Decided to play around in Champions Online again, since it’s been a very long time since I did so. They added vehicles. Or at least hover craft. And some fighter jets.
This is the Hawkwing Stealth Fighter. It has three weapon slots, one defensive slot and a support slot. The craft acts as a device in the devices bar on your character. When you activate it, the craft becomes your character, complete with it’s own set of skills, powers and more. The Stealth fighter has stealth capability, booster rockets, a regenerative beam to help team mates, and has wing turrets and a missile launching underneath.
There’s also the Hawkwing Heavy Fighter, which looks like a little snub nose, has two weapon slots and two defensive slots.
The only thing I don’t like about them is the in game movement. They don’t pitch and yaw as well as I’d like.
Well, my issue with it goes more than that. Movement is the least of my complaints about the new vehicle selection. You’d tend to think that someone with the name Rocket Fox would have a pretty kick ass fighter jet. Unfortunately, the jets are pretty much all about speed and very lacking in punch or defense. You have to work on those, I suppose. Before I mentioned the Stealth Wing has five mod slots, three for weapons and one for defense and one for support. It seems when you travel through the world, complete missions and tackle huge bosses, you get lots of possible mods. In the form of lock boxes. Which you need to use real world money in order to buy keys from the in game C-Store so that you can open them.
The deal is, you pay XX amount of dollars (or whatever currency is native to your country) and get XXXX amount of Zen, the in game currency used to buy items through the C-Store. A lot of online games have this. Probably the best example is Guild Wars 2 selling costume skins and dye packs. But that’s just aesthetics. I don’t have a problem with that. Champions Online has things in their store that affect the game world. Sure there’s different power sets, travel powers, costume pieces, bases, and mini figures, but those are all aesthetic aspects that have no bearing on how well you do. The powers, for example, aren’t any better than the ones you get already. The travel powers, same thing. Many are just doctored up to look like different versions of things that already exist as travel power selections.
Vehicles, catalysts to make mods better, keys to open lock boxes. Those are also available in the C-Store, all of which you can buy in order to make your character, or your vehicle stronger. That’s more of a pay to win scenario which I’m against in games.
It ain’t cheap to get those keys. 1100 Zen there abouts to get ten keys. And that’s about 30 bucks in the real world. Those lock boxes are frequent drops as well. Currently Rocket Fox has 32 of those things in her inventory, and I did buy 20 keys just to see what was in those boxes. Each box has something different. XP boosters, Resource boosters (which is the currency in game to buy from vendors, not use at the C-Store), and level 1 defense or support mods. About 75 each. So you can craft them and get several level 2 versions of the same mods.
Sadly, this is the only thing that’s been added to the game in a while. No actual content in game, just more costumes and vehicles that you have to buy through the C-Store. No new missions, no new areas (such as Hudson City, which had been talked about before). This is rather disappointing, considering that City of Heroes is going off line in less than a week. There may be several CoX players who will venture over to Champions Online. Which means Cryptic better get their butts in gear.
Cryptic has been pretty weak in a lot of areas when making their games. They have terrible customer service, they’ve ignored Champions Online in favour of delivering new material and content for Star Trek Online and working toward releasing Neverwinter Online. It isn’t that difficult to level from 1 to 40 in Champions, but after that there really isn’t anything to do. Sure, there’s alerts, but those get old fast, as each alert is recycled with new villains. After a while, you tend to see those over and over again as well. There is something that could help, and that’s by implementing something popular in Star Trek Online into Champions Online. That’s the Foundry, which is user developed content played in game.
Sadly, I’m not sure that is being pushed forward, as Cryptic seems to just chuck small things at Champions and focus all their efforts on Star Trek Online and Neverwinter Online.
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