On December 17th 2008 2K games officially dropped the publishing of the game due to the take over of Cryptic by Atari. Atari will now develop and publish the game along side the Star Trek Online MMO. They are hoping to keep to the Spring 2009 release.

"We wanted our fans to hear this from us first... We’re changing our Champions Online launch date from July 14th to September 1st of this year."

I've been following Champions Online for quite some time...I love the comic book look/feel to it, but there is heavy competition from already CoH/CoV, DC universe, and I hear Marvel is going to have their own world as well. We'll see who stands apart from the pack.

If day one of my Champions Online open beta experience was summed up as a failure, then a week later I have to continue to call it as I see it and tell you that I think Champions Online is actually full of win. My initial impression wasn't even really an impression of the game, I never got to play it because of Cryptic/FilePlanet's blunder of offering a bad beta client to download. This things do unfortunately happen during open betas, so I had to be patient and continue plugging away.

I had serious problems getting the game installed and patched, but after they fixed the problem and offered the correct beta client I was off and running. My actual impressions are largely positive, and I think that Cryptic has made a great game from what I have seen. Peep at the video below for some of my initial impressions on various game play elements that stuck out to me. The animations, environments, combat and questing are few of the things I briefly touch on. See the rest of my thoughts after the clip:




What I liked:

* The game gets out of the way of the experienced mmo player. NPC's marked with a blue letter "i" over their head indicated that they had text for newbies trying to learn the game. For me, this was a clear indicator to skip talking to them.
* The character customization is fantastic and completely allows you to build any type of hero you like. I think that this is an understatement, but also extremely obvious if you know anything about CO or its predecessor, City of Heroes. I saw some really great heroes in my time in beta, and had a blast seeing the good (and bad) costumes/themes that people come up with. There is so much customization its almost difficult to figure out how to find the right costume pieces. Saving costumes is an awesome game design idea. Having them for re-use, or simply to remember where the costume options are by saving them is a great feature.
* Character names and friends are also the result of an excellent game design concept. Your character's name is always in the format of name@accountname. So, my toons were Firefox@br3ntbr0, Landshark@br3ntbr0, etc, etc. Anyone who adds me as a friend adds "@br3ntbr0" as a friend, so that no matter which of my characters I am playing they will be notified. No more having to tell everyone who my alts are so that they can find me when I'm online. The other benefit of the name design is that there can be more than one Landshark (Landshark has to be the greatest hero ever btw) since the names Landshark@br3ntbr0 and Landshark@youraccount are technically different names. You'll always get the character name you want this way.
* The graphics and animations were excellent in my opinion. The way the beast body style runs on all fours was believable, the spell effects like flames and ice blocks were cool looking, and the animations of the travel powers and melee combat moves were polished and generally well done. Seeing the ground crumble beneath my feet as I landed from a super jump did alot to make me feel like a super hero.
* The UI was clean, uncluttered, and should be familiar to most MMO players. Most importantly it just plain worked, and didn't seem to lag the client too much. The key mappings were intuitive to me, and the game made a point to ask me about that set up when I started. Choosing "mmo style" (or whatever it was called) put a default set of key bindings in that had me off and running with no hiccups, plus they were easily configured when I wanted to change something like camera zoom or auto run keys.
