Targeting & Skill Types in Champions Online

Someone on my forums asked about targeting in Champions Online — how it worked. As strange a question as it seems, the answer is somewhat interesting (I think, anyway).

So how to target a mob? Well you can click on it, of course. Or hit whatever key you have bound to “Select Enemy” and toggle through mobs in the vicinity. But there are choices beyond that. You can set an option that will have you auto-target anything that attacks you (provided, of course, you have nothing currently targeted — this option won’t switch targets on you). You can set an option that lets you target a friend, and instead of attacking your friend, you’ll attack whatever he has targeted (kind of a dynamic assist). Or you can set an option where hitting an attack key will automatically target the nearest enemy. I can’t recall seeing that last option in any other MMORPG, but I may be wrong. The other options are common enough, but it’s nice to have them all available, and all optional, in Champions Online.

Now let’s talk types of skills. I’ve found four so far.

First is the Energy Builder. This is a rapid fire, low damage attack that builds up your character’s energy (used to perform other skills). You can choose how to access this skill. You can require a key to be held down constantly while it fires, or you can choose from two ‘toggle’ variations. In the first, the skill will continue to auto-fire until you turn it off; this is a great way to draw lots of aggro if you have the ‘auto-target’ option on. Or you can choose a toggle that gets canceled when you change targets. I suggest that last option. Your energy builder will continue to fire on your current target whenever you’re not using another skill — basically it’ll work like a default auto-attack in other games.

Next skill type is what I call a standard MMO skill. You hit a button, the skills sucks down some of your energy and fires off, then a cooldown timer starts and you have to wait to use the skill again.

Skill type three is the charge up. This kind of skill gets more powerful the longer you hold down its hotkey, and only fires when you let the key back up. There’s an onscreen meter that fills up to indicate how charged the skill is. I believe some of these skills have some extra effect if you charge them to the max. With a little practice you get a feeling of how much you have to charge a skill in order to kill off a wounded baddie, without wasting the time of over-charging it.

The last skill type is what I call the Charge Down. These skills start firing as soon as you press the hotkey, and will continue to fire as long as you hold it down, or until an onscreen meter empties (essentially the charge-up meter in reverse). If you manage to get off a full ‘clip’ you’ll get some bonus effect at the end of using the skill.

I’m no CO expert, so there may be more skill types I haven’t discovered yet.

Playing different characters that use different types of skills feels a lot, well, different, and I think it’ll give some legs to Champions Online in terms of alts (or re-speccing). This is even without looking at the “Power pools” and damage types of the specific skills.

I hope anyone who knows more about the game that I do will jump in and correct anything I get wrong in these posts!

Creepy crawlies in LOTRO

If you’ve ever played LOTRO, even for the first few levels, you’ve probably encountered a neeker of some kind. These are rather over-grown bugs that are a staple baddie in the game. You fight small ones at low levels, and bigger ones at higher levels.

Thing is, those little bastards are *creepy* when they get bigger. I never realized how creepy until the other day.

Aethgar was riding north out of the Shire, headed for the lake in Evendim. He was roaming along the banks of the river where there’s a broad sandy beach. It’d be a lovely spot, if not for the native wildlife. Salamanders roam the area, and he was collecting teeth and scales from them, and at the same time cutting down on the neeker population (in Evendim the locals call neekers ‘norbogs’ but trust me, they’re just big fat neekers).

It wasn’t too bad until he came upon a spot called, descriptively enough, the Sand-Mounds. This is where the neekers breed, and the place was *crawling* with the wretched things. To the point where I started feeling all itchy and creeped out. The hairs on the back of my neck actually stood up as I watched all these insectile appendages waving back and forth at me.

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I took some screenshots (click to enlarge), but when the things aren’t moving they don’t look like much (plus Aethgar was killing them right and left before I thought to take screen shots. I wasn’t even controlling him, it seemed. He’d totally taken control away from me while I just averted my eyes and shuddered). Huge kudos to the animators at Turbine who managed to so expertly capture that… insectness… of their movements that people tend to have a very instinctual aversion to.

