As I'm in a particularly giving mood, I thought I'd give some parting thoughts on Champions and what they can do to improve it. For all I know, they're already doing some of this in which case I will claim sole credit for those ideas. You can thank me later.
Fix PvP
IMO, it wouldn't take much to fix, really. I'll outline it in four easy steps:
1) Reduce holds/roots/misc effects (like crippling challenge) on players so you can't get completely locked down by one guy. Add immunity timers if you like.
2) Base credit on a threat-like calculation rather than damage so support actually gets something for their efforts.
3) Fix some of the more obviously broken powers like Teleport (still) and Mindful Reinforcement and, I dunno, take your pick of other crap.
4) Refactor the rewards so that PvPers aren't totally down shit creek for playing and enjoying that aspect of your game exclusively.
Beating this into shape really shouldn't take that long if their system isn't stupidly complex or fragile. Cause not like game systems ever are like that or anything.
Add More Missions
More Nemesis stuff, more UNITY missions (preferrably more than the same dozen or so that keep getting repeated now), and more story arcs would all be well received. If I don't have to do every single quest, it opens up a lot more options for people re-rolling because they can't afford retcons. "I did 1-30 in Canada on this guy, so let me do 1-30 in the Desert on the next guy."
I suspect this will get fixed with time. Bloodmoon is right around the corner which is a step in the right direction, but I suspect it arrives too late for a majority of the folks who have already jumped ship.
Fix Teaming
One of the fallouts at the confluence of badness in CO, is that people aren't sticky. In a game where every character can be a tank-mage-cleric, people almost never group up. Despite the fact that people will bemoan miserably (myself included) "required grouping", it is good for your game in the long run. If people don't build lasting associations between each other, the game easily becomes a single player game with annoying NPCs that can just as easily be put back down. You don't want to let your buddies down. Many people will stick out a bad situation longer if they're in it with their chums.
Fixes:
- Increase exp while teaming (currently it splits which makes it stupidly low)
- Fix threat (already in the works--see, I can take credit for that already!)
- Add More 5-Person Content
Add More 5-Person Content
I maintain that Cryptic knows how to make compelling encounters. They need more of this--a LOT more. And now that they have a pile of data on how people actually play the game, they can do a lot more with increasing difficulties. If it requires a reasonable 5-person team to complete more than a handful of compelling stuff, then there's reason for people to form longer-lasting relationships which, as asserted above, is a win for the game long-term.
I would think that a set of five really challenging new L42 missions (like Mandragalore and Andrith) would be enough. Make them sequentially harder. Make them keyed off one another for all I care, just put them in there so PvE minded folks have something to look forward to until you raise your level cap/add your next big free expansion/whatever. Challenge the people with uber solo builds to change them to be more group friendly. Give people a reason to explore the interaction between different powers amongst your group (auras anyone?) and you will give folks a reason to stick around.
This does require a pretty substantial change, however:
Make End-Game Rewards Worthwhile
No one but the most completionist minded people are going to grind UNITY gear the way it is now. It's 250 points for each of 6 secondary slots and 1000 points for each of 3 primary slots. You can get *maybe* ten UNITY merits a day. That isn't going to cut it. Furthermore, people aren't going to grind the UNITY missions just to get to Mandragalore and Andrith when both are bugged if they also don't have drops/quests/whatevers worth grinding for. There is zero reason to have the three crystal requirement for a one time use key to get into one of these. None. I'll negotiate this point when the stupid bugs get fixed and the loot becomes worthwhile--but not a moment sooner!
Add Decent Crafting
We already get (randomly) a tiny number of super uber awesome things to craft with from our daily UNITY missions but can't do anything with those. We stockpile these in the hopes that they actually do something with them which I have no doubt they will. These have to be worthwhile no matter what happens. If the crafting rewards are worthwhile, people have another reason to grind UNITY missions so long as the mountain isn't too high. That puts it past the tipping point: "oh, I can run and get a handful of UNITY badges which is kind of lame but I really want the Q. Essences so I can craft my Boots of Uber Sexy by the end of the week!" Yes, I think that would be enough.
