Alas, poor Paragon. I knew it, Horatio. A city of infinite pew, of most excellent napkin math...
Okay. Now that I've properly invoked the angry ghost of William Shakespeare AND the lady that wrote For Colored Girls... City of Heroes/Villains is closing its doors for good, and its players have been left floundering, searching for a new home for their heroes. Current options in the comicbook subgenre of MMORPG are slim: SoE offers DC Universe Online (DUCO), Perfect World has Champions Online (CO), Gazillion's Marvel Heroes (MHO) is in closed beta... And that's about it. If you stretch, you could offer Paragon expatriates Funcom's The Secret World (TSW), but you'd have to be Cirque du Soleil flexible. The upside of all of this is that the only game on that list that still has a subscription fee is TSW- and the jury's out on how long that will actually last, since their player retention has been spotty at best. By Q2 of next year we may see yet another "free" to play MMORPG on the market. In spite of all of its irritating issues, Champions Online is probably a refugee's best bet.
Crash course time: Champions Online was originally developed to be Marvel Universe Online, back before Cryptic split into two studios (the other being CoX's Paragon Studios). The guy at the top of the foodchain in Cryptic, Jack Emmert, used to be known as Statesman on the CoX forums. Yeah, that guy. The one constantly going "we're going to be better about communication!" and then disappearing for a few months. Champions was the first of two Cryptic games to be launched by Atari, the other being Star Trek Online. CO released with high hopes, mountains of bugs, and to a day one "kitchen sink" patch that nearly crippled it for good. Cryptic has since confirmed that CO launched very rough and unfinished, and that things like Vibora Bay (which they initially tried to introduce as a paid expansion before pushing live as a free content update) were intended to be available at release. Since launch, the game has gone through several major revisions, including combat revisions, several generations of "powers passes" that modified skill trees and balancing, the annihilation of their crafting system, the free-to-play conversion and introduction of Archetypes (effectively, classes)... The list goes on. The development team has changed almost constantly since launch, as publishers shuffle personnel around to different games and promote anyone who doesn't completely suck at their job to Executive Producer. It's been a rocky road for Champions Online.
So why play?
Right now, Champions Online is a themepark MMORPG. The developer and publisher expect players to come for a few months, spend their money, and leave. As it stands, the only people that stick around for long stays are roleplayers and people who can only feel important as big fish in a tiny pond. Veteran players take frequent breaks of weeks to months, cycling in and out as changes come along. Taken as that, it's a great place to drop by and spend some time. There are precious few games with the depth and breadth of character customization options the CO character creator offers. The closest another game has come to rivaling CO's powers system is TSW's ability wheel- and even that is rather more restrictive than your powerhouse options. Over the years, CO's various devs have given us a limited player housing system, thousands of costume pieces covering every shape and flavor of fictional character, and quite a few fun story arcs. The game has no genuine raid content, and is light on team play. Since the introduction of the Alert system, group content is available on demand as long as you're not picky about what you get. Almost all features are available for free, minus true freeform character creation (which can be bought a la carte for a single character slot via microtrans). Basically, if you're willing to find a copy of the game and get the free month, and maybe pay the fifteen dollar sub for a month, you'll have some fun. Beyond that is anyone's guess.
Don't expect to make a home of CO, unless you're on board for some frustration, and the constant feeling of smashing your head against a brick wall. Perfect World has tied the developers' hands, and there's not much they can do for us. CO exists almost entirely to generate revenue for other PWE projects through microtransactions, and as a testing ground for features that will be in upcoming games like Neverwinter Nights Online. There is a great community in CO, if you know where to find it. Supergroups like ARC (PvE/Events), All Stars (PvE), The Saikashuu (PvP/Events), Red Academy (RP/PvE/Events), and Bloodline of Shadows (RP/PvE/PvP) can offer a lot of fun and great experiences for their members. Joining channels like COPvP, Contests, CORP, and Talkytalk will help you find other awesome groups to get involved with.
I'm hoping that we'll get an influx of CoX players into CO, and that they'll bring the same inventiveness, ingenuity, and DIY attitude to us that made Paragon City such an awesome place to be when I played.
As I get time, I'll try to write up some mini-guides to important stuff in CO, but no guarantees. If you decide to try the game out, feel free to send a tell to @ScarletShrike. Just let me know how you got my handle so I don't feak out and think you're a crazy stalker. <3
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