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.

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:

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:

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!

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

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.

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.

Having stayed up much too late playing CO last night, I’ve flip-flopped back to being excited about the game. Obviously the NDA is in place so I can’t say too much about it, but one of the things I do like (that has been talked about in previews) is that as you gain levels you can pick powers from any of the power-pools, which means your Champion can be really unique both in looks and skills. It just seems like the kind of game that will really cater to alt-aholics like myself.

So I’m thinking of pre-ordering. Trying to decide where from. It’s a complicated decision. Gamestop and Best Buy both give Early Access & $5 worth of points to spend on micro-transactions. Walmart gives $10 worth of points but no Early Access. Amazon gives $5 worth of points. Direct Drive and Steam give you the convenience of not having to deal with shipping.

Gamestop, Best Buy & Amazon give access to Open Beta starting on the 17th, Walmart and the digital distributions do not (though in my case, I have a File Planet Key that should cover that).

All but Walmart give different virtual items, but the descriptions are so vague that it’s hard to weight them against each other. Is an Insectoid Airfoil better than a Grond Vanity Pet? Who knows? Walmart skips the virtual items for a map and an iron-on t-shirt decal.

One thing I haven’t yet found out is, how long is this Early Access period? Is it 2 days? A week? Open Beta starts on the 17th and launch is Sept 1 (15 days later). I have to think Open Beta is at least going to span the following weekend, taking it to the 24th, so the max Early Access can be is a week. Realistically if it’s 4 days then we get the game a weekend earlier, which is mostly what matters to me.

Details on all these perks here.

But I ask you.. could they make it any more complicated?

And let’s look at that Lifetime Subscription again. I’m actually tempted, now that I’ve had a chance to see the game in action and see that it isn’t a total disaster. Why? Eight additional character slots. It seems like there are no discrete servers in CO, and so the 6? 7? 8? character slots are all you’re going to get, and as I said, this seems like a really alt-friendly game…just creating different looks and skill sets to mess about with. (Though if they’re smart, they’ll offer additional character slots as on of their RMT items.)

I think this is going to be a really “blogable” MMO, too. So much to discuss in terms of character builds and such. Looking forward to the NDA dropping!