As the inimitable Kruunch points out, if they don't have a fire lit under them right now, they need one and in a hurry. The longer it goes without being fixed, the more subs they're going to hemorrhage. Even though I'm probably throwing in the towel soon, I hope they get it straightened out.
2009/10/22
2009/10/18
Champions: The Ugly
That's right, kids, I can't do one of these without an "Ugly" post. So here it is, and it's not pretty. Look away if you must.
The Cryptic Live Team
I'm at a loss to recall a company that has fielded a live team as poor as Cryptic. I say this remembering the foibles of DAoC (some of them my own), the disaster that was Vanguard, or the tremendously disappointing Age of Conan. City of Heroes was a live team disaster and Champions follows eagerly in its footsteps.
And what precisely do I mean by "live team". Typically when an MMO ships, sometimes a number of months after, there's some shifting around. At some point you need to be thinking about the next Big Thing (TM) and that means rolling off some of your key personnel from the last Big Thing (TM). This leaves a number of designers, QA, GMs, whatevers. This is also when you get the best and most useful data about how the unwashed masses actually play your game. Typically this goes with "adjustments" which the same unwashed masses refer to as "nerfs".
Cryptic has done the worst job I have ever seen of rebalancing their games. The Cryptic I remember from CoH had Invuln tanks hiding in dumpsters because they couldn't take the alpha strikes from minions and lieutenants. Think about that. Invuln tank...hiding in trash cans...because they can't take the alpha strikes. Sure, they may have gotten it right later, but how did they miss that?
Following in their own footsteps, at one point a few weeks ago, they "accidentally" doubled the damage for all mobs in the live game. Wait! Was this an ops bug? Did someone bobble a merge? No! It was broken on their public test server for an entire week. Did no one report it there? No! It was reported pretty much as soon as people logged in there! How did that go live? Who dropped that ball?
How about some of their big nerfs?
Teleporters can get out of any jam through status effects and at a sliver of health in a way that you can't shoot at them. This made them unkillable in PvP. Do you think that breaks the competitiveness? Do you think that makes TP a must have for PvP? The fix? Make them not able to teleport out of status effects. Now they're only nigh unto unkillable.
How about mini-mines which was doing 4x too much damage. Four times too much damage? Really? How did this not get caught in beta?
How bout Mindful Reinforcement that is a shield that heals the target for an amount proportional to the shield remaining after some short period of time. Sounds great, right? How bout when it's broken to the point that it drops a 2500 point heal on the target even if the shield is broken? Sound good? Maybe too good to be true? It's still that way on live but will almost certainly be nerfed and nerfed hard in future patches.
Their missteps are bad enough but would be mitigated greatly by players having the ability to easily rebuild characters broken by wide swings in rebalancing which brings us to retcons.
Prohibitively Expensive Respecs
Most games call the "respecs". Champions paying homage to its comic roots calls them "retcons". In Champions you pick a lot of really important things way before you really know what you're doing. It's true for me now running the tables on my third character although less so, and it's true for people starting the game for the first time. Remember that this game is a skills based system with open power selection. Remember that it is a tried and true trapping of MMOs and RPGs historically to underspecify game information. Remember that this is Cryptic that doesn't like showing numbers to players.
The problem? You have to retcon your choices in order. This includes stat picks, advantages to powers, powers themselves, travel powers, and characteristic foci (otherwise known as super stats). The cost scales with level so the higher you are, the more expensive it is and the further back you go the more expensive it is. So when you have the least amount of information you're making the most important decisions and if you make a mistake, you probably can't afford to fix it. For me, this is less of a problem because I have the backup of (now) a pair of 40s and all the cash and experience that brings. For new players? They're probably screwed.
So you step out of the powerhouse with your brand new powers that you've chosen with as much care as you can and you go out to fight. Maybe it works out well for a while; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it takes you a couple levels to realize that you really wanted X instead of Y. Well now you're screwed unless you have a sizable cash reserve. To paraphrase one of the guys I played with, it's like someone at the top had a thing for prohibitively expensive respecs.
