The superhero MMOG genre is well-served, with no less than three out there, either in development or installed on RPGers' PCs. But that weight of numbers doesn't phase Cryptic, developer of Champions Online: it made two of them.
So, Champions Online is something of a City of... mark 2. Heroes and Villains fill their MMO world, a more polished and cartoony creation than their earlier game. At its base it's a template for you to fulfil your superhero fantasies more completely than any game before.
Total customisation, from the look and size of the hero to the story and their nemesis, is put at the player's fingers. You'll craft a persona as if you'd woken one morning and discovered a glowing spider bite on your bum and a surfeit of Lycra in your closet.
An interesting side-effect of their need for total player control is Champions will not have classes. You are what you make, and any specialisation will come from your own decisions.
Cryptic's system will spin off from a single character mesh, from which you'll tailor the player. A little bit of muscle here, a few extra inches of height. There are no Tanks to colour up, no speedy bodies to select. Just a male and female template and your imagination. It should end up with a server full of garish costumes and interesting character shapes.
With great power comes great responsibility. But it comes with great power first. The fighting in Champions lashes out punches and kicks in real-time; combat that would usually be relegated to a hotbar along the bottom of the screen now happens according to the button mashing.
Even the power is a bit mixed: rather than fighting a with a pool of power, you actually use the light kicks and strikes to build up power for the stronger attacks.
This is a result of two things: Champions will be cross-platform on the PC and Xbox360, all played on a single shard, so you'll have gamers of both platforms on the same server. The second reason is because they can. Lag is no longer such an issue that they need worry about the hotbar.
The world of Champions will stretch beyond the city-based expenses of the previous two Cryptic MMOGs, over an entire planet and beyond.
Glimpses were had at a Wild West town filled with cowboy robots and overseen by Ascii Oakley, a prison where a throbbing-brained mentalist is sewing insurrection and a beautiful tropical island (going by the name of Monster Island).
Here we note the first real trappings of mmorpugerry: gangs of roaming baddies, ready to aggro. The fighting mechanic makes it much more of an action game than you'd expect of an MMOG, particularly in the way the you charge the attacks.
It's good to know that you can punch away at an enemy and it adds to your overall attack power. Particularly when the bar fills up, as there's one thing Cryptic does better than any other MMOG dev and that's imbue you with a feeling of power. Baddies fly from powerful shield powers, dark clouds of life energy get sucked out. It's all rather awes-inspiring.
All this customisation begs one large question: how will the game support a team of heroes, as the very idea of team role-playing game rests in complimentary powers?
How will having teams of uniquely powered characters fit with the need for a cohesive unit? Will there be enough healers or support classes? Will that even matter? Only extensive play-testing, something we weren't privy to, will see the answer unfold. Still, it'll be fun fighting it out.
I really like the art style of this. Realistic environments with comic-style characters. It gives a nice effect.
No classes could be interesting too, although I can see a potential issue with people wanting to be self-sufficient and everyone picking a kiting / stealth class or something.
I might check this one out. Fingers crossed there'll be a demo.
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