The controls in the game are horrid... clunky and badly designed. I like how they give you a few different control sets, but regardless they are bad. Attacking enemies tends to be very slow and awkward. The character customization is fun, though it wont take long for a player to recognize many of the commonly used visuals such as large wings or claws. Quests so far have been boring, though they make up for that with an active world. Really annoying enemies tend to appear out of no where, again mixed with the combat system and targeting... it can be a pain in the butt.

I would have to say the quality of the game is average. It could have spent more time in production, could have been much better designed. Will make a fun console game, but a mediocre PC title.

Overall impression is that this game ranges between a 6.5-7.5/10  give or take. CoH/CoV definately had the controls down better, the design and appeal seemed better thought out and developed. I cant help but feel champions is a mimicry of better games, but is meant mainly to be an entry into the console mmorpg market...not necessarily a very good one, just an entry none the less.

Originally posted by Rabenwolf

The controls in the game are horrid... clunky and badly designed. I like how they give you a few different control sets, but regardless they are bad. Attacking enemies tends to be very slow and awkward. The character customization is fun, though it wont take long for a player to recognize many of the commonly used visuals such as large wings or claws. Quests so far have been boring, though they make up for that with an active world. Really annoying enemies tend to appear out of no where, again mixed with the combat system and targeting... it can be a pain in the butt.

I would have to say the quality of the game is average. It could have spent more time in production, could have been much better designed. Will make a fun console game, but a mediocre PC title.

Overall impression is that this game ranges between a 6.5-7.5/10  give or take. CoH/CoV definately had the controls down better, the design and appeal seemed better thought out and developed. I cant help but feel champions is a mimicry of better games, but is meant mainly to be an entry into the console mmorpg market...not necessarily a very good one, just an entry none the less.

I can tell you right now that it won't be a successful console game. I'm not trying to be insulting or anything, but I think you and obviously the CO devs aren't really in touch with online console gaming.

Insofar as console gaming is concerned, Xbox Live is king. Xbox Live gamers won't play a game with an added subscription fee because everyone who plays on Xbox Live pays a yearly subscription all ready. Do you really think those same gamers would be willing to pony up the money for the game, the cost of the monthly sub, and be willing to purchase content from an item shop?

The gamers on Xbox Live won't support games that require more thought than kill. Even in the games that have objective based gametypes, the majority of the players play Deathmatch and Teamdeathmatch exclusively.

CO is too stat dependent and is definitely not an action RPG. It's not a console game. It's not even close.

I agree with the rest of your post, I just think that too many people blame consoles instead of blaming the developers.

Look at the game's history. Marvel and Microsoft were both on board until they started to see the game and then they both pulled out. Cryptic was left stuck with code for a super hero MMO and instead of starting from scratch like they should have, they flocked to the closest IP they could find to shoe horn into their game.

Marvel obviously didn't pull out because they changed their minds about having their IP associated with an MMORPG because a Marvel MMO is being developed by a new company.

Both Marvel and Microsoft have been in business for a very long time and have both been successful. Why would they pull out if they had faith in Cryptics design?

I seriously don't see what the hand full of people who are defending this game see in it. There are just too many sketchy things surrounding this game's history and the business model is more than enough to make me not want to support it.

Checked out the OB now that is free on Fileplanet w/o a preorder. (good sign?) Anyway, I have to agree with a lot of the posts I am readng here. While the costume customizaton is great, the combat is really clunky. This one needs more time in the oven. Also, the quests just seem tedious, I can't put my finger on it. Maybe I need to give it more time... Oh that's right, with a million other games coming out soon I likely can't be bothered.

Originally posted by monkey_butt

Checked out the OB now that is free on Fileplanet w/o a preorder. (good sign?) Anyway, I have to agree with a lot of the posts I am readng here. While the costume customizaton is great, the combat is really clunky. This one needs more time in the oven. Also, the quests just seem tedious, I can't put my finger on it. Maybe I need to give it more time... Oh that's right, with a million other games coming out soon I likely can't be bothered.

You mean the FEW posts.  Most people are saying its pretty dang good.  Excluding the haters which OP hated before it even came.

Originally posted by Dracill

Sorcery is a very hard powerset, realy hard.

So you are saying you tried on porpouse to use a powerset that you knew was broken to be able to come here and say "My power set was broken and I dont like the game"? It doesnt make very sense to me.... unles all you want is trolling.

No - as I said in the original post, I tried several powersets.

The two points main points I made regarding sorcery were that powersets and powers are poorly balanced, and that support type characters are not only not needed, but their powers are weak and so difficult to use (because of range issues) that they're not worth it.

Originally posted by ghost047

Originally posted by green13

Originally posted by ghost047

He dislike the game because of MT and Bill Roper, he already said it many times.

Oh, and he said he'd put me on ignore...

But here he is still pathetically attempting to misrepresent me.

MTs aside, the game isn't that good. If it were, they wouldn't need the MTs.

I'm not, you have done it yourself, go read your previous post about MT, Bill and even the lifetime sub.

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/3007907#3007907

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/247024/page/1

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/3013674#3013674

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/243801/page/1

What you do, Ghost, is resort to personal attacks when you can't argue the facts, as you did here:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/3007995#3007995

I don't think MTs belong in a subscription model - something which most other mmo'ers agree with.

