I have to correct two errors tonight.
The first one is mine. I said you could unlearn all your skills and powers at any point. Apparently that is not correct; I just never got high enough to where I had more than you’re able to unlearn. So sadly, at some point you’re stuck with powers you’ve been using for a while (you unlearn in reverse of the order you learned them in…think of it like ‘unstacking’ your powers).
The second correction is something I’ve heard as a criticism of CO: small zone sizes. In the screenshot below, I’m maybe one third of the way across the zone, looking back at where I started. The structure you see is Project Greenskin, the 2nd Tutorial Zone. Note how small it looks. These are not small zones. I think there were 150 people in this zone when I entered it.
On Massively Speaking, Kyle Horner said that once one gets out of the tutorial levels the zones are significantly larger. I think he said that would occur around level 9-10?
This is true. I think the game’s somewhat cliche’d tutorial and early “Crisis” zones are giving it a bad rap, which is unfortunate. After these introductory couple hours the game opens up immensely. I don’t have much time to game these days, but I put most of my time into CO, despite its bugs. That’s saying something, at least for what I’m looking for in a game. It’s a very casual friendly title, and that may not be what most of the blogosphere is looking for.
I hope Cryptic rethinks the whole tutorial / crisis zone thing. It’s definitely too late to change before launch, but they could at least offer ways around it down the road.
On unlearning powers, do you mean for free cost, or just plain they get locked later on? The free unlearning is supposed to be while you stay inside the Powerhouse and only on the abilities you’ve been setting while in there. Previous choices cost to unlearn. I haven’t seen any unlocking but I haven’t climbed up very far in levels yet.
Here’re the pieces to the puzzle. 🙂
When I played during the preview weekend, I got a Champion to 11. I could unlearn all but my initial (picked during character generation) skills. I had cash but couldn’t unlearn those two. I assumed you were stuck with those because they were taken during character creation.
BUT the other day, during open beta, I took a low level character into the Powerhouse, and unlearned every power… I assumed (too many assumptions!) that they’d changed things between closed and open beta, and now you could unlearn everything, assuming you had enough $$.
And then last night, there was someone trying to unlearn skills. I got to talking to him, and he said he got to a point where he couldn’t unlearn any more (he was trying to dig down to his travel power to unlearn that). He said he had plenty of money. Then someone else in Zone Chat said you could only unlearn so many skills… that there was a finite number and ‘older’ skills were permanent.
So there’s a long-winded explanation of what I know about unlearning skills!! I’m assuming (again!) that with my first experience, the level 11 dude, it was coincidence that the ‘cut off’ point was at my two initial powers.
@Pete: Thanks for expanding, I didn’t think it was long-winded at all, just useful information.
I came into the game assuming I wouldn’t be able to change choices easily. When I realized I could unlearn, I was worried that lacked impact, but then I got used to it. Now that I’ve been using it, I wouldn’t want the unlearn option to go away.
Prior to yesterday’s patch, you could unlearn your initial powers, I’m not sure when they enabled that but I did actually unlearn my energy building power. They had an oversight there, because I wasn’t the only one and a bunch of players not fully understanding the system yet accidentally gimped themselves by picking powers and not re-taking an energy builder. I don’t think it’s possible to do that now.
Okay yep, confirming that while you get to try and redo anything from your current batch of powers, if you level up a bit and go back to the trainer, you can only unlearn the current plus previous batch.
At least that seems to be how it’s working in the current version since the last patch.