* The starting area did its job, as it offered plenty of information for new players to read. Quests were there to guide users through new mechanics like blocking and picking up objects. The starting area finished up with a public quest, which featured the hero Ironclad and some voice acting. It tied together the game's story for the introduction of an alien invasion, and features you as the person that helps the other champions fend it off.
* The NPC artificial intelligence was good (at times) insofar as they would run for help and bring back friends. Without some understanding of group composition, knowledge of how some skills and builds work, and your own skill you won't just bulldoze through most quests. Some of them are hard and will hand you your ass if you aren't careful.
* Grouping was easy, and teammates were clearly labeled on the map, mini map and instance list so that I could find them. Switching instances to meet people was as easy as opening the map and clicking "switch instance", and if I found an NPC I needed to be already dead or camped, I could just switch instances and find him standing there waiting for me.
* The arena hero games system provides an alternate playing experience aside from the PVE. There is a reward system for participating in the hero games, which gives PVP'ers something extra to work toward. The arena queue system worked well and I got into several matches at level 10, so I was able to get into some PVP rather quicly.
* For me, the game's performance was great. I didn't suffer one single disconnect, and only occasionally had some graphical lag, even with most settings at or near max. In fact, my graphical lag didn't come until the last day of beta when there were many players trying to kill the large robots and I had to render alot of avatars and effects at once on high settings.
* The environments were huge, immersive, and I was able to impact them. I liked how rubble kicked away from my feet when I ran across it, showing the rocks scattering from beneath my feet as I kicked them out of the way. I enjoyed picking up crates, benches, trucks and whatever else I could find to smash the daylights out of stuff and discovered that I enjoy interacting with the environment in this way.
* The questing was a good mix of existing conventions. There were item collection quests, crafting quests, kill quests, escort quests and open (public) quests. The quests seemed to effect my world in some way, unlocking previously inaccessible areas and opening up other quests. I don't know if this was done with phasing or some other mechanic, but I do know that progressing through certain quests would change several things about my current environment, from weather effects changing to new npc's appearing.
* The powerhouse is a great feature allowing you to "try before you buy". For WoW players, this is the equivalent of trying a talent spec out on the target dummies BEFORE you pay for the respec. Its a great way to test out builds by tweaking combat powers, character stats and travel power combinations.
* There are "flavor" items in the game, like unlockable costumes, perks, (read: achievements) and small pets. There may be more than this, but those are what I saw in the game in a week's time.
* Blocking is a simple way to put some level of importance on the player's skill in regard to PVE and PVP. In PVE, the mobs put a big symbol over their heads that screams, "Hit the block key, or I'm going to curb stomp you". You are either intelligent enough to hit it, or you eat a boatload of damage and die. I was amazed at how many players weren't able to pick up on the block skill. To me it seemed to be a simple skill check, the less skilled players wouldn't do it and the skilled players (or ones that simply figured it out quickly) did do it and had some sense of reaction to be able to block the big damage.
* The tailor is a well placed NPC that allows you to tweak your costume after leaving the starting tutorial area. Nearly every character I made stopped at the tailor in Canada or the Desert after loading in so that I could tweak my hero a bit.
* There's one server. ONE. That means that I get to play the game with everyone else, no more finding out that some friends I have at work all play WoW, but they are in an alliance guild on another server, so we'll never play together. I'll be there with everyone else when CO launches.

What I disliked or worry about:

* TLDR. There is far too much text to read in the game. You can rest assured that any character with a big blue "i" over their heads had a ton of instructional text for you to read. As a new player, they are going to have to read alot and I couldn't help but think that most of that stuff could have been better delivered via quests in the starting area rather than just information text in dialog boxes.
* Pounding the Z key to get out of holds. Here is where the naysayers about this being a game for consoles have some bite to their argument. Repeatedly spamming Z to get out of a hold (crowd control) wreaks of beating on the big read button of my Atari controller and requires no skill. No likey. At least blocking requires some sort of reaction time to pull it off.
* While the customization is fantastic in scope, I think the UI needs to be better (I have no clue how) at helping you find the options you want when building a hero. It can take a long time to sift through all the options in hopes that you'll find the right style of armor for your toon. At least costumes can be saved.
* I liked the graphics as I said earlier, but only after I turned the comic book style black outlining off. Its just personal taste I guess, but the game looked infinitely better when it didn't try to mimic comic book illustrations to me.
* I generally like the @accountname character naming design. However, I wonder what problems are presented by having the @accountname part be visible to others in chat and friends lists? If someone puts you on their friends list they'll always know what you are up to (in a limited sense) when you play. You can't just play an alt when you don't feel like getting pestered on your main, like you can do in other games. Not a big deal to me, but will probably worry others.
* I only saw 3 PVP style events that I could queue up for, even at level 40. This wreaks of WoW's AB/WSG/AV battleground repetition if they don't continually add more of these. The 5v5 arena matches were fun to me, but I'd like to see some more scenario/battleground style of objective based pvp too.
* From what I could tell, defensive abilities are greater than offensive ones in PVP. Players with defensive shields and healing abilities can just outlast the glass cannon builds in the arena matches I was in. I would guess that Cryptic will be doing the same style of balancing act for their PVP that games like WoW already wrestle with, and early on it will likely be very imbalanced.
* What zones or environments are in the game after Canada, The Desert and Millenium city? I found a teleporter that had options for Monster Island and some other place (Lemura?), but only offered a strange error message when I tried to access them. Did these get tested? Were they ever available? Is Cryptic pulling a Funcom and putting these zones in with little content, just before launch?
* What kind of end game will there be? Will there be raids? PVP? Something else? What will keep me wanting to play once I hit 40? I was only level 40 for a few hours before I had to go to sleep (damn you, day job!) so I didn't get to explore and test enough things at max level, but it was clear that there was much to uncover. Perhaps this was done in closed beta and I just wasn't a part of it, but in open beta I don't recall anyone being able to test the level 40 zones, quests and skills very much. I did get to log on during the last day of beta and got to instantly become level 40, so I did get a feel for my Gadgeteer/Force powered hero might play. The skills I had seemed pretty good and they all worked as I expected them to, so hopefully there aren't nightmares awaiting us at max level in that regard.
* Cryptic seemed to patch the nearly every time I logged in. Were they fixing things found in open beta, or was this the result of the final crunch to get poorly tested (or God forbid untested) content into the game?

Summary
I had more fun playing CO beta for a week than I've had playing WoW in a few months. This isn't to say that WoW is bad, I still love the game but am just in a lull with it right now. This tends to happen when you've played a single MMO for over 3 years. I realize that new game feel will wear off and I will likely feel differently about CO it in a month or two, but right now that is no reason to stop me from buying the game and playing it at launch. It is a much deeper, fleshed out and polished game than I expected to see in beta. Most games at this stage are in far worse shape, so kudos to Cryptic to having their game somewhere above the failure level that is expected with most new MMO's. Right now is a perfect time to launch too, so perhaps Cryptic can get a good player base and keep them. There are likely many players looking for a new game, and CO just might be it for some of them.

Champions Online really caught me off guard, I was not expecting to like this game and didn't really anticipate the open beta as much as others did. It just drew me in though, as every time I played it I wanted to play more. Its a deeper game than City of Heroes was when it was new, and that is what it needed to be for me to give it a serious spin. The open beta has proved to me that this is a solid game, worth my money...for now.

I've enjoyed the game, despite the negative things I heard from others before playing. Now that open beta is done, some really good reviews are starting to come out as well. As far as reviews go, its a mixed bag so take them all with a grain of salt. Like all games, you just have to try it for yourself. No game will make everyone happy, but for my personal gaming tastes Cryptic has a good inital offering with Champions Online. I'll be negotiating some gaming money into my budget with my wife, and will be looking to form or join a guild (are the called Super Teams in CO?) as soon as I can find a good one. If anyone wants to look me up in CO, just look for any players with @br3ntbr0 in thier name See you September first!

Just out of sadistic curiosity, what's the soloability like in this game, and is it as pickup-group friendly as CoX series was?

I tend to prefer my MMOs as more of a fantasy / medieval theme, but I did try the CoX games a bit and had fun, so this could be worth a mild distraction.

I find I'm limited these days in MMOs to play as I only have an hour here and there to play, and most really bottleneck you after a certain point unless you can commit half your life to them.

I would get this game just to play with Phread, he's awesome.