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Champions Online Updated Impressions
By Cameron Sorden | August 17, 2008
I just finished watching the recently posted Champions Online footage taken by ikky68 at GenCon, and I want to take back some of what I said in this post. I don’t know why they were using that earlier video to promote the game, because it doesn’t do the combat justice. As usual, seeing the actual game being played was far more enlightening than the promotional material.
Combat is much faster and more active than it appeared at first, and there seems to be a lot of movement on the part of both the characters and the villains. It’s still pretty much classic MMOG style interaction, but tweaked up a few speed notches. I also thought that the environments were a hell of lot cooler than they seemed in the first video. You can blow up barrels, move rocks around, and pick up cars and other debris to smash your enemies. It’s certainly not the boring, vanilla step backwards that I thought it looked like from the previous video.
These gameplay videos have restored a lot of my faith in the game that was shaken by the official promotional video, and I find myself newly excited about Champions Online again. They should really scrap that first one and make a new one that shows off their game better. Also, I’m not sure how much content they have, but the game looks really good for how early in development they’re supposed to be. They’re still in Alpha, aren’t they?
Anyway, kudos to Cryptic. Champions looks awesome now that I’ve seen the game in action. Here are the videos:
Topics: Massively Multiplayer |
August 17th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I watched those yesterday and if anything, I thought they reinforced your complaints in your original post.
Those four videos alone have greatly diminished my interest in the game. Same old combat we’ve been doing for a decade, and it’s a far cry from superhero-ish.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I disagree, to an extent. There’s a lot of interaction with the environment, and it’s faster than I expected. The trick will be whether they can polish it so it looks more interactive. Swinging at air and fighting while facing different directions is very old news.
Even though they’re still pretty old school, I thought these were much better than what we saw in the earlier video.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
That was fast combat? It looked very run-of-the-mill on my end. The animations were fast. No slow swinging of a two-handed mallet to be found; the character swings his arm and blasts energy bolts very quickly but that was just the character animations. The actual pace of the combat itself was quite plain and definitely on the slower side of the scale.
September 1st, 2008 at 8:04 pm
[...] games I really wanted to see at PAX this year was Champions Online. If you recall from my earlier responses, I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the videos that Cryptic has released so far, so I [...]