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....wow.
....wow.
#1
So, I'm going to the Champions Online website to check the free trial weekend deal, figure I'll mess around with it, yeah?

....the website is down, with the following message:

Quote: The web site is currently offline

The web site is currently offline. We apologize for this temporary inconvenience and are working to return to service as soon as
possible.


Um....nice one, I guess.

EDIT: And it's back up. Apparently whenever Champions has downtime for the servers...they have downtime on the website and official forums as well. Okay
then.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
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#2
Heh nice. So I'm going to admit despite my skeptisicm I'm going to Try out Champions Dureing this Trial weekend, y'know seeing as I don't have
to pay a penny for it I can at the very least give it a -try-
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#3
Hmmm, free weekend? Maybe i'll try it out. If anything at least to try the character generator
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#4
I'm trying the trial weekend too. First impressions?

Well, you gotta understand, I've just spent the past four hours messing with the character creator. I haven't actually touched the GAME.

Now, first of all...the character creator at once gives more and less than City of Heroes. CoH has more raw costume pieces to play with - but that shouldn't be a surprise, because CoH has been adding costume pieces for over five years. It should have more raw stuff.

Also, I understand a lot of stuff in Champs is unlockable. Which is fine - because there's more than enough basic stuff to play with.

The basic ENGINE here for the character creator is far more robust. The body scales are incredible - adjust length of arms, size of hands, jeez. It's all pretty damn sweet.

You can actually make flat-chested women here. Not that I intend to embrace the loli force, but, uh, if you were looking to actually make a proper-looking little girl, you can.

The face editor...is okay. It's not as robust as games like Bioware's Mass Effect or Dragon Age, but it's a damn sight better than anything else out there. There's a very limited range of different facial textures...though there ARE multiple 'normal face' textures, I should note. And they do make a big difference. But the REAL way you distinguish character faces is by playing with the sliders. And again, the sliders are...robust. That's all very satisifying.

More on the game once I get my gamepad configured.

Yes, I'm going to be playing with a gamepad. It's that kind of game.
-- Acyl
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#5
How much HD space does it take for this anyway?

-Morgan.
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#6
3.8 Gigs, I believe the instillation was. It's remarkably fast compared to CoH, but then....who knows how much of CoH's install is issues 1-16. :lol
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
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#7
remarkably fast?... I've been downloading for 5 1/2 hours and i'm only at 88%
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#8
About 2.62 GB on my drive ...

I haven't been all too impressed by the gameplay, but it may be because my graphics card is struggling to keep up. I am amused that the default pose for
women is 'vixen' and you start with Max Breasts. It is commendable you can make a slim girl though. I haven't really *really* played around the the
Costume creator, but from my hour fiddling about, it looks pretty nice. Though a lot of the costume options are slightly different patterns for the same basic
look. There's a lot of options, and it does look quite nice, though. The one quip I do have about it is their high heels look kinda blah compared to CoH.
But there are a lot of other options that look nice.

It's somewhat fun as it is, though I can tell I'm kinda slow running things on pretty mode. If I had a better desktop/GPU to run with, it could
probably be a fun game. If I had the great company (And better equipment) it could be worth a play. But for me, not with out people to play with.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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#9
There's more to the costume creator than at first glance. Things like, say, trenchcoats are pretty buried in the options. They're there, but you gotta go look in alternate pulldown menus and suchlike.
It's...not the most intuitively laid-out UI. I like what the costume creator engine does, but the interface could use some work.
Granted, the City of Heroes one isn't that fantastic as well, and they have continually re-organized the CoH creator and where costume pieces are located. The CoH creator is a lot more logical nowadays than it was at launch.
The Champs one still has that not quite polished feel to it.
EDIT: By the way, I'm in Champs as @Acyl, naturally. Character name for the moment is Payload.
-- Acyl
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#10
I'm not all to sure how to work the Global chat, but I'll be the same as ever, likely running some form of Braende through the stuff.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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#11
Mmm. I'll likely download it tomorrow when I'm in Florida.

What's it recommend for minimum system requirements? I'm leery that my poor laptop will simply implode under the stress.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
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#12
BTW - I'm in-game on an account shared with a friend. We're on as @Aariny.

Strangely, he hasn't shown as much interest in this test period. I keep checking with him - "Dude, you sure I'm not hogging this? You wanna jump
in, anytime, let me know or log on yourself and kick me, okay?"

He's says he's cool with it. So far, he's got two characters, I've got 6. Heh.

