When Champions Online launches this September, it will be the first in a line of superhero MMO’s looking to dethrone the current, and only, contender for the genre; City of Heroes/City of Villains. As there is no timeline for the Marvel MMO, and DC Universe Online isn’t giving us anything more specific than late 2009, early 2010, Champions Online will no doubt enjoy the leg up on the competition…As it tries to get a leg up on the current competition.
Like any good superhero story, the top rivals descend from the same creator; Cryptic Studios (Sounds a bit cryptic, yes?), and will undoubtedly be fighting for the role of Daddy’s Favorite, if you will.
Bring Your Own Hero
City of Heroes opened in 2004 as the first of its kind; The superhero MMO that let you configure everything to your heart’s whim, and create the superhero that not only flared creativity and originality, but would become an alter ego of the real life you. So, naturally, everyone created Wolverine and Superman lookalikes, inevitably drawing lawsuits from Marvel Comics. Unoriginality aside, the character creator, at its time, was praised as the most player-friendly system in any MMO to date, and probably retains that title to this day.
Champions Online takes the City of Heroes customization much further, introducing the above, in addition to the ability to change how your character moves. Cryptic Studios gave us a sneak peak by giving several examples: An animalistic hero may leap on all fours, while a robotic hero may move in a jerky, animatronic fashion, and a mentalist may hover over the ground rather than walk. Even your powers may be customized to fit your hero. If you have a blue fetish, make your costume blue, and make your weapons blue, and even your heat ray blue (Blue is hotter than red fire anyway). Champions Online also removes the class-system from City of Heroes, and presents the player with the ability to take on any power equally, obviously as long as they have the hero points. In addition to the player’s own customization, Champions Online also offers the ability to customize your own arch-nemesis, including his powers, his minions, and more.
Player Vs Player
Champions Online has a leg up on City of Heroes in that the game will feature full PvP from launch. City of Heroes did not receive player vs player combat until several issues in, and even then the movement has not gained a huge following. and was drastically changed in Issue #13, much to the dismay of the small pvp community. With the release of City of Villains, players now have the ability to duke it out, Hero Vs Villain style, in designated PvP zones. Earlier, Heroes had the ability to raid Villain’s bases, however that was suspended with a later Issue release.
Champions Online, on the other hand, will launch with fully realized PvP in the form of an Arena system, where champions can duke it out in varying arenas, choosing from your usual 1v1, free for all, and team rumbles. Player Vs Player in Champions Online is more of a controlled system, unlike the Heroes Vs Villains in City of Heroes.
Series Staple
City of Heroes wowed the audience with the unveiling of the Mission Architect system, where players could create their own missions to go on. If history has taught us anything, it’s that any system put into any game will be wrought with abuse, and the MA system is no exception. Shortly after released, players found ways to create their own missions perfect for experience farming that, although they are taken down shortly after creation, offer plenty of options for abuse.
The staple of Champions Online, on the other hand, is the Nemesis system, where players can create their own nemesis to fight. Aesthetically, the idea is knowing that there’s a villain out there targeting you, made specifically for you, conformed to just how you’d like him to be. On a more useful level, your nemesis will occasionally ambush you (from what I understand, it’s when you reach certain levels) for an epic hero v villain battle.
But Don’t Take My Word For It
The reaction to the beta for Champions Online has been, so far, positive. I made this article short because, in the long run, there’s no real point in speculating as to whether or not Champions Online will kill City of Heroes until we’ve actually had a chance to play it and guage it for ourselves. There is still the possibility that Champions Online will launch in September, and will completely fizzle out. The fans from City of Heroes may decide that they want to stay where they are, and not even bother looking in the direction of Millenium City.
All of the beta testing in the world cannot prepare you for what will happen once the game goes live, and every MMO ever has had a shakey launch, due to problems creating accounts, problems with server load and stability, exploits, bugs, and more. Thousands of players searching for a needle in a haystack will find it much faster than the developers and a small group of beta testers, and chances are they’ll complain about that needle, or exploit it to no end.
Take a look at World of Warcraft, inarguably the most popular MMO in history at over 11 million players. When WoW launched, and for some time afterwards, the game was plagued by bugs, graphical errors, people falling through the world, and long server downtime, as well as a lot of patches. A LOT of patches. I’m not singling out Age of Conan as having an exceptionally worse launch than any other MMO, just that despite the launch issues, it is the most popular MMO than many other MMO’s combined.
City of Heroes, as it stands, is at a win-win situation. Whether or not the launch goes smoothly, it’s unlikely to hinder or hurt the current player base that the City titles have amassed. Cities has reached the point many MMO’s dream of reaching; It doesn’t have unrealistic expectations of beating World of Warcraft, and as far as subscribers go, the City titles are sitting nicely on NCSoft’s throne of money (A throne of Won?), next to Guild Wars.
MMO Fallout 
I was planning on doing a Champions Vs CoH/CoX post on release but to be honest I dont know if there is much point. Even from closed beta Champions is light years better than CoX
You have to remember Cryptic developed and worked on CoX for quite some time before handing it over to the current developers. I think of Champions Online as a spiritual successor to City of Heroes/Villains, as Cryptic can look at everything that they did wrong, or wanted to do, and implement it.
Right now you can see City of X trying to catch up with CO’s promised features. Already they’re showing customizable powers along the lines of CO, and I wouldn’t be surprised if COX reveals an arch nemesis system at some point in the future.
yeah but CoX is a terrible game it wouldnt be hard to improve on it
I think CoX is great. I work a full day and when I get online in the evening I can always find a team, unlike WoW. I don’t have a dozen online friends who game with me so being able to join a group at any time is a big selling point for me. I may try CO, but despite features, it will have to have a friendly team environment to keep me.
@ Dumoc, if you want a friendly environment I’d avoid CO for the first month. As always there will be tourists who will come into the game and moan about everything…. I dont think Ive witnessed a first month in an MMO without trolls etc.
I’ve not really grouped up except with my mate to be honest but I would say the grouping format needs to be made easier.
CoX was a great game that that arguably got progessively WORSE as the Devs strived to placate a minority of complainers and force players (customers) to play a product according to how they envisioned it (which is never identical to how a player choices to play it of their own free will). Cryptic killed it’s own fan loyalty.
Taking the lessons learned from CoX, one would imagine that Champions would be better, but assuming that the greatest challenge of any game is competing against another free thinking player (not a developer’s npc’s during PvE), it appears that Champions is actually far worse. PvP will only be in arena format? There wasn’t a “small” PvP following in CoX. It was actually quite huge up until issue 12, and the fighting was truely awesome and on a heroic scale. And some players chose to rapidly level character just to play the awesome PvP. Then the Devs in i13 killed it in order to force players to PvP like they wanted & again to placate a small minority that complained about others rapidly leveling, and them being too immature to handle the dynamics of superhero PvP. If they don’t allow unrestricted PvP in Champions on a city-scale, I not wasting one cent on the game and hope it turfs quickly.
I doubt Cryptic will ever get the hint what it needs to do to make a successful and challenging game. Someone please pick up the slack and get it right.