Why Hate Healers?
I mentioned it in my last post: the game penalizes healers. Like it or not, the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) is popular because it works. Please indulge me in a brief football analogy. You get big beefy blockers up front, you get your guys who can throw and you get your good hands guys and everything works because each player is specialized for what they do. A few special ones can do two or three things (blocking tight ends and scrambling quarterbacks for instance). MMO roles work the same way. You want your beefiest characters with their oceans of hitpoints keeping the attention of the biggest and baddest uglies and you want your guys doing damage doing as much damage as they possibly can without turning that ugly's sights on them.
In Champions, healing aggro is broken. If you drop a big heal on a tank, you will get aggro. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can be in the right stance, you can stack your presence so that you generate way less threat, and your tank can stack presence so they generate way more threat and it just doesn't matter. You will get aggro and unless you're also a tank, you will die.
The devs have said that it's "working as designed" but have already adjusted it down on the public test server. This is a design decision that really shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. We do betas for a reason--it's to sort stuff like this out. You couple that with the day 1 nerf ("rebalancing") of defensive passives and exp and you get a game that's really in disarray on day 1. Bad Cryptic, no Twinkie.
Healing is already a much maligned role. You need them, they need you, and you only really notice them when they fail--whether its your fault or not. The game already penalizes them by not giving PvP or PvE credit, why make it harder on those who choose that role to take one for the team?
Content Holes
I've mentioned the day 1 "rebalancing" a bunch of times already, but in an attempt to call out one of the worst live decisions I've ever witnessed, I'm going to call it out again. On that fateful day they nerfed experience as well. On paper you can get from 1 to 40 doing quests and just quests but like I mentioned before, unless you go out of your way to do every single quest or spend a lot of time in broken PvP, you end up having to grind.
I listed this issue under "The Bad" but it really goes further than that because it's at the confluence of a number of poor decisions. You get your day 1 patch which rocks people on their heels. You get your really awful cost of retcons. Now you get people having to grind in a game that's otherwise very casual friendly. The solution? Now, more than a month and a half after release, we get a set of daily repeatable grind quests some of which are terribly broken. Some of these have stupid requirements "kill 150 X" or "gather 20 X" where the drop rate means you kill the same 150 X and takes up bag space. The kicker? Some of them are broken and don't give any XP! So you're really grinding anyway and people can see right through that. [keyshawn]C'mon, man![/keyshawn]
Broken Content
The table is already set for some very frustrating gameplay and a growing ennui from at least some appreciable portion of the vocal playerbase but let's kick it up that one more notch that makes it look ever so clownshoes. I will point out but two things.
First, most of the last three 5-person instances are broken in some way. I can probably say "all" of the last three 5-person instances are broken but there's one that I've never been to that no one ever goes to. The other two, one at 38, and one at 40, are broken in pretty bad ways. The level 38 one (Viper's Lair) has bugged both times I've been there to the point that the two ending bosses did not attack me at all. That's pretty bad. The broken 40 has a broken boss that pretty much instagibs your entire team within seconds of the pull. Despite the fact that the encounter is soloable if you use some broken powers, this seems bad.
Second, in a single shard game with multiple instances, what stops a raid group from going through and killing all the big world bosses in every instance? In other games we have raid timers which keep people from farming the same bosses multiple times a day. In Champions we have a reverse raid timer. Each big world boss will put an invisible debuff on you which cannot be seen in your interface which turns at least one of each boss's AoE attacks into an unmitigated instagib. The kicker? They stick this on a number of quest mobs. So if you're helping out to kill a big bad for a buddy, you're kind of screwed when you get the quest yourself. Brilliant! Functioning as intended or not, this qualifies from a player's point of view as "broken".
The Cryptic Live Team
I'm at a loss to recall a company that has fielded a live team as poor as Cryptic. I say this remembering the foibles of DAoC (some of them my own), the disaster that was Vanguard, or the tremendously disappointing Age of Conan. City of Heroes was a live team disaster and Champions follows eagerly in its footsteps.
