're just getting absolutely destroyed.

[White Haven]

Not ANOTHER MMO with a love-affair with melee combat. It always happens, the rogue-analog class simply wins.

[Stark]

Are you saying you're tired of tank/melee dps/spike/heal breakdowns? WHATEVER FOR?

[Mr Bean]

I've got it, still trying it out, no comment as of yet, still playing with the character create to see what's possible

[OmegaChief]

Not ANOTHER MMO with a love-affair with melee combat. It always happens, the rogue-analog class simply wins.

Small issue being there aren’t 'classes' at all, really you just choose a bunch of powers and on level up you can choose from a list of every other power in the game. With Melee attacks do more damage on average then ranged (I believe, don't take this as word of god) going into melee range can put you in the horrible rape radius of the bad guys.

As for rooting, very few of the powers root you to the spot, you can run around and spam them as much as you like, though doing that is likely to make you run into the aggro range of even more bad guys.

Control scheme wise you can pick from a couple of options, including aforementioned "Fantasy" for WoW-style controls or "Paragon" for City of Heroes style controls, though from my experience and those of other testers the best control scheme is to use the (Unsupported) Xbox 360 controller to play the game. As I said it's very much a console button mashing game

[Minischoles]

Not ANOTHER MMO with a love-affair with melee combat. It always happens, the rogue-analog class simply wins.

Small issue being there aren’t 'classes' at all, really you just choose a bunch of powers and on level up you can choose from a list of every other power in the game. With Melee attacks do more damage on average then ranged (I believe, don't take this as word of god) going into melee range can put you in the horrible rape radius of the bad guys.

As for rooting, very few of the powers root you to the spot, you can run around and spam them as much as you like, though doing that is likely to make you run into the aggro range of even more bad guys.

Control scheme wise you can pick from a couple of options, including aforementioned "Fantasy" for WoW-style controls or "Paragon" for City of Heroes style controls, though from my experience and those of other testers the best control scheme is to use the (Unsupported) Xbox 360 controller to play the game. As I said it's very much a console button mashing game

Unfortunately melee classes seem to be very dominant. A friend of mine i've been playing with rolled dual blade, and one of the attacks he has is a constant knockback charge, in melee range, that costs 12 energy (at level 20 he has 120 energy) and does 200 damage. Considering most hp pools are about 1500 at level 14, thats a lot.

And the horrible rape radius of some bad guys is pretty much being in range. Villans at about level 14 can hit for 600, whether at furthest range or in melee range. Getting yourself a heal is pretty much mandatory, no matter what class you are, and you spend the tougher boss fights running for your life and desperately healing up before going back in to continue downing it.
I can only speak from a ranged perspective, but the more powerful charge attacks can require standing still for >8 seconds charging to full energy, and the heals currently require you to stand completely still channeling, with even minor damage (like cold environment damage, or even a hit of 2 damage) completely breaks the channeling.

[Rahvin]

Got past lvl 10 yesterday.

For perspective, so far I;ve been choosing powers exclusively from the Electricity pool - no melee stuff as of yet. Electric attacks have a chance to chain to other targets - tight groups of low-powered goons are cake. I also don't ever want for energy - I gain it back so quickly that it's really just not fair. I can chain my charge-up nuke (Chain Lightning) pretty much constantly as long as I hit once or twice with my energy builder now and again (which tends to happen by itself since my reaction time isn't perfect and the energy builder is a toggle). I also have Lightning Shield to enhance my blocking ability, Electric Form to enhance my damage and energy damage resistance, and I just got Thunderstrike (ranged AoE damage on a small cooldown, increases the chance of Chain Lightning to chain to other targets, soon to add a Hold effect to the initial target).

I like the combat because it feels more engaged than WoW's fire-and-forget rotation style.

I haven't yet played with melee focused abilities, and I haven't tried PvP yet.

At level 10 my chain lightning takes about 1 second to charge, and typically does between 120-180 damage to the initial target (depending on relative levels).

I still get raped by large groups, but normal villains aren't too tough. My chaining abilities let me just kill the biggest enemy, and the chained attacks take care of the minions. I managed to solo a 3-person quest (though I did die immediately after killing the main target).

I'm still finding the game to be really fun. Priorities are currently to try grouping with others and to try out PvP (I just got a mission to try out PvP last night, so I'll even get some XP). I anticipate PvP to be very interesting because of the ease with which energy recharges. We'll see whether melee really dominates. With such a flexible character system, "balance" may not be an applicable term. Of course, I can hardly feel bad for someone who takes no defensive or healing abilities at all and then sucks at PvP when they die before their 1337 d4m4g3 can pwn anyone, so maybe balance will simply be biased against foolish choices.

