Played Lately: Champions Online

• The headstart for Champions Online took off with a shot Friday. So far, CO is one of those games I don't have much to blog about because, well, I'm enjoying myself. And you know nothing is worse for a blogger than a good game. With that in mind, here's a little of what I've been doing.



• As threatened, I rerolled Arcfire as my main character. I was able to tear through the tutorial zone in, if the timestamp on this image was right, just about an hour. I did reread the quest text, which slowed me down a little. Yeah, I'm not sure why. Guess I'm just weird. (Agree or disagree in the comments.) At some point in the future, Cryptic may want to allow for a clearer through-line for the tutorial. Maybe let Socrates (the game's crime computer) give you a hefty fetch and kill quest that leads right to Dr. Silverback with lots of bonus experience points. Really, how many of you will want to do the "block three attacks" quest on your eighth character?



• The desert crisis mission takes a little longer, but I was able to get through it and the following quests in due time. I really enjoy the crisis zone idea and hope there is more of that in the future. It may not be as elegant as phasing content, but it works well in context of the zone instancing architecture.


• And as long as I'm mentioning it, the instancing hasn't annoyed me once at all. The game naturally directs you to instances with friends in them. (I've picked up a few random names from groups.) And there are just enough people around to make the worlds come alive. I don't want to see several thousand people zipping over Millennium City. With that many heroes around, there would never be crime in the city.


• Let me put it to you this way: everyone thinks Batman is such a bad-ass superhero. If he's so amazing, how come there is still crime in Gotham City? The reason is that he's only got himself. And whatever supplemental characters DC needs to push more Batbooks onto the shelves. That's what Champions feels like and what it needs to feel like.



• Just today, I wandered over to the Canadian zone to see what quests were available and had a good time. I enjoy the fact that both zones have low and high level content in them, so we'll have an excuse to come back and continue exploring.


• The Qularr invasion is also going on for us headstarters. It's, um, interesting. Bugs show up every hour or so and the stack of heroes at the drop point pound them into paste within minutes. Maybe the developers didn't take into account how popular this would be. More bugs, please. (That feels like a weird thing to ask for in a game.)



• I've continued to play around in the character creator. I love that I can save a costume without even finishing a character. Then if I do want an alt, I'll have a few ready for me to try out. Here we have the Techno Angel. She's made with bits from the lifetime subscription bonus, so keep that in mind if you download her.


• I'll more than likely keep uploading new characters as I make them, just in case you'd like to use them. Maybe a little practice with the character creator will improve my proficiency with it. We'll see.


• Again, I'm Arcfire@AnjinM in game. Look me up and we'll smash some bad guys together!

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