Champions has announced their F2P update will launch on January 25th. With DCUO having just launched on the 11th, I’m very interested to see how many new players the F2P release brings in, how many stay, and how many upgrade to a subscription. I’m not expecting to see a doubling or tripling of revenues though like Turbine experienced with LotRO.
I’m a little more excited about this than I thought I would be. Not much changes for me since I have a lifetime subscription, I’ll still have access to everything I did before, but now I’ll also have a stipend of 400 Cryptic Points a month. I’m very curious to see if I can use those points in the STO-side store as well as the Champs-side store.
Besides the points, the F2P launch also includes a substantial revamp of the 1-20 experience as well as a few new powers for each of the existing frameworks. I’m definitely going to roll a new hero to check out the changes.
I know a few people were upset that the free players wouldn’t have access to the fully customizable hero system, but since they are allowing full access to the content (with the exception of adventure packs) they had to do something to incentivise people to subscribe. Like Turbine’s games, Champions is not a true F2P game but a hybrid subscription model.
The more I’ve thought about it though, the more their plan makes sense to me. The open system for building a hero is great for experienced players, but can rapidly get confusing and not-fun for a new player. Things like passive and active defenses, energy forms, etc. are probably more than a new player wants to worry about right away.
The confusion over powersets and what works best with what was exactly the reason I didn’t stick around with Champions very long after launch. I thought the options and wonderful combinations one could make were brilliant, but it was just a bit too much for me as I am not one to use spreadsheets or theorycraft or any of that. So to me the archetypes sound pretty good.
It would be nice to have more archetypes or out-right powersets to purchase, but maybe those will come with time.
Dickie, although they haven’t talked too much about it, the F2P matrix does indicate that they will have additional archetypes available in the C Store. It sounds like they play on expanding the choices so that there is an archetype for any character you might want to play. They’re just starting with the basics.
As for the stipend, I don’t remember where I saw it but Cryptic was pretty explicit that they wouldn’t allow those points to carry over. Chances are I’ll be using mine to buy all of the odd costume pieces I never bothered with before.
Awww. Well that’s understandable if disappointing. I haven’t looked into what they’re planning to add to the C-store so I’m not sure if I’ll end up using my free points or not. For that matter, though, anything on the Trek-side that I want I’ve already purchased as well, so I guess it doesn’t matter much. 🙂 Pitfalls of poor impulse control.
I remember seeing several developer posts mentioning that more archetypes would be released later, so those will definitely show up over time.