The Daily Grind: Have you been playing the Champions Online free weekend?

by Eliot Lefebvre on Nov 29th 2009 8:00AM

Super-hero, Events, real-world, Previews, Opinion, The Daily Grind, Champions Online

It was certainly a nice surprise when we found out that Champions Online was going to run another free weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. Not the biggest news, certainly, but nice in a "finding two dollars in your wallet that you didn't know you had" sort of way. And of course, there are always people who will take a gander at something if it's free, people who've been interested in seeing the latest updates to the game, and folks who wanted to take part in the Blood Moon event but had certain... technical issues.

There's a bit more than a day left, so today we ask: have you been taking part in the free Champions Online goodness? Has it improved or gotten worse, if you played before? If you're new the game, was it enjoyable or underwhelming? And if you had specifically opted out, why did you decide not to give it a chance? We're interested to hear your impressions, positive and negative. And if you're already playing the game, have you noticed more new faces running around this weekend?

Tags: blood-moon, champions, champions-online, cryptic, cryptic-studios, free-weekend, opinion, preview, tdg, the-daily-grind

Reader Comments (42)

I'm nearly a 3-year vet of City of Heroes. I used the open beta, blood moon, and thanksgiving free periods to get a sense of the game. Mostly I used it to try ideas I couldn't normally do in City of Heroes and to see if Cryptic had made any improvements on the gameplay.

It needs more content in the 10-20 range. I tried 3 different characters a Power Armor/Gadget mix, a Force/Ego Weaponry mix, and a Two-gun/Martial Arts mix (still only munitions at this point) I could get to level 10 between the tutorial and crisis zones. After that it's roughly the same kind of grind with the same contacts. I tried mixing it up a bit, but there's a hole in the desert and canada between 13-20 and the Millenium City content gets repetitive after the second time you do it. Also the endless "To-Do list" gets old really fast.

City of Heroes/Villains, by contrast, you had a choice 2 or 3 different contacts which would get you from 10 to 15 and then run a task force (aka lair) which would get you from 15-20. Note: The argument of "Well City of Heroes has had five years of content to build on." doesn't apply. The content I am describing was available at City of Heroes/Villains launch.

I have issues with the item system, specifically the 1 minute cooldowns for healing devices. (Ugh) Plus it would have been nicer if the power replacements item were secondaries instead of primaries.

The big thing that makes or breaks an MMO is going to be community and if the game can build it up or not. I saw a lot of CoH transplants where the whole SG decided to remake themselves in CO. I've noticed the Zone chat is a lot quieter in CO than CoH and CO doesn't have as many zones as CoH.

It's a nice game but it's not nice enough that I'll spend real money on. I'm looking forward to STO, but not if Cryptic pulls the same "open beta via fileplanet sub"-BS they did for CO. The game I'm most looking forward in the long term is SW:TOR, I like the idea of "Class-based content" since it means I don't have to sit through the same grind everytime I try out a new character concept/class.

I got hooked after the first free weekend after growing terribly bored of WoW and I needed something to fill the gap. I unfortunately never played CoH because WoW took up all of my gaming time, but CO gave me a chance to fulfill my childhood dreams of being a superhero. But it also gave me that chance to test out a Crytic MMO engine to see how the STO gameplay could be.

The game is just as repetitive as WoW and other MMOs, but the game fails hard when it comes to PVP and the instances. CO's PVP is pretty much laughable. I agree that the Zombie Apocalypse is fun for the first 5-10 minutes of the match but by the time everyone dies off and it's you vs. 100 zombies and 5 heros, you have no chance. The death-matches are very unevenly matched, but it is fun to destroy everyone though :) The acclaim system and what is considered a win is totally unrealistic and totally bugged out.

When it comes to finding a group to complete a 5 hero mission, it's almost impossible to find anyone, or anyone that has the understanding of roles. Aggro is unbalance during instances, with everyone pulling everything equally even with a character with almost no presence. There's limited or no strategy needed to complete any of the instances or multi-hero quests. it's just a but of heros button mashing kills. And if you're in a hurry you could just fly to each of the mission tasks and fly out avoiding everything else. (Where's the challenge there?)

But the game is really missing the opposition, the nemesis missions are simple, the random nemesis minion attacks are useless, it takes a single AOE to take them out before they even have a chance to attack. But the game is missing the random grind PVP. It needs player Villains, the game is boring when I can play without really having to pay attention to my surroundings. It's needs opposition.

Overall the game is too easy, since the first free weekend and last weekend i'm almost a lvl 40 with no more than 5 hours a week soling just about every mission, even the 2-3 hero instances 2-4 levels above me. I found I spent more time trying to find missions than actually doing them because I ran out of missions to do pretty quickly. Then I'm stuck doing mindless grinding missions to get to the next level.

I'll probably ride the game out until STO but I don't see me continuing to play it much longer without significant changes to the game and gameplay.

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