Champions Online Launch: Not That Bad

The Champions Online launch has not been going super swimmingly, but it could be a lot worse.

• One major balance adjustment when, in a move that mirrored City of Heroes’ early days, the developers saw people found ways to exhaust content that was supposed to last for months in days, freaked out, and rolled some major nerfs.
• One day of downtime, owed largely to somebody playing with the patch server when they shouldn’t have.

Cryptic has moved well to counteract most of the damage.  Any character generated prior to the launch day patch will be allowed to rebuild their characters for free.  The day you couldn’t play is not being counted against your subscription.

However, the nerfs remain.

The primary thing adjusted were the passives – powers to be slotted and forgotten as they enhance your character in some vital area.  Those who leaned heavily on their passives are now very much feeling the pinch.  Passives are now somewhat between 40% to 60% less effective as they used to be, and consequently heroes who rely on them for survival are dying 40% to 60% faster.

I feel the nerfs were certainly necessary, as the game was quite trivial before, but the severity of the adjustment was an over-reaction.  Many players claim their heroes can no longer even survive a fight against 3  henchmen – a number whose importance is derived from Jack Emmerts previous declaration that being able to fight 3 minions in City of Heroes is an ideal balance.  It’s a fair argument – even at the most basic level, heroes should be capable of doing this fairly reliably.

It turns out that the over-severity was deliberate,  as apparently because that’s how Bill Roper sails:

The biggest thing you have to do when you’re piloting a ship this big is that you tend to have to make big course corrections.  I think the thing that players always talk about is ‘Well, why don’t you make smaller changes?  Just change it like a little bit, then a little bit.’  The only problem is, when you have a big ship, when you make a lot of small course changes you have to make a lot of them and it’s hard to see.

Where the good ship Champions Online was previously listing dangerously to Starboard, it’s now listing somewhat noticeably to Port.   As of today, developer posts reveal them working diligently to make an even more acute course correction.  Soon after launch, they raised a test server in play to get a little feedback on the kind of fixes they’re doing before just rolling them on the server.  Soon, we expect they’ll even have their patch messages half-decently documented.  It seems the developers are well underway to switching their mindsets from beta to retail.

In the meanwhile, if you were wise/lucky enough to stumble across my guide and follow it prior to launch, you’re probably doing just fine.   This is because my guide walked you away from the idea to taking a bunch of attacks, and instead focused on getting a diverse set of powers instead.  Such a move fairly assures that simply nerfing the passives wouldn’t have killed your character.

All things considered, Champions Online’s launch could have been much, much worse.  When Anarchy Online launched, it was so laggy and crash-prone that it was unplayable for weeks.  Even World of (Bloody Successful) Warcraft had to shut down sales of the game temporarily because the servers were being completely overloaded and unplayable near launch. A day of being unable to play and characters with passive power dependencies encountering difficulty is comparatively nothing.

That said, I’m definitely looking forward to that free respec.  Sure, my character plays well enough, but I think I could find an entertainment benefit by rebuilding my character in a more novel direction.  Thus, even in these trying times, there’s a certain silver lining in that I’m being granted an opportunity I would not have otherwise.

Champions Online Turns Up Awesome, After All

Three days ago, I had three concerns on my mind.

• I would not be able to get the 6-month discounted subscription because “limited time” suddenly became “limited numbers.”
• I would not be able to play until September 1st because, in a very unique precedent, you’re only allowed in the pre-order head start if you pre-order for certain parties.
• Champions Online’s power selection seemed overly attack-centric to me.

These concerns a mostly resolved, and now Champions Online is thoroughly awesome in my book.

Champions Online Chargen Tips

Lets talk Champions Online Strategy, particularly when it comes to developing your very own hero from scratch.

Statistics

The primary statistics you want to invest in are endurance, recovery, constitution, and intelligence – in that order.

• Endurance assures you’ve a relatively large battery to use your powers from.  Being able to use your powers at a critical juncture can save your character’s bacon in the larger majority of the situations you’ll encounter.
• Recovery primarily reduces the amount of time it takes you to generate energy.   What good is a giant battery if it has only a small sliver of power in it most of the time?  Recovery fills that battery quickly, as well as making sure the power tends to gravitate to a nice level.
• Constitution bolsters your hitpoint pool, which will come in handy because sometimes the opposition will hit you with some fairly big punches.  You should learn to block those punches (by holding down the shift at the right time) but having some hitpoints offers a handy margin of error.  It’s also useful in situations where you’re being nibbled to death by ducks – several smaller threats.  Expect to get insta-killed by a lot of Cosmic level threats if you don’t have enough Constitution.  (Expect to get insta-killed a little later if you don’t have a quick means to replenish those lost hitpoints.)
• Intelligence reduces the expense of the powers you use.  Some people think that the savings from intelligence aren’t nearly as influential as Endurance, but what’s happening there is that they’re missing the vital importance of savings-over-time.  The effect is subtle, but very important.  Intelligence also influences the damage output of any pets under your control.