And what precisely do I mean by "live team". Typically when an MMO ships, sometimes a number of months after, there's some shifting around. At some point you need to be thinking about the next Big Thing (TM) and that means rolling off some of your key personnel from the last Big Thing (TM). This leaves a number of designers, QA, GMs, whatevers. This is also when you get the best and most useful data about how the unwashed masses actually play your game. Typically this goes with "adjustments" which the same unwashed masses refer to as "nerfs".
Cryptic has done the worst job I have ever seen of rebalancing their games. The Cryptic I remember from CoH had Invuln tanks hiding in dumpsters because they couldn't take the alpha strikes from minions and lieutenants. Think about that. Invuln tank...hiding in trash cans...because they can't take the alpha strikes. Sure, they may have gotten it right later, but how did they miss that?
Following in their own footsteps, at one point a few weeks ago, they "accidentally" doubled the damage for all mobs in the live game. Wait! Was this an ops bug? Did someone bobble a merge? No! It was broken on their public test server for an entire week. Did no one report it there? No! It was reported pretty much as soon as people logged in there! How did that go live? Who dropped that ball?
How about some of their big nerfs?
Their missteps are bad enough but would be mitigated greatly by players having the ability to easily rebuild characters broken by wide swings in rebalancing which brings us to retcons.
Prohibitively Expensive Respecs
Most games call the "respecs". Champions paying homage to its comic roots calls them "retcons". In Champions you pick a lot of really important things way before you really know what you're doing. It's true for me now running the tables on my third character although less so, and it's true for people starting the game for the first time. Remember that this game is a skills based system with open power selection. Remember that it is a tried and true trapping of MMOs and RPGs historically to underspecify game information. Remember that this is Cryptic that doesn't like showing numbers to players.
The problem? You have to retcon your choices in order. This includes stat picks, advantages to powers, powers themselves, travel powers, and characteristic foci (otherwise known as super stats). The cost scales with level so the higher you are, the more expensive it is and the further back you go the more expensive it is. So when you have the least amount of information you're making the most important decisions and if you make a mistake, you probably can't afford to fix it. For me, this is less of a problem because I have the backup of (now) a pair of 40s and all the cash and experience that brings. For new players? They're probably screwed.
So you step out of the powerhouse with your brand new powers that you've chosen with as much care as you can and you go out to fight. Maybe it works out well for a while; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it takes you a couple levels to realize that you really wanted X instead of Y. Well now you're screwed unless you have a sizable cash reserve. To paraphrase one of the guys I played with, it's like someone at the top had a thing for prohibitively expensive respecs.
Why Hate Healers?
I mentioned it in my last post: the game penalizes healers. Like it or not, the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) is popular because it works. Please indulge me in a brief football analogy. You get big beefy blockers up front, you get your guys who can throw and you get your good hands guys and everything works because each player is specialized for what they do. A few special ones can do two or three things (blocking tight ends and scrambling quarterbacks for instance). MMO roles work the same way. You want your beefiest characters with their oceans of hitpoints keeping the attention of the biggest and baddest uglies and you want your guys doing damage doing as much damage as they possibly can without turning that ugly's sights on them.
In Champions, healing aggro is broken. If you drop a big heal on a tank, you will get aggro. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can be in the right stance, you can stack your presence so that you generate way less threat, and your tank can stack presence so they generate way more threat and it just doesn't matter. You will get aggro and unless you're also a tank, you will die.
The devs have said that it's "working as designed" but have already adjusted it down on the public test server. This is a design decision that really shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. We do betas for a reason--it's to sort stuff like this out. You couple that with the day 1 nerf ("rebalancing") of defensive passives and exp and you get a game that's really in disarray on day 1. Bad Cryptic, no Twinkie.
Healing is already a much maligned role. You need them, they need you, and you only really notice them when they fail--whether its your fault or not. The game already penalizes them by not giving PvP or PvE credit, why make it harder on those who choose that role to take one for the team?
