Champions Online, Cryptic Studio's newest MMO, caters to superhero fans, but does it appeal to women? Find three suggestions and improvements in this article for appealing to and retaining women gamers for CO.
There Are Women on the Internet
Champions Online, Cryptic Studios’ newest MMORPG, appeals to those who want to play superheroes, but does it appeal to women? In many respects, it is off to a good start, but several improvements could easily be made to appeal to more women gamers outside the traditional MMO realm. Currently, 64% of the gamers on the internet are women according to Nielsen Entertainment’s third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study. Only 11% of the current MMO population, however, are women, so how can CO attract more of these women to their game?
Put Women in the Artwork
Normally, you cannot stop the MMO developers from plastering large-breasted women everywhere they can and often in completely inappropriate ways. Champions Online has the opposite problem. You can barely find women characters and art depicting women anywhere. On their webpage, all of the most prominent figures are men. The one woman I could find is 75% covered by an American flag. I see the faces of three more once I scroll down, but only their portraits are displayed.
The Champions Online game box is even worse. On the front of the box, three figures are prominent featured, and they are all male. Two more tiny figures can be seen, and they are also male. On the back of the box, you finally get a nice piece of work with a Celtic-deity-like woman flying in a very strong pose. We want more of that kind of art. Some of the most awesome superheroes in comics are women: Wonder Woman, Phoenix, Poison Ivy, Rogue, Storm, and Cat Woman. Let’s see more women in the artwork!
Put the Difficulty in the Gameplay Not the Character Planning
There is a trend in MMOs to put the game's difficulty in character development (spec) rather than in the actual gameplay. Champions Online follows this path with its Framework and open ability system. Having to go to the forums to figure out which powers are best to take, which ones are useless, and which build will actually make you useful in a group is incredibly immersion breaking.
CO’s completely open ability system in addition to their extremely restrictive, expensive, and limited re-spec (retcon) options makes leveling a paralyzing process. Thankfully, the gameplay is relatively easy, so messing up your character will not cripple you. Having to ponder a ton of abilities every time I level gets painful - especially knowing that undoing them will be stupendously expensive (respecing more than a few powers back in your order of training is usually more money that you have earned in your character's entire life). This would not be a problem if all of the abilities were useful and equally powerful in some way, but as we all know, that is simply not true in any MMO.