And Now For Something Completely Different: The Champions MMO Free Weekend

Well, I had a little extra time on Halloween weekend so I spent some of it downloading and trying out the Hero Systems superhero game MMO Champions Online.

First thing I noticed – well the first thing I noticed was the popup telling me that my brand-new desktop replacement $2000 workstation laptop was too old and had outdated drivers.

Yeah. This would be why I’m not playing Champions Online.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get screenshots. Fortunately, Kiki over at Lovely Black Dress has a post summing up my experience pretty well. Particularly as regarding the boobs.

Taking my new enormous boobs, and following through on a threat I made on Twitter, the martial artist Gratuitous Cleavage Lass was unleashed upon Millenium City, to fight crime with the awesome powers of a complete lack of dignity and self-respect and wearing white after Labor Day. Yes, they actually let me name my character Gratuitous Cleavage Lass.

I got through the tutorial finding that Martial Artists are astoundingly effective. I would think nothing of taking on four, five, even six drones or a leader type with two flunkies. Even the ten-foot-tall battlesuiter at the end, Black Talon, quickly folded up under a flurry of dickpunches and knee kicks. Well, he was tall and I was short.

Then I got to the game proper which was very different. Fortunately, I didn’t seem to have much trouble getting groups. Unfortunately for the social wallflower that I am, I pretty much had to. I was good at flunkies, though not as good as I was in the tutorial and a fight with a supervillain or a villain and a flunky was a grim, hard-fought battle of attrition. A supervillain and backup or two villains would leave me on my shapely ass in the snow.

But I think I was getting the hang of it, and maybe getting together with some more experienced characters and working through some suggested builds would have helped. I didn’t really know, and am still uncertain what my character was really capable of.

I also found it odd that every time you moved to a different area, or went to the Powerhouse to get new abilities when you leveled you went to a new server then back to a different one when you returned. One wonders how a group stays together through this.

It was also kind of jarring to try to figure out the various gear and power combinations. If I had a coherent character concept then grabbing random mystic, arms, and superscience items would have been confusing. As I had no coherent concept, it didn’t strike me too badly.

I would really have liked to try more character combinations. In fact, the character generator itself was entertaining, and one of the things I really liked – though it often took me several tries to get the program to accept a customization I picked out. And I don’t know if there was a way to go back and re-customize the look or not.

I would have enjoyed more than a busy holiday weekend to play with it. I don’t really think with the limited number of characters I was able to level out of the tutorial, that I really have a clear and valid idea of how the game works. And that’s the final strike – I would have tried to make time for Champions Online but I can’t afford another MMO in my life at this point. Particularly one that doesn’t run well on my hardware, has a confusing instancing/server setup that makes it even harder for me to be social, and doesn’t give me a trial long enough to see what the game can really do.

But, I am digging out my Fifth Edition Hero System books and getting a superhero game together. So thanks for that much, at least.