Content Holes
I've mentioned the day 1 "rebalancing" a bunch of times already, but in an attempt to call out one of the worst live decisions I've ever witnessed, I'm going to call it out again. On that fateful day they nerfed experience as well. On paper you can get from 1 to 40 doing quests and just quests but like I mentioned before, unless you go out of your way to do every single quest or spend a lot of time in broken PvP, you end up having to grind.
I listed this issue under "The Bad" but it really goes further than that because it's at the confluence of a number of poor decisions. You get your day 1 patch which rocks people on their heels. You get your really awful cost of retcons. Now you get people having to grind in a game that's otherwise very casual friendly. The solution? Now, more than a month and a half after release, we get a set of daily repeatable grind quests some of which are terribly broken. Some of these have stupid requirements "kill 150 X" or "gather 20 X" where the drop rate means you kill the same 150 X and takes up bag space. The kicker? Some of them are broken and don't give any XP! So you're really grinding anyway and people can see right through that. [keyshawn]C'mon, man![/keyshawn]
Broken Content
The table is already set for some very frustrating gameplay and a growing ennui from at least some appreciable portion of the vocal playerbase but let's kick it up that one more notch that makes it look ever so clownshoes. I will point out but two things.
First, most of the last three 5-person instances are broken in some way. I can probably say "all" of the last three 5-person instances are broken but there's one that I've never been to that no one ever goes to. The other two, one at 38, and one at 40, are broken in pretty bad ways. The level 38 one (Viper's Lair) has bugged both times I've been there to the point that the two ending bosses did not attack me at all. That's pretty bad. The broken 40 has a broken boss that pretty much instagibs your entire team within seconds of the pull. Despite the fact that the encounter is soloable if you use some broken powers, this seems bad.
Second, in a single shard game with multiple instances, what stops a raid group from going through and killing all the big world bosses in every instance? In other games we have raid timers which keep people from farming the same bosses multiple times a day. In Champions we have a reverse raid timer. Each big world boss will put an invisible debuff on you which cannot be seen in your interface which turns at least one of each boss's AoE attacks into an unmitigated instagib. The kicker? They stick this on a number of quest mobs. So if you're helping out to kill a big bad for a buddy, you're kind of screwed when you get the quest yourself. Brilliant! Functioning as intended or not, this qualifies from a player's point of view as "broken".
2009/10/15
Champions: The Bad
Sadly, all is not well in Millenium City...
The Game Is Really Short
Between the initial draft of the intro article and now, I've not only dinged my main up to 40, but I'm within mere hours of dinging a second alt to 40. How can this be? Didn't they nerf the exp on launch day? Yes, they did and no, it doesn't really seem to slow people down that much. On my schedule, it's looking like about 120 hours from level 1 to level 40 if you don't futz around and know what you're doing. I'm sure I could do it faster if I really wanted to, but half the fun for me is trying the same encounters I already know with different builds which leads us to...
The Game Is Really Easy
Very few times have I felt that the game was legitimately challenging once I had the correct build and the correct strategy. This probably isn't a shocker unless you consider that I solo the 5-person instances and most of the world bosses. In fact, this isn't even because I have some esoteric build or some innate penchant for gaming. It's in fact pretty common for people to do this. But wait! Didn't they nerf the defensive passives at launch? But didn't they nerf half of the overpowered powers? Yes, they did, and it's still doable.
On a purely personal note, I think they should nerf a bunch of stuff, but if they do and I can no longer solo 5-person instances, it's a deal breaker for me. The jump in difficulty from 5-person instances to, I don't know, a hopped up +6 level nemesis mission is too great. I liken it to WoW in the Bad Old Days (TM) when the jump from non-raiding to raiding was UBRS to Molten Core in a day when you couldn't easily get blues in every slot. It's that pronounced. So if I can't reasonably solo a 5-person instance, the amount of content I can experience (repeatedly) that's even remotely challenging without outside intervention dwindles to nil. I.e.: deal breaker.
