Top Five Features Women May Enjoy in Champions Online

Champions Online, the newest MMORPG by Cryptic Studios, is where all your dreams of becoming a super hero can come true. The game launched with a bang, and like most MMOs, has plenty of gameplay elements and design to appeal to men. I found a few things that may appeal to the women gamers out there.

The character creation on CO is extremely flexible and open-ended. You start off with a basic model, but soon, you can be adjusting the details of your avatar’s face, body mass, musculature, and as always, your breasts. Though the character creation of Champions Online still falls short of City of Heroes, it still offers much more customization than those of competing MMOs. The menu itself is simple to use and understand, and each category has pre-made choices and then a detailed customization screen. You can start with something that the professionals created and then tweak it to your preferences. The costume options are versatile, colorful, and color coordinated for those of us who are not entirely sure which hues are complimentary. My one major complaint is that you start off with an Incredibles-like mask over your eyes, and you have to skip ahead three screens in order to remove it. Masks for superheroes is so 1980s. Hasn’t Cryptic watched any of the new X-men movies?

Best of all, character creation is a feature you can fully explore even while using a Champions Online trial key. I highly recommend you put this feature through its paces during your trial.

 

Anyone who has played Age of Conan is extremely familiar with the tendency to go with browns and dark, dreary colors in some of the male dominated MMOs. (Okay, all MMOs are male dominated considering that the female population for MMOs is an estimated 11%.) While some of the features in CO follow the traditional manly path of using as many browns and blacks as possible, the comic book-style of the art demands some bright colors and vivid hues. The officers are in bright blue shirts, and many of the modern buildings look clean and bright. I felt like I might be in a happy city instead of some gloomy burnt out area. Then I can feel like my hero is helping to keep the city joyful and crime-free.

Okay, this feature is a while in coming, but most women love to be able to personalize the world in which they game. At level 25, you get to design your arch-nemesis and even write a story for him/her. Then this arch-nemesis shows up at random points in the game in order to challenge you, start quest lines, or be a pain in general. I usually jump at the chance to make the world more immersive for myself, and this goes a long way into doing that.

The different zones vary a lot in appearance though the art style stays consistent, and the variation is extremely nice compared to the repetitive zones found in City of Heroes, a precursor to Champions Online. The best feature about the scenery in CO is the fact that several pieces are actually interactive. You can pick up mailboxes and actually use them as a weapon. Take that mailbox, throw it at a group of bad guys, and get a decent AOE damage blast. Granted, the fact that these pieces respawn break immersion a bit, but it is still very cool that you can interact with most pieces of scenery.

Ultimately, Champions Online can easily be played solo without difficult choices or even difficulty in leveling. For some of the hard core women gamers out there, the game probably will not be challenging for long or at all, but for the more casual players, the ease of play and leveling results in constant progress. Playing does not require an inordinate amount of number crunching or huge spreadsheets for choosing powers. Doing missions (also known as quests in similar games) is the fastest way to level and can usually be done solo. Several of these missions make actually reading the descriptions quite worth the effort, and brute force is not necessarily the best way to go about completing them. Thus, leveling can be interesting and quite fun rather than another quest or mob grind.