I was nothing but relieved when Aethgar had finished killing enough neekers to placate the healer up at Evendim lake. He rode away from the Sand Mounds as quickly as his horse would carry him, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

It was a beautiful day at the lake. Shortly after this shot, Aethgar leaped in for a swim, and I swear I could feel the cool waters washing all that insectoid filth off of me.
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I really do love LOTRO. I love that I have a lifetime subscription so I never feel the slightest bit pressure to play it. I play it when I want to experience Middle Earth, which for me happens fairly often. I love the art-style…the same one that so many people hate. IMO people who hate the art in LOTRO are…well, crazy. OK, the avatars aren’t the best, but the world is lush and beautiful and I never get tired of gazing up at the sky.

I joined a Kinship the other day. I’m still not sure it was the right move. I kind of hate the intrusion of Kinship chat. I tend to just lose myself in idle wanderings through the world; I don’t often use fast travel, preferring to ride hither and yon, seeing what’s over the next rise, gathering cabbages and taters for dinner, mining a bit of ore, helping the odd adventurer out. It’s a total escape for me — a place to decompress. I always come away smiling.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting

OK so I’ve tried to leave the negative attitude at the door, but the pressure’s building up inside of me and I’m going to blow my top if I don’t rant soon.

So here goes!!!

Why can’t people just accept MMORPGs as a defined genre and stop trying to change them?

You don’t see FPS players complaining because the newest FPS has lots of guns and a targeting reticule. You don’t see driving game fans bitch because they can’t get out of their in-game cars and walk around. You don’t see sports game afficionados requesting an option to turn down the gravity in their games.

But MMORPG devs…they can’t catch a break. A new game comes out and people complain about some or all of the following:

  • The game has (too many) quests
  • The game has too much grinding [though grinding is almost never defined but seems to boil down to “there were moments I wasn’t riveted by what I was doing”]
  • The characters have levels or skills that require too much time to attain
  • The game world is too large and requires too much travel
  • The game world is too small and doesn’t feel immersive
  • The characters have the same old boring stats
  • There’s no player skill because success of actions depend on character stats, not player hand-to-eye coordination
  • The game is too shallow
  • The game is too complex & I don’t want to read all those scary words that tell me how to play

The list goes on and on and on, but many of the things people complain about are exactly the aspects that make these games MMORPGs (questing, stats, a big world to explore, stat-based actions).

May I not-so-humbly suggest that the people who are so tired with the staple aspects of MMORPGs…. STOP PLAYING THEM! There’re a ton of different game genres out there to play. If you’re sick of questing and exploring and planning out character progressions… go play a different kind of game. Play an online shooter, or one of the new MMORTS-type games. Dig out Planetside and play that. Get involved with one of the browser-based empire-building games. Jump into Burnout: Paradise and have a hoot driving around with your buddies.

Go somewhere, but just, please, stop peeing in our pool, because there are literally millions of gamers who like MMORPGs the way they are.

This rant was triggered by someone talking about Dust, the new console-based FPS announced by CCP. The comment said something like “Wow, this really makes Aion and Champions Online look like tired old retreads.”

WTF??? So a new *shooter* makes a couple of MMORPGs look old and tired? That’s like saying “My new BMW sure makes our living room couch look old and tired.” How are the two even remotely related, aside from being things you sit in or on? Dust and Aion are both games, and that’s about where their similarities end. Dust is a player-skill based shooter played on a gaming console, and Aion is a MMORPG played on a PC. They could hardly be less similar, so I see no value in comparing them.

MMORPG burnout does happen. Have the class to recognize it for what it is, and go play something else for a while, rather than miserably sticking around MMORPGs crapping all over everything that comes along.

Hey Cryptic: Give us better clothes next, kthxbye

Yesterday an acquaintance said on Twitter: “I’m pretty unimpressed with the graphics of CO. Jackets and other items look like crap. Only good costume is a sleek one.” (I’m not linking because this person has protected her updates.)

