Blaugust 2015 Day 24

Sunday night I returned to my multitasking experiment and started up Champions. I logged into the six heroes, I had already created just to refresh my memory on what combinations of powers I had already played with before heading into the character creator and seeing what I could come up with for a new super hero.

Creating a new hero in Champions, and before it in City of Heroes, has always been a unique experience for me. My favorite heroes, the Blue Ram and Silver Hunter, have always come about because a specific part in the character creator caught my imagination. I started out by picking up some wind based powers, initially thinking I’d create a wizard type character. When I got into the costume creator though as I browsed through different masks and other parts, I happened upon some swept back hair and got the idea for a speedster. A pair of aviator’s goggles and leather jacket started to give me more of an idea on the hero’s background.

In City of Heroes, the last thing you do is name your hero. It was always the hardest part because not only was it difficult to come up with a name that was cool and fit the character concept, but you also had to come up with something that someone else was already using. More than once, I can remember scrapping a whole hero design because I just couldn’t find a name that I wanted that wasn’t in use. I’m so glad that Cryptic removed that issue by only requiring names to be unique per account. It’s so nice to not have to look up esoteric synonyms.

Thus after maybe 30 or 45 minutes, I had created the Tempest. A WW2 fighter pilot who vanished in a storm over Europe before reappearing in Millenium City, not having aged a day and with no memory of the lost time.

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I took Tempest through the tutorial and first few levels. I had the impression that the starting experience was more changed than it really was from the Ravenswood articles that I’d skimmed on the Arcgames site. The tutorial Qularr invasion is now framed as a simulation of an historic event rather than a live event, and some of the side quests have been streamlined out. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more to it. Completely a problem with my own expectations though and not the game.

GameClient 2015-08-23 23-30-59-26Past the tutorial, you’re dumped into the Powerhouse which avoids an old issue where you ended up in Millenium City first and needed to know where to go. Cryptic has also added some nice training videos, which are in-game cutscenes that explain some of Champions’ mechanics like charge-up powers and maintained powers, and tied the post-tutorial intro quest to watching them. That might sound onerous but they were all very short.

Once I got Tempest trained up and exited the Powerhouse, I was directed to Kodiak on the West Side of Millenium City, just like in the original game. I completed the first five or six missions that he gave me and not much seems to have changed there. It all felt very familiar and comfortable.

GameClient 2015-08-24 00-20-06-74

 

Tempest
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5 thoughts on “Tempest

  • August 25, 2015 at 9:04 am
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    Brings back some cool memories. City of Heroes was my first major MMO and I loved it – I was so sad when it shut down. Champions, for me, works as a good superhero MMO, but it never seemed to reach the ‘successor to CoX’ point. Last time I,plays they had changed up the way freebie accounts create heroes and it seemed you could only select a few power combinations. Is it still set up that way?

    • August 25, 2015 at 10:37 pm
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      When the game originally went free-to-play, freeform characters became a subscriber only thing. The official reason as I recall was that freeform is more confusing and Cryptic didn’t want new players making bad builds and leaving the game. That’s definitely a possibility but it probably had as much to do with enticing people to subscribe as it did with simplifying the game.

      I’m not sure when they started this, but I saw on the store that you can now by a freeform character slot for 5,000 zen (basically $50), which would be nice for people who don’t have a lifetime and don’t want to subscribe. Seems a bit expensive to me, but I guess if you consider it in lieu of a box purchase it makes sense.

  • August 26, 2015 at 1:30 am
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    Looks like I’m reinstalling Champions now. I’m feeling so much nostalgia from this post.

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