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.