Y’know, she’s absolutely right. In the midst of having great fun making truly outlandish costumes for my Champions, I’d overlooked that the basics are so bad. Look at the Drifter pics in my last post. Look at how his pants drape around his shins. They look bloody awful. His shirt is totally nondescript and boring, too. There weren’t any ‘normal’ looking shirts — he’s wearing (iirc) a t-shirt with a ‘creased’ texture applied. No hats to speak of, either. Doh! Silly me, see comments for how badly I mangled this point.

Cryptic has done a great job with things like wings and other accessories, and if you’re making a spandex-clad Super you’re going to be fine. But if you’re trying to make someone more ‘normal’ looking, you’ll find your options are both limited and pretty bad.

I don’t know if Cryptic can fix this easily: my guess is that there’s more to it than just creating new art assets — there’re physics involved with cloth, after all. But I hope they can.

Day 2 of Champions OB much better

After all the nonsense of yesterday and this morning, I’m happy to report that the Champions Online “open” beta was performing much better tonight, at least for me and for friends on Twitter.

I was hoping to try an experiment. One of the neat features that CO has is the ability to save a character ‘template’ and then use it again, or even share it with friends. Normally for open beta I’d just create a total throw-away character, but since I figured I could save it, I opted to spend some time and try to create a champion I might re-use in beta (ultimately I failed, but that’s beside the point for the purposes of this experiment).

My idea was originally for a basically human cowboy-type hero. He’d use pistols as his energy builder/ranged attack, but then Ego melee weapons for his close range.

The character creator wouldn’t really stretch far enough to accommodate my vision, so the character morphed as I made him. I stuck with drab colors, but his ears and eyes got very alien, and his hands grew claws. His proportions are off, with huge forearms and calves, but thinner biceps and upper thighs. His nose is flat-ish. I wanted to give him a slight muzzle but couldn’t manage it. I wanted to give him a cowboy hat, too, but couldn’t find one. There was no duster, but there was a trenchcoat.

His name is Drifter and he’s deliberately ugly and is meant to be creepy. He looked creepy in the character creator but (as others have noted) characters never look as good in-game, sadly.

Anyway, I saved his template and was delighted to find that they save as a jpg!! Here it is:
Costume_Owner__CC_Comic_Page_Blue_303963064
In theory, if someone downloads this and sticks it in their screenshots folder, they ought to be able to load it in the character creator and make a clone of Drifter. Actually note that character isn’t quite complete. My ‘finishing touch’ of Drifter was to give him the Bestial attitude. I ended up deleting that version because running on all fourss he just looked silly. But here’s the full version, ready to launch, version, complete with running on all fours like a beast:
Costume_Owner_Drifter_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_303963158

I’d love for someone to try this out; see if you can really load a character template from a jpg. I assume the data is really in the file name: that 303963158 number. But who knows? If anyone tries it, can you leave a comment and let me know if it worked? If so, I can see a cottage industry springing up around people doing character design for others (not me, obviously…I’d be a customer!)

Back to poor fugly Drifter. Here’s a couple reference shots, from the launcher. I spent so much time messing about in the character creator that I didn’t even get out of the tutorial area!

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And this one is gamma corrected like mad so you can see what few details there are on the costume:
drifter3

Champions Online OB off to a rough start

So Day 1 of Champions Online “open” beta was kind of a disaster. Patcher problems galore. I never did manage to get into the game. As I type this I’m d/ling a new iteration of the OB client from Fileplanet. My Closed Beta client wouldn’t patch, so I tried my pre-loaded Fileplanet Open Beta client. That wouldn’t patch. Then at 10:30 PM (or thereabouts) Cryptic finally offered some info and mentioned there was a new build on Fileplanet, so I’m going to try that. Note to Cryptic: 10:30 PM is too late to start issuing updates. You’ve got customers on the East Coast.

So on the one hand, this is what beta is for…to smooth out problems like this. On the other hand, launch is right around the corner, and getting into this (quite short) open beta was one of the perks of pre-ordering, and this is where a company can really shoot itself in the foot. Because they tied OB to pre-orders, they gave OB a fiscal value in the hearts of gamers, and so these gamers are rightfully irked that they can’t play. They are owed their open beta period.