I can get a challenge in Champions in exactly four ways:
- solo a 5-person instance
- pull a pile of mobs which no one has a hope of dealing with because AoEs are limited to 5 targets or less
- pick a build that's hobbled in some way (yeah, right, that sounds fun)
- PvP
PvP Is Hella Broken
I love PvP (I really do). It was one of my favorite things in WoW and as far as I can tell, the only reason to play DAoC. It was OK in Conan. In Champions, it's hella broken. Let me briefly list the ways...
Status effects have no real immunity timers. Holds, stuns, snares, knockback, knockup, it all can be chained with nary a pause. This means that if you're fighting someone with a spammable status effect (and many of them are) you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, die right now or in the next 10 minutes if you happen to have Regeneration at a high level. Don't worry, they can keep it up indefinitely.
Healers get no credit. I'm not talking "healers get less credit" I'm talking "healers get NO credit." The entire game is like this, in fact. If you are a healer in PvP as I often try to be, you will get zero points for your contributions at all. If it was your efforts that turned the tide, tough. If it was you that kept the other team score-less, so what? You get nothing. If you don't do significant damage, you get squat and thats just the way it is. Sound broken? It is!
The dynamic range of build power is too high. In WoW, even when massively outgeared (as we usually were), I always felt that we had a chance even if it was small as long as we played better than the other team. In Champions, it seems to be mostly build. If you have a broken build and fight against other broken build teams, I imagine it's a lot more interesting but the game just plain isn't designed for it. If you bring a PvE build into PvP, even one on one you're going to get worked and there's nothing you can do about it. This compounds when you fight PvP groups who all have broken builds and pound even the most resilient of heroes into dust in seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating this.
Lack of gear/cash rewards from PvP. I probably wouldn't have noticed this except that someone else pointed it out to me. You can totally level in PvP as long as you'd like but you get almost no gear for it and you get no cash to buy new gear. You can buy a small amount of gear that might fit your needs if you PvP endlessly and don't mind the unaffordably high cost of these items but that's not really reliable now is it? This is a problem for people who couldn't care less about PvE and is yet another example of why the game isn't designed for PvP. Sorry PvPers, it just isn't.
There's Little Replay Value
Because of the XP nerf at launch, if you don't go out of your way to grind mobs or PvP, you pretty much have to do every single quest. There are indeed, on paper, enough quests to go from 1 to 40 without grinding but if you're not super uber careful about it, you can easily miss one or two levels of experience. In all of MMO-dom that I've seen, I'd have to say that the grindy bits in this game are really, really forgiving, but it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game which is almost mind-numbingly casual.
This means that if you do bring multiple characters to 40, you will be doing a very large percentage of every quest on each and every playthrough. I expect this to change as they add more content, but at the moment, the point stands. I was going to say "no replay value" but I am playing through it with a different set of powers which is amusing to me from a wannabe designer point of view if nothing else.
No Endgame
So you've saved the world from VIPER and ARGENT and Teleios, and a spectacularly ugly menagerie of career evildoers. As you ding 40 and get your invite to the premier super heroing group cleverly named UNITY, what do you get? You get a bunch of once-per-day missions that can get you a small number of unity points like three or six. Whoa. Hold me back. If you have a small handful of these, you can buy attunement crystals to two (that's right, TWO!) level 40 5-person instances. If you have a thousand of these, you can buy some pretty nice gear. It isn't spectacularly nicer than the stuff I got to 40 in to be honest, and remember that you can only run your half dozen random missions once a day.
So...well...by next April I could buy something...
Riiiiight. Bad desginer, no twinkie. If the margins were thinner, I might be tempted to grind these damned things out, but they really are repetitive and the increase in ability just isn't that compelling.
If PvP weren't so horribly broken, or there were more interesting things to do, or the game was significantly more difficult, I probably wouldn't mind running the UNITY missions so much. But, jeez, that really seems poor. If I were in a more caring and less drunken rage, I might give them the benefit of the doubt "they're not quite finished yet" but it really seems like they didn't put any thought into this.