There are secondary statistics (called such by me because they’re not quite as important) which will nonetheless be important depending on the type of character you’re making.  They’re far less universal, however, for reasons I’m about to explain.

• Strength may be an important statistic in many RPGs, but in Champions Online it only does two things for you: determine the size of the things you can pick up and throw, and influence hold resistance (both yours and your enemies vrs physical holds).   It also boosts your melee damage, but currently only to about 25% and caps with a moderate investment.  Thus, investing heavily in Strength is primarily useful for characters using Might powers because (along with constitution) it scales with certain powers.  For everybody else, it’s fairly pointless unless you plan to throw a lot of cars.  (Granted, throwing big things does do some pretty good (often AOE) damage.)
• Dexterity is another important statistic in most RPGs which isn’t all that vital in Champions Online.  If you don’t have enough dexterity you basically won’t dodge and won’t do critical hits… but most characters can probably survive well enough doing only their base damage and blocking the big attacks.   It’s primarily useful for characters who take Munitions, Archery, or Martial Arts powers because certain powers scale with it (particularly “Killer Instinct” out of Munitions because the frequency of critical hits will build your energy).    It’s also relatively good for Ego-heavy characters because if you’ve got all that extra critical damage potential you might as well be able to use it.
• Ego increases the severity of critical hits as well as the ability to break free from insubstantial (non-physical based) holds, and works well with high-dexterity builds.   It’s useful for Munitions (the energy restored from criticals when using “Killer Instict” scales with ego), but it’s really useful for Telekinesis players as a lot of powers scale with Ego.  Especially Telekinesis (the power) which replaces Strength with Ego for lifting up and throwing things at range.  For everybody else, it’s about the same as Dexterity in that it’s a rather pricey investment for something that might happen.
• Presence is primarily useful for Telepathy, Sorcery, and tanking characters.  In general, it’s a team-support power, both helping to garner more aggro from enemies when you attack them (which stops them from attacking weaker members of your team) while helping to avoid aggro and heal or buff more effectively.  Pet-centric heroes will enjoy additional hit points to their pets.  More offensively minded characters can do well without it.

There’s some room for debate in statistics – my outline of which powers benefit from which statistics is not all-inclusive.  I highly recommend grabbing this Champions Online character builder to see ahead of time just what powers will require what stats to scale well before deciding on what stats to prioritize.

Power Selection

However, when it comes to power selection, I think I’ve something a bit more concrete.  I’ve found this formula works very well:

Take a passive defense power as soon as possible.  These powers include Invulnerability (Power Armor), Regeneration (Supernatural), Lightning Reflexes (Martial Arts) and Personal Force Field (Force).  The consequence of holding off on your passive defense power is clear: you will die, a lot.

Once you have a defensive passive taken and slotted (they currently slot by default as long as you have a defensive or balanced build selected) you will discover your survivability increases markedly.  You’ll particularly notice the difference when grouping with players who have opted not to take one: you’re often the only one left standing.

Alternately, you can take an offensive passive power.  It will similarly improve your survivability, since defeated targets are no longer a threat.  However, the third kind of passives, support passives, are notoriously bad for improving solo survivability.  (Perhaps with the exception of ones that bolster your ability to heal substantially when combined with an always available healing power.)

Choose one good single-target attack and rank it up with advantage points.

Often, your base attack given at level 1 (the one that isn’t an energy builder) will be fine, but if you decide you want to take a bigger (flashier) single target power, then that works too. If you choose to go that route, be prepared to accept that the replaced power will largely collect dust.

You should avoid spending advantage points on your neglected power.Your prize single-target attack is what you use to take down tougher targets.  You probably won’t need another one, because the recharge time of most attacks is zero, though you can further supplement your attack with ones that debuff the enemy to your type of damage or apply secondary damage (e.g. Toxic Nanites).

Choose one good area-of-effect attack and rank it up with advantage points.

A few sets (such as Dual Blades or Gadgeteering) get a good AOE attack at level 1.   Most sets will require you get them a little later.

The necessity of an area-of-effect attack comes from the opposite scenario of developing a good single target attack.  Often in Champions Online, you’re not dealing with a single strong target but rather several weaker targets.   Performing damage over an area of effect saves a lot of time and energy points over having to track them down one at a time.  Once the weak targets are down, you can switch to your single target attack to mop up the more durable ones.