[Narkis]

I played for a bit in the closed beta. I gave it up though once I realized just how similar to City of Heroes it was. Not that I didn't like CoH, but after playing the original for some months, I had no interest in playing a rehashed version with better graphics.

[Rahvin]

I played CoH years ago, and returned for a few months after CoV came out.

I've found CO to be different enough from CoH to keep me interested so far. Granted, it's only been a few days. But the amount of customization possible in CO is staggaring, far beyond what CoH had available. The costumes are all just as varied,but now you can be asymmetrical and you don't have to wait until lvl20 or 30 to get glowing eyes or a cape. The big part is the powers and the basic mechanics, though. Energy management is 100% different in CO than in CoH. Classes no longer exist. You can mix and match any and all powers in the game.

The UI definitely reminds me of CoH. The basic art design makes me think of CoH with updated graphics. The storyline (alien invasion, Defender/Statesman vs Dr. Destroyer/Whathisname Tarantula Guy, etc) is defintiely reminiscent of CoH.

But the actual gameplay is more than a minor evolutionary iteration, I think. CoH at its core was still a "tank/healer/DPS/Utility" class-based, "hit a button for an ability with mana-based energy management" kind of game. Functionally it was little different from WoW or any other popular MMO. In CO energy management is more like a cross between a rogue and a warrior from WoW, with 90% less frustration than either of those mechanics alone. The removal of classes brings flexibility in group makeup so that you don't spend an hour looking for a tank to fill the raid, and don't need to respec just to do some PvP. It feels more superheroic than CoH ever did, by far.

It's certainly possible I'll get bored by the end of the week, or I'll try PvP or an instance and be so completely disappointed that I'll move my $5 prepay to a different game and forget CO. But right now, I'm going home on lunch to play CO. See you guys in an hour

[Rahvin]

Last day of the beta is here. Cryptic has arranged a special event for the end: a massive invasion from Dr. Destroyer, where all heroes can immediately level up to the cap and fight off an invasion of giant robots while exploring the full content. Played a but on my lunch break, and it's good fun at 40. Also, loot will drop in the event that will persist to the live game but will never be seen again, so you get a little something for helping with the beta.

The game has a few problems with unbalanced powers that make some characters too easy in PvE or unstoppable in 1v1 PvP, but that's the case with nearly every MMO I've ever played, especially at launch. Overall the missions are interesting, give decent rewards, and make me want to keep playing. There are enough power selections over the course of a character's career to allow for some pretty powerful and adaptable results, and the pick-and-choose system allows for an incredible amount of variety and creativity with character design that just isn't present in most MMOs. The world looks pretty, though it doesn't feel nearly as immersive as a fluid, open-world design like WoW.

I'll pick up the game and at least play the free month, at this point. Farther than that...we'll see.

[White Haven]

Okay, after spending the last less-than-a-week-or-so playing the beta, it's Rebuttal Time.

First: That heal issue you were whinging about, Mini? I'm gonna go ahead and assume that that's Psychic Healing, which is...let's see, insanely cheap, channeled so the heal starts instantly, AND can be channeled while moving. Y'don't think that warrants a single disadvantage? Every other heal I've run across so far has been immune to interruption via damage. For that matter, in the little PVP I got around to doing in the beta, melee DPS wasn't instagibbing people at all. That's not to say it wasn't doing hefty damage, but not rapetrain levels of death. Warhammer taught me to withhold judgement until the higher levels, however, as it had a good heal/damage balance for the first twenty, and ass for the last twenty, so time will tell.

Second: Rooting. If you want to get shit for damage out of them, many of the better attacks are charge powers. Now most of them will fire with a tap, but that's only if you're duelling your girlfriend and really want to tickle her; for serious damage you're gonna be wanting a full charge. On the flip side, 90% of a full charge is 90% of a full charge's damage, so if you have to get the fuck out of dodge, your cast time isn't wasted. Bonus!

Thirdly: Necessity of heals and dangerousness of villains. Partially right there, you can fight bosses that way, but I've also seen rapetrain-build heroes with a single short-duration invulnerability power accomplish the same thing, albeit chancier. If you're having survivability troubles, spend 2 powers over in Force and get yourself a passive (pretty strong) defence in Personal Force Field as /well/ as an invuln cooldown. Oh, and GET TELEPORT. Yes, other travel powers are cool. No, other travel powers don't give you what amounts to a phase-shift get out of jail free card AND give you perfect stealth for setting up sneak attacks. Oh, and it's fast as hell when you're shifted out AND it doesn't have a ramp-up time like Flight.