Cryptic’s explanation of what happened doesn’t fill me with confidence, either. A few things contributed to the problems. First, they claim their game & account servers can handle 40,000 concurrent users, but apparently not their patch servers? Some players are currently experiencing issues where the Patcher can “freeze.” The main problem is we’re delivering a 400 MB patch to ~20,000 people simultaneously. Every time a patch rolls out (particularly in the first month) all those users (and for Cryptic’s sake I hope we’re talking about a good deal more than 20,000 players!) are going to be hitting those patch servers. They need to be able to hold up as well as the account servers; that seems like an obvious thing to overlook to me.

And then their web servers couldn’t handle the strain. How many times do we see this in MMO roll-outs? They always, ALWAYS seem to forget the web servers. Adding more web capacity isn’t rocket science and it isn’t really very expensive.

Lastly, the initial client being delivered by Fileplanet was borked. 3.6 gigs worth of files were in the wrong directory. How did this not get tested? Didn’t anyone d/l and install the client ahead of launch?

Yeah, it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize. But hey, I’ve been on their side of things plenty of times, too. Just part of the job.

Cryptic can still get back on track. If everyone can play tomorrow, and if the actual launch is free of these issues, all will be quickly forgotten. But if this is a preview of launch day, they’re going to be flamed hard, and it won’t be much of a leap before Roper’s Hellgate: London fiasco starts being brought up.

Tuesday AM Update: So as I mentioned, I re-downloaded the client from Fileplanet last night. This was the client that didn’t have 3.6 gigs of files in the wrong directory. The client they updated yesterday evening. I started the patcher and went to bed. Why on earth did I need to patch a version of the client they’d *just* released? I can’t answer that.

This morning I found the patched had timed out. Overall progress: 0%. What little progress it had made before I hit the sack was lost.

So I ran it again. This was at 6:30 am ET, 3:30 am PT. 30 minutes later, it’s 4.9% of the way finished. This despite Cryptic’s assurance that the patcher logjam would clear up in “about 6 hours” (which would have been about 4:30 am et).

But what’s really annoying? They released yet ANOTHER version to Fileplanet, and this latest version is all patched up, according to another update at Champions-Online.com. Why on earth didn’t they put this version up when they ‘freshened’ the client last night!?

Now for all I know, they had a zip of the ‘fixed’ client laying around yesterday and uploading it to Fileplanet was quick and easy, but I still think that a better plan would have been to say “We’re going to prepare a fully patched version of the client and put it on Fileplanet, so we suggest you wait and download that.” This sequential refreshing of the Fileplanet client smells of panic to me.

So now I have a decision to make. Kill the patcher, and d/l the Fileplanet client for a 3rd time, or trust that the patcher will stay connected while I’m at work today, and finish up.

Update to the Tuesday AM update: So there’s a 3rd option: a stand alone patch. I downloaded that. Ran it. Started Champions Online. And guess what? It’s patching some more. So the stand alone patch to bypass the patcher issues still needs to use the patcher? But the good news is, *that* patching went very quickly (maybe it was just applying the files that were in the download). So in theory, Champions Online is finally ready to play.

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ZOMG! Champions Online NDA drops

So I am the ultimate authority on everything related to Champions Online, given that I beta tested for a whole 2-day preview weekend and got a Champion almost to cap (level 11). So *anything* you want to know… I’m your source.

I know my regular readers don’t need this disclaimer, but for the random passerby, the above was sarcasm.

Anyway, I got into a preview weekend a few weeks back and created 3 different characters, the highest getting to level 11. I have not really followed the game, or hung out on forums, or anything like that, but based on my weekend I did pre-order the game and am looking forward to playing more.

If I had to sum up the game, I’d say: City of Heroes 2.0. You can see a lot of CoH in the game, but of course the Champions RPG system changes things a lot (I assume…I’m also not familiar with the Champions RPG!). If you hated City of Heroes you’ll probably hate Champions Online. If you loved CoH but are ready for a variation on a theme, then boy, are you gonna be a happy camper.