Again, if you decide to replace your AOE attack with a better (higher ranking) one, be prepared to accept you’ll probably not get much use out of the replaced power.  Again, you’ll want to avoid spending advantage points on this soon-to-be-redundant power.

If your power category has a power enhancing power, get it sooner rather than later.

The reason why this is necessary is because many powers in Champions Online do not completely unlock until you have the necessary power enhancing power.  Power enhancers include energy forms, focus powers, and other (unless categorized) powers.

Examples of “energy forms” include Electronic Sheath (Electricity) Fiery Form (Fire) and Field Surge (Force).

Each discipline of Martial Arts has a “focus” power.  These are named “Focus of” something.   While your focus power is working, it will often unlock whole other modes for your attacks and defenses.

Other examples are less categorized and generally less important.  Power armor’s Targeting Computer reduces or eliminates the downtime of using the energy builder power, and this becomes essential later on when you’re trying to use several Power Armor attacks to unload a ton of firepower.  Munition’s “Killer Instinct” is another great energy saver that lets them be far more effective because they will not need to spend as much time generating energy.

Some of these take up your passive slot.  Consequently, you may want to hold off on taking them until you have found other means to reduce the damage coming at you.  Perhaps crowd control, maybe an effective active defense like Masterful Dodge, uber attacks which eliminate threats quickly, or simply joining up with some other heroes who can distract the enemy for you.

That’s pretty much it.  You’ve now five to eight powers powers: your energy builder and single target attack you received at level 1.  Your passive defense you received at level 8.  Your energy form at 5 or 11.  Your preferred AOE attack at 5or 11.  Maybe you’ve decided to invest in better AOE/single target attacks, maybe you’ve an essential focus power to take.

Now, as you level up, take whatever you want, but stick mostly to non-attacks. Very few attacks have a recycle time on them, and if you’ve advantaged up a favorite  single target and AOE attack you should have all the attacks you need.

The reason why I caution players away from doing this is because, if you take too many attack powers before you have shored up your defenses adequately, your character will have difficulty soloing.  You will find yourself in a situation where you are dying often.

Unless you are planning on teaming all the time, you will want to build yourself up as your own tank and healer as well as an attacker.   Throwing in some crowd control is a very good idea too.

It’s a constant see-saw – watch your offense and defense carefully, and plan your next level accordingly.

Don’t Underestimate Utility

If you’ve decided you’ve reached the point where you have all the offense and defense you want (at least for the moment) there’s still a whole other direction you can expand: utility.  These are the kinds of abilities which are not raw offense or defense, but rather can grant you the flexibility you need to handle particularly sticky situations.  They include:

• Support powers which buff, debuff, or heal are solid choices to push “good” into “great.”
• A pet (you can summon more than one at a time) can be quite useful because they do not require animation time to use after being summoned, essentially granting you bonus actions.  (They may also serve as a distraction to your enemies’ ire.)
• Crowd control can be highly effective mitigation and a means to turn an impossible fight around.
• Stealth and/or Smoke Bomb can allow you to avoid fights or bail out of fights gone bad respectively.

These are excellent choices to broaden the overall abilities of your character.

One last tip: keep an eye out for excellent advantage point perks you can apply to your powers.  Even the feeblest of powers, the energy builders, can sometimes become an essential part of your chain once advantaged.

Force Bolt’s Energy Refraction is the foremost example on my mind – it not only allows you to have a chance to get some free hitpoint barriers when you’re healing, but it will also grant you an “energy form” state which is advantageous to unlocking the full potential of many powers.

The humble “block” power enhancer are also a good place to look for good advantage perks.  Energy Shield’s Laser Knight or Force Shield’s Force Shealth can reduce the amount of damage you take substantially.

As I warned earlier, this guide can make the game boring for you, so don’t necessarily take it as set in stone that this is how you must build your character.  Champions Online is very much a game of flexibility – you can (and should) build a character that plays how you want the game to play.

Me, I like to build my characters as being safe, powerful, and versatile – that’s essentially what this guide is about.  If you follow this guide and find the resulting character boring, feel free to experiment – it may be that you prefer a more specialized hero with weaknesses of their own.

Hardly Working

I’ve taken my largely unemployed status and focused my obsessive compulsive behavior in a positive direction: design and programming.  It’s been a long winding road, but I think my BYOND project is about half complete now.

What you see here is pathfinding debug mode, with a whole lot of extra clutter. Red targets denote closed nodes, green targets denote open nodes. Three paths are currently being displayed with a black on white mesh. Fields of up arrows indicate sources, fields of down arrows indicate destinations.