As for my own observations, I've been enjoying it. They fucked the exp curve in the ear at the end of beta, but that was apparently a test (gosh, in beta?) so all the forum whinging has me amused. I hope there's no raiding/ultra-high-density PVP environment, because if there is they're going to need a new engine, the Destroyer event fucked performance hard. The costume bits still need more anticlipping work and as has been mentioned, they also need more coherent sets. I also didn't see any glow options in the costume creator, which is a bit of a bummer. They also REALLY need to spend a few months going over the quests for inter-quest coherence, it's quite clear that they either had multiple writers doing quests in the same storyarcs OR at least one of their writers is, in fact, an orangutan. The same quest giver will give me a quest telling me to question the aid of the mayor's chief of staff regarding a kidnapping AND another quest telling me that the mayor's chief of staff is a mind-controlling supervillain in disguise as if it were something everyone should already know and not a major discovery.

Power types that don't get an energy form need some loving to make up for the lack of such a meaty damage boost or else energy forms need to catch it in the teeth. With the whole automatic 40 thing my (originally level 18, so better geared) sorceress was hitting for something like half what my formerly level-11 telepath was, simply because Shadow Form applies to Ego attacks and I haven't seen any form that'll work for sorc stuff. For character concept work, there really needs to be a broader choice of energy-builder attacks in a given powerset, and by broader I mean 'more than one.' Weapon costume bits need to be pulled from and replaced in holsters when a weapon-based class is using them, rather than just being static costume items and the weapons blinking in and out of existence.

Overall, well, it felt like a beta, and as usual it's being released before time, but I don't think it's too FAR before time to be salvagable. I'm planning on playing it, at any rate.

[Rahvin]

I played around very briefly with healing and tanking. I found it interesting that a healing character will be regaining energy by attacking enemies.

The damage differences with certain abilities are a little weird. Your "super stats" (the giant bonus to two stats you choose in the first few levels) seem to determine the scaling of your abilities more than anything else, though abilities also scale with set attributes (empath heals scale with Ego, for instance, which obviously Might powers are going to want Strength). But my Lightning character's main nuke, Chain Lightning, does FAR less damage than my Darkness sorceress' Shadow Blast. The Tap damage is equivalent roughly, but charging Chain Lightning seems to just give a higher chance to arc to additional enemies rather than buffing the damage.

When I popped to 40, Gigabolt became my primary nuke (and it has a humorous reference in the description to Back to the Future as a bonus). That thing hits hard even as a tap, easily 75%+ of a fully-charged Shadow Blast without the charge time. When I charge it, it consumes my energy form for a moment...but holy crap does it hurt.

Condemn is a godly power - a ranges small AoE that looks impressive and applies an 8 second hold to enemies. That's right - you can chain-Condemn closely packed enemies to death with virtually no risk...unless you miss one.

Some of the Advantages and power ranks don't seem to be working - either descriptions don't appear when you look in the leveling menu, or they just don't seem to have an effect when you select them (this could be forum paranoia and effects could just be a little different from what people are anticipating - we don't have anything like WoWWebStats to do our own data mining at this point). For some powers taking Rank 2 or even 3 doesn't seem to have any effect; for others there's a huge difference. It's a beta, I'm not overly concerned.

Cryptic is being very helpful with giving us numbers. Power descriptions usually tell you exactly what percentage chance a secondary effect has to proc, exactly your range of damage, etc.

Haven's right about Teleport. You cannot fly in combat quickly enough to escape, and other powers are similarly limited. Teleport's combat disadvantage is a 12-second cooldown before you can teleport a second time...but one teleport is sufficient to escape a dangerous combat area, heal up, and come back for more. And stealth is vastly inferior to suddenly teleporting directly behind your enemy and striking as you phase back in. I think they did a great job of making it useful for PvE but giving it a disadvantage that prevents it from allowing melee to utterly rape everyone in PvP.

My little PvP experience taught me only that knockback sucks on the receiving end, and Shotgun needs to be changed. The devs have said that the engine currently doesn't allow diminishing returns on knockback, meaning powers like Shotgun can chain knockdowns and slowly kill you,though it'll take forever even with no defensive abilities.

The giant robots event did crush my video card almost to oblivion. Frame rates were somewhere in the teens, but I had everything at high settings and in smaller (5 or so) groups I didn't have any trouble. Honestly the same thing happens in any game when way too much happens at once - I'm sure many of us remember 40-man raids in WoW on computers from 4+ years ago.

The most important thing is that the game is fun to play, and on that level it succeeds. The opening month will give us an idea how the Devs are going to address the remaining issues and whether my opinion is the result of "oooh, shiny!" or the game is actually going to remain fun for an extended period of time.