Here's a tip: add 5 or so 5-person instances that are really hard. I know your design team has the chops to build interesting encounters. Make the last 1% of your character count for something, and stuff these places full of interesting bosses. Put them in a chain with whatever your favorite raid instance locking mechanism is so long as I know I have some challenge to look forward to each and every time I log into the game. Give me a reason to keep sending you $15 a month because...
The Population Is Shrinking
Since there's only one server with each zone split into a handful of instances, it's relatively easy to tell roughly if the population is shifting. Because all the later levels are done primarily in two zones, it's super uber easy to compare populations just by looking at those zones. I can tell you that the top level zones are roughly half to two thirds of what they were a month ago. This corresponds frighteningly well with the end of the first month + one month trial period from launch.
I do know that both Conan and CoH had the same kind of issues. There just wasn't much to do when you hit your last level and both of these games survive today. I've got very little doubt that Champions will be around for a while, but that doesn't make me think for even a moment, that they couldn't have hit it out of the park if they'd paid a little more attention to how people actually play these kinds of games.
The Game Is Really Short
Between the initial draft of the intro article and now, I've not only dinged my main up to 40, but I'm within mere hours of dinging a second alt to 40. How can this be? Didn't they nerf the exp on launch day? Yes, they did and no, it doesn't really seem to slow people down that much. On my schedule, it's looking like about 120 hours from level 1 to level 40 if you don't futz around and know what you're doing. I'm sure I could do it faster if I really wanted to, but half the fun for me is trying the same encounters I already know with different builds which leads us to...
The Game Is Really Easy
Very few times have I felt that the game was legitimately challenging once I had the correct build and the correct strategy. This probably isn't a shocker unless you consider that I solo the 5-person instances and most of the world bosses. In fact, this isn't even because I have some esoteric build or some innate penchant for gaming. It's in fact pretty common for people to do this. But wait! Didn't they nerf the defensive passives at launch? But didn't they nerf half of the overpowered powers? Yes, they did, and it's still doable.
On a purely personal note, I think they should nerf a bunch of stuff, but if they do and I can no longer solo 5-person instances, it's a deal breaker for me. The jump in difficulty from 5-person instances to, I don't know, a hopped up +6 level nemesis mission is too great. I liken it to WoW in the Bad Old Days (TM) when the jump from non-raiding to raiding was UBRS to Molten Core in a day when you couldn't easily get blues in every slot. It's that pronounced. So if I can't reasonably solo a 5-person instance, the amount of content I can experience (repeatedly) that's even remotely challenging without outside intervention dwindles to nil. I.e.: deal breaker.
I can get a challenge in Champions in exactly four ways:
- solo a 5-person instance
- pull a pile of mobs which no one has a hope of dealing with because AoEs are limited to 5 targets or less
- pick a build that's hobbled in some way (yeah, right, that sounds fun)
- PvP
PvP Is Hella Broken
I love PvP (I really do). It was one of my favorite things in WoW and as far as I can tell, the only reason to play DAoC. It was OK in Conan. In Champions, it's hella broken. Let me briefly list the ways...
Status effects have no real immunity timers. Holds, stuns, snares, knockback, knockup, it all can be chained with nary a pause. This means that if you're fighting someone with a spammable status effect (and many of them are) you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, die right now or in the next 10 minutes if you happen to have Regeneration at a high level. Don't worry, they can keep it up indefinitely.
Healers get no credit. I'm not talking "healers get less credit" I'm talking "healers get NO credit." The entire game is like this, in fact. If you are a healer in PvP as I often try to be, you will get zero points for your contributions at all. If it was your efforts that turned the tide, tough. If it was you that kept the other team score-less, so what? You get nothing. If you don't do significant damage, you get squat and thats just the way it is. Sound broken? It is!