I could have just made a simple tile-based real time strategy game.  However, what I’m actually making is three games in one, featuring three factions which play differently.

“Natives” – These play like Dwarf Fortress with a bit of SimAnt thrown in.

“Terrans” – These play like Dune 2 with a bit of M.U.L.E. thrown in.

“Pirates / Independents” – These play like Firepower… I haven’t decided just how much Battletech-like attention to customization they’ll get.

Although I can compare parts of it to other games, you can find a comparison for any game.  That I’ve come up with this particular mix, well: ladies and gentlemen, here we have an original game (for once).

Because the BYOND platform is inherently a MUD, that’s basically what this is: online featuring many players at once.   Because I’ve AI driving all three of the factions with or without player intervention, it also plays well in offline mode.

As a newbie game designer, I’m pretty damn ambitious.  It’s probably because I’ve some 26ish years of game playing experience looking down on me, a passion to still play games within, but a general boredom of the current offerings out there that I’m looking for some way to channel it.  There’s tens of thousands of people working in game development right now, but how many people with that kind of backdrop?

Sometimes, fate is not so subtle: whether I make it big or not, game designer I  be.

That said, enough sitting around on my butt trying to find work when nobody is hiring.  I’m returning to school next week, full time.  Somehow, I don’t think this is going to stop me from working on games.  The game developers’ passion is so well ingrained that this is my free time now.  I’ve got Chrono Cross sitting ready to play every evening before I hit the sack – perhaps one of the best games ever made – but I’ve found myself so occupied by my project that I end up doing this instead.

Crossing My Chronography

Long time no update.  Well, no, I’ve updated 3 times since the last entry – they’ve just been doing things in the “life” category of blog.  Noticing this blog is about gaming, I had second thoughts and decided to mark those entries private.

Today, I’m here to blog about my recent adoration of Chrono Cross, the some-ways-worse, many-ways-better sequel to Chrono Trigger for the Playstation   10 years?  Has it really been that long?  Remarkably, I not only had the same copy of the game I played back then, I even kept the hint book (it kept up remarkably well, with still-vibrant colors – well done, Brady Games).

More F2P Goodness: Runes Of Magic

In between trying to make my own game this weekend (so far all I’ve accomplished is a lot of design work) I’ve given Runes Of Magic a spin and found it to be pretty darn good.

On first blush, you’d assume that Runes of Magic is just a bargain World of Warcraft: only one race, 6 classes (soon to be 8), better-but-not-as-stylized graphics, smaller world, and a free to play with micropayments payment model.

However, as I read up a bit about the game (the above video and a wiki) I discovered that Runes of Magic actually does quite a few things better than the Blizzard-made marvel.

Impressive Features

Foremost among these features is the ability to dual class.  You can specify one class as a primary skill and another class as a secondary skill.  In addition to “class-specific” skills (which make up the bulk of each classes abilities) each class has a set of “general” skills which are usable while they are set to be the secondary class.  Further, there are a “elite” skills which only are available to each specific primary/secondary combination.

Overall, the dual class system is robust enough that the 6-class system functions well enough as a 30 class system.  However, unlike Final Fantasy XI’s job system (which allows you to level up as many jobs per character as you want) you can only pick two total classes per character and switch between which is acting as primary or secondary.   To an extent, Runes of Magic makes up for this by providing better compatibility to any combination of classes (there are many job combinations in FFXI that just don’t work).

Other cool features Runes of Magic has includes:

• Crafting and housing are in and well supported.  Many kinds of crafting, about on par with World of Warcraft in sophistication.  Housing includes the ability to purchase furniture.
• The titular runes of magic, which can be applied to slots on gear to grant various skill boosts.
• When you put your cursor over a mob, you can see which (if any) active quests you need it for.  (They also show up as an icon on the mini-map.)
• You can get a mount immediately rather than waiting for several levels to earn one.  (First mount’s free for a day… after that, it’s a P2P item.)

Overall, a pretty solid offering for a free to play game that doesn’t just seek to beat World of Warcraft at its own game, but also inherits seamlessly some excellent features found in other games.

How the game stays afloat

You never really have to purchase anything to play this game but, if you decide to do so, the “diamonds” go along the range of 100 diamonds for $5 to 3000 diamonds for $100.

A permanent mount runs about 395 diamonds while a 7-day-rental can be accommodated for 30 diamonds.  Other things available in the item shop are color customization (body, clothing, mount) consumables (potions, transport runes, equipment enhancement) furniture (for houses) and so on.

