One thing I can say is that I have been pleasantly surprised
with the turnaround in Champions Online. Now, this is not to say that
everything is going smoothly or perfectly but the direction and the way they
are working their designs has been pretty good. They’ve started implementing
methods and such for Champions that has over all improved the game, honestly,
and looks to be leading towards giving some good overall. It isn't all peaches and cream, but I am going to just discuss what has impressed me.
Now, I know there are people that believe the mod system is
a bunch of hooey or some other thing like that, but just taking the new item
and gear system into account, the overall improvement just on mid-range mods
alone, is a staggering improvement over what we use to have. The vocal minority
complaints have basically been coming from those people that can’t farm one
critter over and over for the best of the best gear. In short, Cryptic has now
given a foundation to keep playing instead of the former log in when the new
content releases, complete it then log out for the next several months model
that has currently been in the game as it stands. IE, they gave people reasons
to play now, and for some odd reason, those vocal people find that a horrible
idea. *boggle*
Old systems were removed because, frankly, they weren’t
going anywhere. I know some people like to claim that the old crafting system
was the “best of the bestest” out there, but really, it was crap. Having a
useless system that was worthless from the minute you started messing with it,
and even the interesting items only the crafter could actually use was a
ridiculous idea to begin with. In short, they removed the mess of useless
stacking components and just gave us ways to get the special stuff from
vendors. And now can just combine items for the stats we want, and put them in
the gear we desire. No more of the random stats that do very little for the
character.
The Alerts themselves are actually pretty good, with a few
quibbles. Over all though, they provide content and if you are hunting for some
costume pieces you always wanted, the bosses can drop particular pieces that
can be used or sold by you. In addition to that, each of the types can either
help you level, give out a large amount of resources (money in the game) or
even provide you with modifications. Then there are the special types which are
generally week long variants of the other three but with a special villain or
villain group to combat. It’s a good foundation start and I can see Alerts
being used to introduce special event content that has more of the super hero
flavor to it, such as moving the Undead Hero fights during the Blood Moon to
Alerts instead of having them out in the world.
The biggest thing that I am actually interested in that was
just announced as a contest that can be found here is create your own villain,
which the Grand Prize is your villain will be featured in an EPIC 10 man
encounter (ie raids). The game system already is set up to support raids now,
you can see it through the team up window, and this actually makes me happy to
see that large scale content like this is finally being considered for
Champions. It has been needed to help with endgame and the new foundation for
loot and such that was created gives the devs a large amount of leeway in
creating unique items and upgrades for characters as Champions now pushes
forward.
The follow up now is to wait and see when the lair review
goes through, which is also supposed to include epic lairs (which are supposed
to be very tough 5 man content, IE heroic dungeons basically). The dungeon
finder is already in place, as it can be seen in the Instance Queues window
with its own tab, but the dungeons themselves have not been hooked in. And
after that, there is supposed to be new content with a level cap raise and talk
of new zones. I can only hope that this will include increased support for new
power sets as well for the game as well as reviewing what’s already out there.
The future is looking bright, and if in gam activity is any
proof, this was just the type of thing that Champions needed to get the ball
rolling again. Hopefully we will see more in the future.
Edit: Something else I forgot, the number of costume pieces that people have always wanted were also released with this update that you can find as random drops from the NPCs in the world or using new in game type currencies (similar to TOR) you can buy them from special vendors instead. It's a great way to flesh out characters now.
Edit: Something else I forgot, the number of costume pieces that people have always wanted were also released with this update that you can find as random drops from the NPCs in the world or using new in game type currencies (similar to TOR) you can buy them from special vendors instead. It's a great way to flesh out characters now.
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