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/243937/page/1

But unlike others in these forums, I have not, however, expressed fear or concern that if CO succeeds with this model that other mmos will follow suit. SOE have already gone down this road and the results have been poor. I've argued against MTs (with a subscription) because I think they're going to be a major handicap to any game, including CO.

So I feel no need to give a biased review. In fact, having played the game I now understand why the MTs are there - even without MTs it would have relatively limited appeal.

As for Bill Roper, I've addressed that already too. My only experience of him prior to trying CO was Hellgate London and his CO interviews in which he.... doesn't distinguish himself in a good way. I enjoyed Hellgate London as a single player game. I never tried the "mmo" part of it because it looked overpriced for what it was.

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2996044#2996044

Nothing I've said in my review is untrue. I haven't described the game as "craptastic" as others have. In other posts I've skirted breaching the NDA to defend it against those sorts of unfair claims, and I gave due credit in my review to things CO does well.

But CO is far from a perfect game and it really is an average successor to CoH. It has many problems and appears to have been designed to appeal to solo console players. And it's fine to design a game for a specific market like that - but if you try to market it to people outside of that specific market, i.e. to the wider mmo community, and as something as other than what it is, you and your product will attract due criticism.

Originally posted by unbound55

All in all, I think it is a reasonable review, but there are some points that seems to be missing and areas that I've had a different experience with:

• Interesting that there is no mention of the customization of the individual powers.  It is true that the number of powers is relatively small, but part of the leveling process involves applying bonuses or additional abilities to those individual powers.  This creates more significant customization than CoH (which also has a relatively small number of powers available to the user), and a little bit more inline with talents in WoW.
• Interesting that cooldowns figure prominently in the initial part of your review.  It is true that there are some cooldowns with some powers, but it is hardly a pervasive issue in the game.  I've played around with 3 different toons so far and haven't encountered it myself, and heard about it only through one of my friends (3 of us are playing concurrently choosing different toons) on one of her toons.
• Power imbalances in a new MMO?  I've never heard of such a thing (/sarcasm)
• I do agree that the percentages approach to powers can create a nerfing nightmare.  I'm hoping that Cryptic learned some lessons from CoH, and that they won't have to be as extreme in their balancing...I'm still a bit miffed at what they did to my regen scrapper...
• The team-play portion of your review was rather shocking to me.  The game has been more stable and solid than some of the long-running MMOs (including CoH that I also reactivated back in February).  We've not encountered anyone missing from the maps, although we did learn to play with the zoom on the mini-map pretty early.
• I've not seen any performance issues on a modern platform.  You do realize that the P4 was initially shipped in 2000, if you are running a 32-bit OS you really only have about 3 GB RAM, and the 4750 can't do but so much by itself.  I did have to turn down the graphics a bit on my son's computer (about 3 years old, don't remember the specs, but it at least had a dual-core processor) because of noticable, but it's nowhere near set to the bottom on graphics.  Minimum specs are always disappointing for any software.

I didn't mention customisation of powers because it wasn't working properly when I tried it and it's possible that will be fixed by the time the game is launched. There was also an issue that with the imbalance between powers, ranking up weak powers has much less benefit than ranking up good ones.

Some powers I tried did not improve in effectiveness at all when I ranked them up - which was a bit shocking. Other bonuses I tried also did nothing - eg. there was one for summoning circles that was supposed to give you control over the summoned that didn't do anything. Some of the bonus descriptions were still blank. It was very clear to me that this aspect of the game was still undergoing active development.

So I chose not to comment on it.

CO made a very big deal of not having cooldowns from very early in its development. Many were shocked and disappointed when the TTH interview came out that revealed that the power armor set was cooldown based. I did make the point that it's nowhere near as bad as CoH, but cooldowns are there.

The bug I encountered with invisible team-members was reported by a lot of other beta players - and as I said, was fixed by my second attempt at teaming up.

Yes I'm aware that the P4 is old - I said that it was likely the problem in my original post. I'm also aware of the effective 3 gig limit that win xp applies. But I'm above the recommended system specs for everything but my processor and even that (3 GHz) is above the minum (2.5GHz). So while I wasn't surprised that I couldn't run it with all of the settings turned right up, I wasn't expecting to run into issues with all of the settings turned right down.

I made the comments I did, including all the details of my system, because they are informative. Not everyone will have a "modern platform".

I didn't mention customisation of powers because it wasn't working properly when I tried it and it's possible that will be fixed by the time the game is launched. There was also an issue that with the imbalance between powers, ranking up weak powers has much less benefit than ranking up good ones.

Some powers I tried did not improve in effectiveness at all when I ranked them up - which was a bit shocking. Other bonuses I tried also did nothing - eg. there was one for summoning circles that was supposed to give you control over the summoned that didn't do anything. Some of the bonus descriptions were still blank. It was very clear to me that this aspect of the game was still undergoing active development.

So.. When exactly did you play the game then? A lot of said issues with powers have long-since been fixed. Sorcery works properly now as do most of the power sets. The only real major problem as far as powers go right now is how overpowered Healing/Regenerative abilities are. If your review based on old data, mention that so the rest of us know. Granted, a lot of what you've said is quite accurate. Some of it, though, is indeed very dated.

The game's performance has improved a good bit on lower-quality computers, though I have to ask Green, what graphic card do you use?