[Drooling Iguana]

choosing the color and emanation point of many powers

Does this mean that I can shoot plasma balls from my penis?

Could I make a kilted Scotsman superhero that attacks by shooting fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse?

I don't really see the point otherwise.

[White Haven]

Sadly it's chest, head, fist, or open palm only. Besides, it'd take a decidedly unusual amount of custom animation work to have powers that required you to aim your ass at an enemy every other attack. Oh, and as a non sequitor, the Doppler effect sounds REALLY wierd on some of the sounds, ESPECIALLY power-armor eye-beams.

[Mr Bean]

Speaking of sounds. Looks like they use the same sound library as City of Heroes/Villians, lots of sounds have been re purposed in Champions Online. I know I've heard Zombie Vomit, Titan Missile launch and Mastermind Robotics sounds re-used for mobs and a dozen other old sounds in new places.

[Rahvin]

Speaking of sounds. Looks like they use the same sound library as City of Heroes/Villians, lots of sounds have been re purposed in Champions Online. I know I've heard Zombie Vomit, Titan Missile launch and Mastermind Robotics sounds re-used for mobs and a dozen other old sounds in new places.

Other sounds have been redone - many of the Electricity framework's effects sound very different from CoH, for example. Gigabolt has a very nice thunder peal with it.

A LOT has been borrowed, though. Honestly, it doesn't bother me - there were many things done right in CoH/V, sounds and design included, and I'm perfectly happy to let them keep what works well.

I tried Ice Slide last night. It fits thematically - you can't stop on a dime, you continually slide downward unless you actively try to move up, and while the comet-trail effect isn't quite comic-book ice-sliding goodness, it's as close as I'd expect a game engine to get. Still, I didn't like it compared to other flight methods or Teleport.

Going to try our a Force character tonight before the servers are shut down. If I have time (I'm getting pretty good at the tutorial zones), I'll try something with melee.

[Mr Bean]

So who's thinking of getting the game fyi?

[Rahvin]

So who's thinking of getting the game fyi?

I'm definitely picking it up. It's more than fun enough to try when it hits live.

[OmegaChief]

A no from me, while I admit, it does do some good things, and have some good idea's, there's just not enough to hold me.

Now if it were f2p with some microtransactions for funding (So long as they wern't game breaking so I can ignore them), then I might reconsider, but nope not willing to shell out for a second MMO, I'm happy with City of Heroes/Villians, roll on issue 16!

(Yes I know they have lifetime subs up, but I don't have a hundred odd quid laying about right now, and the whole debacle with them running out is somthing else for another time/thead)

[Ritterin Sophia]

Nope, I'll be sticking with WoW and CoX, for the time being. When The Old Republic comes out I'll be cancelling those in favour of some Star Wars goodness.

[Vanas]

So, I gave it a shot for the beta, and I've really had fun. Been on CoH for a few years and I've got a little tired of it, so it's ncie to have CO around. I don't really indulge in PvP, so I can't comment on that aspect of the game, but I had time for a little PvE before the 1m HP killbots arrived. My main gripe thus far had been the fact that some of the low levels were frankly dull. Especially starting out with a Power Armour character, watching the wrist bolters slowly chip off health incredibly slowly was mind-numbing. I appreciate that may have been my fault for choosing the gadget blaster as second choice and after I dupmed it and replaced it with Iron Man beams, the whole thing flowed so much better. So, that's a plus, the way you could happily respec your entire power tree from just after the tutorial. The it's nice to get travel powers early and practicality has long since fallen by the wayside for swinging, rocket jump and acrobatics. Sure, I'll never get quite where I want to be, but I'll have far too much fun trying. I can't flaw the feel of the game, really. I liked the way that CoH makes you feel heroic, and this has ramped it up a few notches. I've seen a few heroes pick up NPC stalkers and have been forced to sign autographs.

Really, the sheer amount of variety the game offers encourages me. Sure, the PvP twinks will undoubtedly work out das uber set eventually, but screw them. Roll on missile-spewing, demon-summoning, orbitally striking toy collectors with chainsaws for arms. It's silly, it's funny and, well, I've had more fun on it than I've had on CoH in a long while and WoW... ever. So, I think I'll be getting it.

[White Haven]

@whitehaven here, so yeah, I'll be playing. As with City, I'll be a compulsive altaholic, so who can say where things go from here? I like how you don't feel like a pathetic loser pre-25ish (and especially pre-14) like you did in City, so maybe I'll actually have the willpower to keep playing characters enough to slog past the doldroms.