I unlocked the Celestial Powerset, BTW, and made a version of Lora'lai. Here, check it out -

[Image: screenshot_2009-10-29-14-42-10.jpg]
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#13
Patching as we speak. I hope to have SOME time on it, but it's looking doubtful: I gotta move this weekend.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll
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#14
Looks like you can count me out for this free trial then. Don't have that much hd space available, and I've got other fish to burn this weekend than
trying to clear enough space for a client for a game I probably won't have much time to actually try playing.

-Morgan.
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#15
Aiee. Slow patcher is SLOW. Worse than when I used to play WoW.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll
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#16
Soo..I managed to get my Signature Name Smile Am level 9 In Canada *grin*
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#17
*Makes Alice, plays around in the tutorial.* Maybe it's just me, but it feels like I'm driving a shopping cart with one working wheel. It's
twitchy, laggy as hell, and I'm actually having enemies spawn with the title 'InvalidName', right in front of me... I dialed the graphics down one
notch in an attempt to make it run smoother, and it dropped to unbearably ugly, and still laggy, with an enemy draw distance of about twenty feet and a world
draw difference not much higher.

I wish I was exaggerating for comedys sake, or for the cliche of 'CO Sux, CoH rulz!', but I'm not. This game played that badly for me I'm
giving up after about two hours, and an hour of that was server downtime.
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#18
So, my take after messing with it for a half hour or so.

The Character Creator:

Has some options I want. Triple or quad tinged costume pieces were nice, and additions like thigh armor, customizable left and right arms, and backpacks were
nifty and I want them in CoH now, please. The pose thing is also nice, though I had no way to know that pose is basically locked in once you finish your
costume, which left my attempt at Sylia spending the half hour I spent in the tutorial running around on all fours except when she needed to, y'know, use
her weapons. However, Cloth/Leather/Metal = no appreciative difference to me, and I really felt like my build of Sylia's costume was spandex with metal
plates bolted onto it and a helmet, rather than an actual armored suit.

Manipulating the character creator is an exercise in patience, as it is unintuitive in the extreme and whoever designed the drop down bars needs a swift kick
and to be told to start over. Perhaps, with time, I could learn to master it, but the simplicity that CoH's creator has seems lost on this one. It's
like by adding more options, they forgot how to organize them in any orderly manner.

Third, and most damning, is the fact that because my computer's graphics are suboptimal, I apparently get to play with the graphics engine Champions By
Clay Fighter. I felt like I was crafting a hero out of play-dough, and I shudder to think of trying to render Sylia's face without the helmet in the
character creator.

The Tutorial: Large hams abound. This thing is written in the Silver Age, and it shows. Got a few chuckles out of me, but between the clunky interface and
difficult to understand objectives and the like, I just didn't make much headway. I basically ran around killing things, getting killed, etc. The voice
acting was...painful, to a degree. I'm kinda grateful for CoH's purely text based cut scenes now. Less chance of actors....overacting.

Again, the Claymation Engine really took me out of it. CoH is by far not the prettiest of games, but it at least does metallic textures and such well without
requiring me to have the latest, greatest graphics card.

This felt less like a MMO and more like an action game, which is nice, but deceptive. Getting shot even if I wasn't in the path of fire a second ago, and
the classic "delayed impact blow" where an enemy had a move with a longer wind up than it took me to walk away, which meant I still got hit, or
worse, blocked after it no longer mattered.

The power builder attack setup is okay, but relying on it would drive me nuts, even if the attacks are randomized. The charge feature is another "can we
haz in CoH, please?" feature, but not a game seller.

Picking up and hurling barricades was kind of awesome, I will admit, but again, one tiny diamond shard amongst what really came across as a roughly put
together game.

In general, I did not know what a majority of my interface did, or in fact what all these "resources" and the like do. I even scanned the various
tutorial balloons and found myself lacking in knowledge afterwards. It's like throwing someone into a tutorial that starts with Coyote and moves upward
from there, without telling them anything else. I was bewildered and generally learned by trial and error, rather than any effort of the game to educate me.
Maybe all the info was there, but I certainly couldn't find it. I'll take CoH's "LISTEN TO US, DAMMIT" clue-by-four any day over that.

Overall, between the graphics that make me long for CoH and the general feel that I'm in the beta or something, Champions didn't sell me. It just told
me ways CoH could make itself better and overall hold onto me tighter, should they choose to do so.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
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#19
Broken patcher is broken. >< So I can't even say yay or nay based on, y'know, actually playing the game. Gah.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll
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#20
*Blinks, goes and takes a look.* Apparently, the Account server's down. You can't log in via the game launcher, or directly via the game client.
That's... remarkably bad, honestly, and not what Cryptic needed to happen today.

