Why I'm Not Buying Champions Online

 I’ve always been a huge fan of the concept behind City of Heroes/City of Villains. I love the idea of playing as a superpowered hero or villain, designing my own custom character complete with backstory, and righting wrongs or committing atrocities in the name of justice or villany.

I was right there for the beginning of City of Heroes, played in the beta, and spent a good amount of time in the game. Ultimately, while I loved the in-depth character creator and overall aesthetic of the game, I became disillusioned with the repetitive mission structure and lack of variety overall.

While I have reactivated my account on several occasions, the game never hooked me the way World of Warcraft did.

When I first heard about Champions Online, I was incredibly stoked. A fully-realized superhero game, backed by a classic, respectable license, by the designers of City of Heroes, what’s not to like?

After playing the open beta, I can honestly say: quite a bit. I’m not expert on game design; I’m just a fan who saw enough in his open beta experiences to decide that perhaps Champions Online is not all I had hoped it would be. Several factors combined to convince me to change my mind about the game.

This isn’t a full review, rather one player’s experiences and opinions about the open beta experience.

 One thing that always turned me off about City of Heroes was the frequent performance hiccups I experienced while playing it. Constant lag spikes resulting in rubberbanding are one of the most annoying aspects of any online game. Combine this with flying quickly across a cityscape and it was not uncommon to frequently find myself magically teleported backwards several yards.

Flying, super jumping, or running at super speeds through the city are the things that make a player feel like a true super hero, and performance hiccups in these areas can really pull you out of the experience.

City of Heroes was the only MMO I’ve ever had this problem in (aside from the early days of Star Wars Galaxies), until I played Champions Online.

 So much of Champions Online is clearly lifted from the City of Heroes (more on that later), but I didn’t expect they would copy the bad as well as the good. It’s ridiculous that I can’t move across a zone at high speeds on a very decent machine, especially when you consider that all of the zones in Champions are intstanced, and few contained more than 60 or so people.

Speaking of instances, how annoying is it that you can’t simply jump into a zone and hope to find your friends there? I absolutely refuse to believe that Cryptic couldn’t have done a better job with the system than to force me to communicate with friends outside of the game in order to get into the same zone and play together.

In today’s post-World of Warcraft MMO landscape, these types of performance hiccups are completely unacceptable.