Random tips for 1st time beta testers

Character Creation: I totally missed all the goodies on my first toon. There’re some tabs at the top of the character creation window that you have to click on to change your costume. By default you see the stuff to change the avatar model itself. The legs tab doesn’t show at all and you have to click a triangle that is supposed to be an arrow to find those.

I know I know, very obvious. But the first character I made, I missed that those tabs were clickable UI bits, and I’ve seen at least one other person claim there’s no way to change legs, because he missed the triangle-arrow thingie.

During character creation you’re going to pick 2 skills. One is a low-damage “energy builder” and the other is your first powerhouse attack (that uses the energy you’re going to build). Those two skills are going to be with you for the life of the character, but every other skill you take can be unlearned, so once you get leveling, experiment with abandon.

You get travel powers at level 5 (maybe an hour in). When you go into the training hall, choose your travel power *last* before leaving. Why? Because when you return to the training hall, you can unlearn the last thing you learned for free. So you can unlearn “Tunneling” and try “Rocket Boots”. By learning a travel power last, you can try several to find one you enjoy. Rocket Boots are the fastest and I warn you: it’s hard to use anything else once you’ve enjoyed the speed of Rocket Boots.

The early game reminds me of LOTRO beginnings, if you’ve played that. You first go through a small tutorial instance. Then you travel to one of two starter areas which are also instances, but that might not be immediately evident. Player population in these was really limited in closed beta (~25 people) and you can spend a decent amount of time there. So don’t get discouraged thinking “This is it? This isn’t an MMO!” Once you defeat the Foozle of the area you’re in, the walls come down, the zone opens up and you hit much larger population zones.

If you’re going to craft, DO pick a crafting profession and level it up in that 25-man instance. There’s a LOT of low level crafting mats in there, and once you head out into the big game world, finding enough materials to get your first 50 points or so of crafting becomes tedious.

So why’d I pre-order?

I really enjoy the character creation, same as I did with CoH. I am NOT one of the “I’m sick of questing, sick of levels” MMO player contingent. If you are, then you’re going to disappointed in Champions Online, as it is absolutely about questing and gaining levels. But there are no classes, and that’s one aspect I really enjoyed. Once your character is created, you can choose skills from any power pool, so you can really customize your character in interesting ways. That said, many skills have prerequisites that nudge you towards being a bit focused. So a Martial Arts Power might have a prerequisite of 2 Martial Arts Powers or 4 Powers (Pool unspecified). That means you can take it as Power #3 if your first two Powers were also in the Martial Arts tree, but it’ll have to be your 5th Power otherwise. So by sticking to 1 or 2 Power Pools you can get higher ‘level’ Powers earlier.

Knowing myself, I see me with a bunch of low-mid level characters with bizarre skill sets. I don’t think this will be an “Achiever” game at all for me. It’s going to be about creating strange superheroes and seeing how they play.

Which leads me to my biggest concern. As far as I can tell, there is just 1 “Server” (with every normal play zone instanced and allowing ~100 players inside) and you have X character slots (I don’t recall the number. 6, 7, or 8 I think) for your account. I can easily imagine running out of character slots, which is the one thing that makes the Lifetime membership intriguing (it comes with 8 additional slots).

Sorry this is so scattered and rambly… I didn’t prepare a post in advance and I’m bashing this out while eating lunch at work. 🙂 Also why I have no art… screenies are all at home.

PSN finally gets (a bit) social

If you haven’t popped by the Playstation page (and really…why would you?) you might not be aware that they’ve finally started to open up their Trophy data.

Granted they’ve hidden it well. Once you log in, you have to click on the tiny My Profile link at top right, which exposes all kinds of dull account management foofery, like “Would you like us to constantly spam you with ads from our trusted partners?” But there’s a new tab over on the right called Portable ID, which gets you this:


Get your Portable ID!

And the Trophies tab has been spruced up to help you compare your Trophies against other PSN members.

So now Sony is only like 5 years behind Microsoft in terms of making PSN a social gaming space.

Oops, slipping into that negative thing again. OK, it’s a nice step in the right direction, and at least it indicates that Sony is aware of what gamers want.