Launching January 2010...

It’s been a few weeks now and I think it’s safe to say that the Champions Online experiment is all but completely over.

As predicted, A.J. has abandoned the game for Aion, taking P.D. with him. This was not an unexpected turn of events, but it did come sooner than I thought it would. Even my own patience with Champions has been pushed to the brink and when those free 30 days finally run out, my league of heroes will fall into limbo with it.

I really wanted to like Champions Online, and at some level I still do, but this game has problems that are simply unacceptable for a 2009 MMORPG. It’s not the buggy gameplay, the frequent downtime, or constant balance changes. Those were anticipated and accepted as the unavoidable consequence of any launch. But Champion’s goes beyond these issues with mistakes that you wouldn’t think possible of a team that has been in the MMO business longer than Blizzard.

The chief problem with the game is a simple one. It was not ready for launch when it launched.

Content in this game is slim. Unlike the golden standard that is WoW, Champions launched with barely enough content to reach the level 40 level-cap. There are exactly five ‘zones’ in the game and you need to spend time in every one of them to continue progressing. For a game where the core attraction is creating a multitude of different heroes, there is a disturbing lack of variety of places to go and things to do. Every character you make will inevitably follow the same path and fight the same evil-doers through the bulk of the game.

If this were not already a rather significant issue with the game, it was made worse on the first day after its release with a patch that significantly reduced the amount of experience given by quests.

To say this decision, credited to Bill Roper of Hellgate: London fame, was shortsighted would be an understatement. Now not only was there a lack of things to do, but in many cases the X number of quests created for a particular level did not give enough experience to bring the player up to the next level, resulting in an eventual ‘drought’ of quests all together. This left eager heroes at various points in their progression to the much sought after ‘level cap’ without anyway to achieve their goal other than rampaging around the world killing anything and everything that will give them experience.

Very heroic.

As I said, I expected bugs, I expected downtime, I expected imbalanced powers. I did not expect that when I purchased the game, I was buying into a ‘paid beta’ and that it would be another 3-4 months before the game would be actually ready to launch.

Oh well, at the very least I can say I was there when Cryptic tricked thousands of people to pay them $50 to play half of a game.