Friday, September 21, 2018

Champions Online 9th Anniversary!

Happy anniversary Champions Online! It's hard to believe you are 9 yrs old and you're the longest and only active superhero MMO today! You are also a slightly unbalanced and generic MMO with uninspired questing, a terrible cash shop and f2p restrictions.

9 years ago I was fortunate enough be given a copy of CO to review for a site named Gamesquad, an opportunity I am grateful for. Unfortunately the website doesn't exist anymore so I'll have to dig up a copy of the review to see what I thought of the game at launch. I have spent quite a bit of time with CO the past three weeks, I hit level 38 which is a couple short of max so I might write-up a re-review just for the heck of it.

What I will say about Champions Online right now is the questing is bland and generic. CO is highly reliant on gear which makes the early levels really tough. If you don't have a gold account or lifetime sub you are limited to pre-made archetypes, some of which from what I've read online are plain bad. Did I mention the questing is generic? There is very little in Champions Online that makes you feel like you are a superhero in a comic. Replace the superhero gimmick with a fantasy setting, or a sci-fi setting, or anything that comes out of Korea and the game would be the same. It's so generic that at times I struggled to get excited to login and play.

So yes, Champions Online is 9 years old this year, it is a time capsule of MMO game design from almost a decade ago.


3 comments:

Yeebo said...

I really enjoyed it around launch, but got out of it when my PC died and never made it back. A lot of the appeal of the game when I played hinged on the deep flexible character generation system. However, the developers pretty much lost their minds when they developed the FtP system. Locking that FF character generation system behind a $30, per character, paywall pretty much guarantees I'll never try the game again.

You don't recruit new players by giving them access to the mediocre parts of your game with gimped characters. You show them what's awesome about your game and charge for extras.

Jayedub said...

The freeform restrictions are just ridiculous in this game. Wildstar and ESO, I believe, are good examples of a sub-based game making the switch to f2p, CO is unfortunately a relic of the past where developers felt the need to make paywalls for many aspects of their game.

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