One of the annoying elements about Planetside was that it had no rivals, the game didn’t have to fight  it was the only one of it’s kind, it stagnated due to this and the players suffered. The idea of more SuperHero themed MMOs in the world is a very appealing one to me as it encourages enhancement development of each game and of the whole genre.

I grabbed an open beta key from Fileplanet, who appear to be the hottest place for open betas at the moment, yet they have the slowest download queues in the world. Grrr.

Happily I set my download off before bed and it was ready when I woke up on Saturday, My chance had arrived and here are my thoughts on the game.

# This post may contain spoilers, cease reading you are avoiding them #
# Please remember this is Open beta and the game could change before launch #

Like a war zone

I’ll be honest from the start this game really reminds me of my first encounter with Tabula Rasa, with some rather similarities between the game mechanics.

• The inflexible interface – If there was one element of TR I disliked the most, it was the way the interfaces weren’t movable on the fly or how they were stuck in stone. I’ll be the first to admit that Champions has a superior system to one one that was in TR but it still feels lacking in some areas. Melmoth pointed out to me that F12 allowed access to the layout screen, which is a step in the right direction, I had a rather interesting time trying to compare the elements of two in-game screens that both closed the other one down.
• Gank lottery quests – Many games have this ‘feature’, you may know it as the “take out target before the other 10 people doing the same quest” style of mission. Of course with each shard limited to 100 players it’s not a massive issue as each zone is large enough your not steeping on each other toes. Yes I know it is(was) a rather common feature in EQ / EQ2 games too, not a system that I tend to enjoy.
• Multiperson world – Single player game – Much of Tabula Rasa I was able to complete solo and when I wasn’t soloing my team would run around attempting to be the first at taking down a boss etc, it was a rather competitive gameplay style. I teamed a couple of  time with folks to get certain tasks done, but frequently it was a case of “Care to help with XYZ”, “Sure”, BAM, “See you around”.

Of course there are more things different between the games, it just had a familiar feeling to it.

It was nice to see that the plan is for no location limitations nor any server shards in the live game, so you should be able to enjoy decent populations no matter what time of day you play. I truly hope more MMOs move towards this type of arrangement in the future, us EU player may stick around longer then.

A quick breakdown of the game elements:

• Graphics
  • There isn’t much I can add to the topic that hasn’t been mentioned a thousand times over. It is unique and works for some people and not for others. I found it rather enjoyable but also could imagine it getting a little irritating if this was your primary MMO, the black outline appeared to kick in at a greater range at times resulting in a black blob appearing until i got much closer.
  • I was without my normal graphics card at the start of this testing. I used a temporary replacement that only just met the requirements of the game specs. Those playing with older machines may find the graphics lack detail and the gameplay jumpy when busy and the costume creator gets laggy.
  • Those with advanced graphical option will see the costumes in full, those without may find their character looks different to other players.
• Costumes
  • The costumes was always going to be the life & sole of this games genre. I have had a good play about with the creator and there are many options to pick from in some areas, other I feel had a token two options in there to keep them on par.
• Crafting
  • I managed to get a little crafting done in the game and reached ARMS level 100, where I then get presented with the option to buy an unlock for the next 100 levels. The crafting seemed decent and allowed me to salvage resource from unwanted equipment and purchase recipes for crafting new items.
  • I briefly seen the Auction house, but there was nothing happening on there and it require that I know the name of what I wanted. Or i could have just been inactive.
• Inventory
  • The inventory system works like Guild Wars you get your first bag to start with, then you can craft additional bags with X number of slots depending on the recipes you know.
  • Powers
    • To be frank I wasn’t that impressed by the powers-sets that were on offer, of course this will all expand in the future but for now there wasn’t much and they all felt samey at least in the levels  to 10. As there are no classes in the game you either get to choose a role or pick ones you prefer, there isn’t much awareness of what each set had to offer later on so it became a mixed bag, though you can respec for for cost whenever you liked, which was rather nice.
    • The travel powers were interesting and offered a few different modes of transport, some could be grouped: Flight, flight on object, Superjump, Acrobatics, swinging and tunneling. I found alot of this powers awkward to use and preferred not to use them. I found acrobatics was a good all around power as it allowed for decent jump height plus allowed for a fast run in general while active (I missed sprint!)
    • I levelled a few characters and the tutorial area feels a little long with you having a block power, a energy increasing attack power and finally a larger attack power. This was the combination for the various power-sets I tried out and each felt identical with only the melee powers needing me to get that bit closer.
    • The power acquisition I found confusing, I’ve had a read and still didn’t completely understand how it fitted together. Every time you level up you get a point to spent at the powerhouse, but these points don’t all result in direct powers. So by level 12 I had 4 powers plus my block and travel power with some statistics builder powers too, but it felt like enough for me to handle at that stage.