The dynamic range of build power is too high. In WoW, even when massively outgeared (as we usually were), I always felt that we had a chance even if it was small as long as we played better than the other team. In Champions, it seems to be mostly build. If you have a broken build and fight against other broken build teams, I imagine it's a lot more interesting but the game just plain isn't designed for it. If you bring a PvE build into PvP, even one on one you're going to get worked and there's nothing you can do about it. This compounds when you fight PvP groups who all have broken builds and pound even the most resilient of heroes into dust in seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating this.
Lack of gear/cash rewards from PvP. I probably wouldn't have noticed this except that someone else pointed it out to me. You can totally level in PvP as long as you'd like but you get almost no gear for it and you get no cash to buy new gear. You can buy a small amount of gear that might fit your needs if you PvP endlessly and don't mind the unaffordably high cost of these items but that's not really reliable now is it? This is a problem for people who couldn't care less about PvE and is yet another example of why the game isn't designed for PvP. Sorry PvPers, it just isn't.
There's Little Replay Value
Because of the XP nerf at launch, if you don't go out of your way to grind mobs or PvP, you pretty much have to do every single quest. There are indeed, on paper, enough quests to go from 1 to 40 without grinding but if you're not super uber careful about it, you can easily miss one or two levels of experience. In all of MMO-dom that I've seen, I'd have to say that the grindy bits in this game are really, really forgiving, but it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game which is almost mind-numbingly casual.
This means that if you do bring multiple characters to 40, you will be doing a very large percentage of every quest on each and every playthrough. I expect this to change as they add more content, but at the moment, the point stands. I was going to say "no replay value" but I am playing through it with a different set of powers which is amusing to me from a wannabe designer point of view if nothing else.
No Endgame
So you've saved the world from VIPER and ARGENT and Teleios, and a spectacularly ugly menagerie of career evildoers. As you ding 40 and get your invite to the premier super heroing group cleverly named UNITY, what do you get? You get a bunch of once-per-day missions that can get you a small number of unity points like three or six. Whoa. Hold me back. If you have a small handful of these, you can buy attunement crystals to two (that's right, TWO!) level 40 5-person instances. If you have a thousand of these, you can buy some pretty nice gear. It isn't spectacularly nicer than the stuff I got to 40 in to be honest, and remember that you can only run your half dozen random missions once a day.
So...well...by next April I could buy something...
Riiiiight. Bad desginer, no twinkie. If the margins were thinner, I might be tempted to grind these damned things out, but they really are repetitive and the increase in ability just isn't that compelling.
If PvP weren't so horribly broken, or there were more interesting things to do, or the game was significantly more difficult, I probably wouldn't mind running the UNITY missions so much. But, jeez, that really seems poor. If I were in a more caring and less drunken rage, I might give them the benefit of the doubt "they're not quite finished yet" but it really seems like they didn't put any thought into this.
Here's a tip: add 5 or so 5-person instances that are really hard. I know your design team has the chops to build interesting encounters. Make the last 1% of your character count for something, and stuff these places full of interesting bosses. Put them in a chain with whatever your favorite raid instance locking mechanism is so long as I know I have some challenge to look forward to each and every time I log into the game. Give me a reason to keep sending you $15 a month because...
The Population Is Shrinking
Since there's only one server with each zone split into a handful of instances, it's relatively easy to tell roughly if the population is shifting. Because all the later levels are done primarily in two zones, it's super uber easy to compare populations just by looking at those zones. I can tell you that the top level zones are roughly half to two thirds of what they were a month ago. This corresponds frighteningly well with the end of the first month + one month trial period from launch.
I do know that both Conan and CoH had the same kind of issues. There just wasn't much to do when you hit your last level and both of these games survive today. I've got very little doubt that Champions will be around for a while, but that doesn't make me think for even a moment, that they couldn't have hit it out of the park if they'd paid a little more attention to how people actually play these kinds of games.
2009/10/06
Champions: The Good
So we'll start out with the stuff in the game that I think is particularly good. The typical disclaimers apply.
Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.
Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.
I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.
Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!
While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.
Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.
A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.
Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.
Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.
I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.
The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.
Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.
Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.
Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.
I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.
Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!
While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.
Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.
A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.
Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.
Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.
I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.
The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.
Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.
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