This was a big advertising opportunity. A free trial of the game, during a big event. Given that, as near as I can tell, there's no standard 14 day trial
or anything anywhere on the site (How DID you get yours Logan?), this was going to be the chance to get the attention of a lot of gamers from other MMO's,
CoH included. And instead... well, my opinion on the game aside, when the servers apparently break and no one can try the game out, people that might have been
convinced to give Cryptic money roll their eyes, and go back to Azeroth and Paragon.

*Goes and takes a look at the CO forums.* And from what I'm seeing... this is a weekly occurrence. Holy crap *facepalms*
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#21
Random update note. Died Twice To master villans of my level mainly first time cause I had no idea what to expect when i got to canada..I see -a- zombie..so I
throw the transport I was carrying at it..then i find out as it..3 other zombes and a master villan ice shaman come rollin over the hill and eat my face.
Second time Blindsided while fighting other things (needs moar situational awareness!)

On the Upside I had my first scuffle with a level 7 super Villan when I was level 8.... I've taken -more- damage fighting mobs of lower rank >.> it
was a joke..literaly I'm pretty sure I could have walked away while auto attacking. and won Tongue
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#22
You know, the more I hear about CO here, the less inclined I am even to try the free trials.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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#23
okay, after hearing MD and OM's veiws.... i am not touching that game with a 20 foot pole


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#24
Connectivity and Server Stability: It's pretty clear the Cryptic server hardware and infrastructure isn't very good. It's cracking under the weight of the trial...and as others have indicated, they've thus far been having emergency unscheduled downtime pretty much every week. There was one period today - yes, during the trial weekend.
I'm writing this post now because I got disconnected, and can't get back in. The servers appear to be up. It's just, y'know, me. This is a very poor showing by Cryptic/Atari. Remember, server hosting for City of Heroes was always handled by NCsoft. Never Cryptic. These servers are Cryptic-operated, though...and it ain't good.
Graphics Card Compatability: This is very poor. My card's a GeForce 9500M - yeah, I'm playing on a laptop. And the game works fine at high graphics settings. It looks great, actually. The metallic textures and reflections are a thing of beauty, and the comic-book black outlines actually work quite nicely. Plus it's got antialias settongs...
BUT. I also know that I'm a fortunate minority here. Folks with older cards are probably gonna have problems. Ops, Ankh, you know this. And there's no reason why a modern MMO should have that kind of graphics compatability issues. No reason at all. Again, sloppy work.
Costume Creator: It's a very powerful tool that can do amazing things. Far better than CoH. EXCEPT...the INTERFACE for the Champions costume creator SUCKS. It's not the creator engine that's the problem, it's the INTERFACE. God, the menus. The dropdowns don't remember where they were. You can't scroll between pieces easily. It's kinda painful.
Gameplay: Now, this is the thing.
I like how Champions plays. But, fundamentally, this is an action game. More action than MMO, really. It's like...the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, that's really how it feels like to me. I enjoy that sorta thing, and I actually LIKE how the block mechanic and energy building systems work. But I also recognize that not everyone will.
You do need to be a lot swifter on the controls than in CoH. It's not quite twitch-based, but at the same time, positioning and movement matter a lot more than in CoH, and you gotta pay a lot more attention to what you're doing. Though that depends on what your powers are, of course. My Power Armor guy needs a lot of planning. My Telekinetic Blade girl is just a mobile button-mash blender. But still, all the same...
Is it a good game? That really depends on your tastes. It's really pretty damn far from City of Heroes. And while the power system gives you a lot of flexibility for doing different concepts, it's also damn easy to nerf yourself if you're not careful. That's one thing I don't like. On the one hand, the open power system should encourage you to do whatever the hell you can do.
On the other, if you don't plan your choices carefully, you're going to die. A lot.   
Conclusion: Well, I've already bought the game. But I don't have graphics problems, and I actually like the gameplay. So it's a good game for me, but not necessarily for you.
There's also the fact I got it cheap, for about USD $20. That was a UK offer, though. I understand the street retail price is still more like US$40-50 elsewhere. I wouldn't buy it for that much.
I'm also not sure I'll re-subscribe after the trial month. We'll see.
-- Acyl
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#25
Well, after a quick 24 hour patch download, which only crashed twice I've been able to try CO. My impressions are pretty much like everyone else's.
You can do things in the costume creator I'd really like to see in CoH, but the interface is somewhat painful.

As for game play, I don't know. The farthest I've made it before crashing is almost getting Socrates's first dialog box. Most of the time it
crashes hard just talking to the first contact who tells you how to walk, and that's when it doesn't just reboot my system upon exiting the character
creator. And that's with the absolute minimum settings on everything I can find to turn down. So, I think I shall be sticking with CoH for the foreseeable
future.

--

For someone following Canadian politics, I assure you, this is

terribly funny and rife with innuendo.

-- Rob Russell
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