Conclusion
Champions Online looks like it going to be a rather fun game for those that prefer the style of gameplay offered by City of Heroes/Villains, I found the options for powers to be very limited and had expected a few more, but then it could open up in the later levels.

I was glad to have this chance to give Champions a bash, admittedly the vast outdoor style of the gameplay has put me off more than anything else*, but those that plan on playing the game are going to have alot of fun.

* A rather annoying bug caused my powers to continually vanish from my powerbar, this was irritating and was linked to having to hold a power down to charge it up. This bug appeared to have vanished after a patch that seen the powers become unmovable unless the power window was open.

Other Screenshots
For this trial I created numerous characters  the most memorable were:

Forphine

little ms violent

I know you!

And you!

We’re not in Nerva any more

Northern Lights

underwater and no SCUBA?

Castles are all the rage

Ever since my early days of online gaming it has continuously been non-fantasy titles that have occupied my time and remained at the forefront of my gaming habits. Yet if you were to ask me what exactly about fantasy games that I dislike, I doubt I could muster a single item as a culprit.

Please do not confuse my lack of interest in fantasy games for a dislike of the genre, of all the titles I have played it is frequently the fantasy ones that are the most detailed. Combining very rich & informative lore, well thought out & balanced crafting systems which allows these games build up a loyal and dedicated fan base.

Every few months Guild Wars manages to draw me back , but no matter how good my intentions I can not seem to last more than 2 maybe 3 weeks at the most before the game loses nearly all appeal. This experience has been mimicked in my reactivation of LoTRO, this game amazed me yet again, and it still does, but quite soon I found myself logging on less and less, a good job I cancelled my subscription back in December as I have no urge to go near the game at all now.

I find it rather strange as I do enjoy the variety of quests (I read them too), I adore the lore and the crafting is one of the best I have encountered, yet even all these elements combined does not appear to be enough for my gaming needs and attention.

For some time I believed that my lack of interest in fantasy MMOs was driven purely by the need for Guns (more futuristic themed) and a move away from swords, but with the arrival of Tabula Rasa I realised that this was not the case and my months playing City of Heroes/Villains has enforced it even further.

Looking back it could have been the fact that Tabula Rasa aimed to be a futuristic Science fiction shooter yet it still felt like a fantasy game at heart, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, for want of a better comparison. Excluding the usual reasons I feel that the fantasy elements were a big factor in driving me away from the game.

I think the bottom line is that the game-play elements of the Sword, Shield and Spell MMOs don’t really appeal to me in anyway. I appear to crave things that these games, not matter how wonderful, just don’t deliver. In 2009 I look forward to the Jumpgate MMO and a few others due out soon that aren’t fantasy based MMO games. I truely hope that I can find a game that will fill the gaps that were promised in 2008 yet still remain.

I think the bottomline is that me and Fantasy MMOs don’t get along too well, then again perhaps I’m just too picky with my MMO needs.

I remember being quite excited about being invited to the Tabula Rasa beta, a game that I was quite looking forward to at the time. It was clear that even a month before launch the game wasn’t going to answer my MMO prayers, but I thought that I’d submit feedback to see if things would improve before release.

Along with many others, I filed numerous bug reports, sadly none of the suggestions were acted on and as far as I’m aware the TR interface remains one of the most clunky and unappealing features of the game. This one element alone resulted in me playing for less than a month after release.

It’s sad that to improve “word of mouth” about a game beta testing is used to parade the games abilities to a potential audience. This has a negative effect if the player base is bug reporting various items in the game that need attention or alteration, and none of this information appears to be acted on, as the truth is the final version of the game is already installed on our machines.

A Beta testing phase should stay focused on the feedback it receieves, and deliver games that match or exceed our expectations.

The game has a total of 4 servers at the moment, 3 in the US and one in the EU. At peak times the EU server shows as being under a 'very high' load. As you can imagine it can be laggy at times, although generally the game runs smoothly. Well, except for the memory leaks.
On starting the game up, the ingame display shows memory usage at around 60% after 2 to 30 hours of gameplay that figure is near 95% to 99%. At which time it's worth quiting out of the game before it crashes. The problem is even after quiting my computers memory usage shows at around 400MB out of 2GB in have installed, so it's not all rosey at the moment.
But it seems that WoW with guns is the future, even if the future has a User-interface that sucks big time.

I last played the beta 2 weeks ago, but have been following the releases to see if any of the following has been altered. To my knowledge these notes are up todate.

“Perhaps you'd better start at the beginning…”

The character creation isn't that great, you can customise armour on your character and their general appearance, but that's about it. You will look like alot of other avatars in the game and when you start getting armour drops in various colours you'll look more like a harlequin than a solider.
I nearly died laughing at the way the name system works. Effectively you choose a first name and surname and all characters on that account will take that surname. I'm not sure if that is a unique surname just to your account or on that server. This is going to be a nasty sticking point if alot of people sign up to play, with all common names being taken.

One sore point I came to notice very quickly is the keymapping, it is very unique to the game and I found it to be non-intuitive and awkward at times. Like the location of the auto-run key (numlock).A nice feature is the way that the Q key cycles through your weapons and the E key cycles through your secondary skills, although if you have accidentally swapped weapons without knowing it, it can lead to horrible nasty things. I also hated the fact that sprint is a skill that can be selected in the list, but if you end up swapping by accident you end up running out of endurance as it take time to swap back to the skill and turn it off.

Another area of the game that I found very poor was the User Interface, it is extremely limited, as it doesn't allow the user to re-scale or move the windows to suite. The last time I played the game (about 2 weeks ago) the UI hadn't improved. Infact when switching between resolutions the UI looked exactly the same taking up the same percentage of the screen and when running at 1600 x 1200 that sort of inflexible design is a very big stumbling block to a game with alot of expectations.
On top of all that when you have a window open, like for your backpack, your characters movement is limited due to the method used to direct your character.

The game-play follows the standard method I mentioned in my last entry, Mission/kills = XP = Levels. Mission based games can get highly annoying when you do the same missions over and over for each new character you attempt to progress with. There are lots of missions to pick up and you'll always have something to do or somewhere to go.
The default ingame camera is a behind the character view, swapping to an over the shoulder view when zoomed in. this works pretty well allowing you to focus on ranged targets.

When I used it, I found the in game chat very confusing and found it difficult to understand where I was typing and to whom, also it vanishes quite quickly that you often miss a message.

Conclusion
I feel that TB is a decent game and will appeal to the shooter type of player that isn't that fond or interested in WOW. To be brutality honest there are elements of the game that need some serious re-design to make this a MUST-PLAY type of game rather than an OK-ISH type of game. Unless the points above are resolved the lifespan of the game is going to be limited by the amount of time gamers are willing to subscribe.

What to expect.
WOW with guns
Mission after mission
Grinding levels
Built in Voice Comms
Invention system for weapons, armour and equipment

What not to expect.
A highly customisable character
Help from other players in the swamped chat channels
Moveable, scaleable interfaces
Anything new