Fairly standard micropayment stuff, but surprisingly you can actually purchase some of these things by questing (albeit it takes a lot of questing to earn the good stuff).

Good… but perhaps not good enough for a burnout

To an extent, I’ve put MMORPGs behind me.  I just can’t seem to enjoy them anymore – my rampant alt-a-holicism crops up because I no longer see the point to virtual accumlation.  However, if I still did like these sort of games, and I was in the mood for a game like World of Warcraft, I think it’s a fair bet that Runes of Magic would be my choice.  Outside of that (very specific) definition, I think I would prefer a more challenging game like Cabal Online or Dragonica.

One thing that would make me happy would be discovering that Champions Online or Fallen Earth were F2P.  Part of the reason for this is purely selfish: I’m flat broke.  Work has never been easy to find for the student fresh out of college, but this recession is making things even worse than usual.  However, I really suspect that with such fine F2P games on the market, the whole “$50 box + 15/mo subscription” model may be sorely outmoded.  With games like Free Realms and Dungeons and Dragons Online making the switch, perhaps it’s only a matter of time until we see all MMORPGs go this route.

Okay, Mechwarrior 5, You Got My Attention

Cutscene?  Not according to the writing in the lower right corner: in-game footage.  (It’s easier to make out in a higher resolution version.)

Looks like it’s going to be an extremely atmospheric-feeling Mechwarrior.  The ejection sequence in particular is outstanding.  My only real complaint is that it looks like damage is going to be represented by percentage, which suggests that one of Battletech’s main draws (the sectional damage mechanism) may have been deprecated.

Battletech veteran note: if you ever find yourself piloting a Warhammer against an Atlas, try to operate at range 9 or greater, so the only weapon the Atlas can use against you is its LRM-20.   2 PPCs versus an LRM-20 is a pretty good bet, as the LRM-20 will typically connect with only 10 missiles, and they should be spread out.   In an urban environment it might be hard to get that distance, but even operating at range 4-5 should gain you a nice base-to-hit advantage.

Dungeons And Dragons Online, Again, For The First Time

I bought and played Dungeons and Dragons Online towards release, and discovered that it was a pretty decent game. The AD&D 3.5 mechanics were translated into a surprisingly-faithful system that also pulled a real-time quasi-arcade mechanism. What was actually delivered in terms of core gameplay was actually both fast paced and conveyed a certain spirit of Dungeons and Dragons.

(Dungeons and Dragons Online Gamespot footage.)

Unfortunately, it didn’t really feel like a MMORPG. While Dungeons and Dragons Online had an excellent mechanism for finding players to team up with, the actual game was heavily instanced. There was no real compelling feeling of a unified world, instead you would go and perform instanced dungeons.  Time and time again you would do these, because chances are the people you meet would need to do them to complete missions even if you already have done them before.

That the dungeons were of excellent quality with randomizing elements is beside the point: while Dungeons and Dragons Online was a pretty decent game, it was never a $15/mo game.  It never had that MMORPG-like appeal, even if it was a pretty decent fast-paced RPG and Dungeons and Dragons conversion in and of itself.

(A fellow sharing my excitement over this transition.)

So I’m actually quite excited to hear that the game is in the process of going Free To Play. You can get into the beta right now if you have a Fileplanet Subscription (or likely even if you have a DDO subscription) and see what they’re offering.

I’ve played a little bit of it, and I feel a great deal like I am indeed meeting Dungeons and Dragons Online again for the first time. This is how the game really should have been at release: no strings attached play, just log in and go for it, and if you decide you want to get some additional goodies then dig out your wallet and buy em’.

The payment model is detailed here, showing that you can choose to pay $15/mo if you really don’t like the idea of micro transactions. Some of the things you can purchase include additional character slots, classes (Monks and Favored Souls are currently considered additional), modules (sets of extra dungeons), shared bank slots, ect.

An interesting thing I’m noticing about The DDO Store is that the vast majority of the micro transactions are permanent – you really can escape having a subscription in all cases except for special consumables (e.g. special healing potions).

Dungeons and Dragons Unlimited is leaving beta August 4th. The beta, of which I’m currently a part (and the NDA is dropped) will wipe its characters at that point.  In this move to going free to play, I would like to see a lot more mainstream MMOs follow suit, but Dungeons and Dragons Online in particular should really benefit from this transition as the game was practically designed for it from the start.

To Simulate A Meaning In Life

Well, I think I figured it out: the reason why I keep halting my BYOND game-production half-way through is because I’m a fairly goal-oriented individual and I knew, at least subconsciously, that the goal of what I’m making sucks.

Why Exult Ultima 7?

Halfway through June already, where does the time go?  Truth be told, I’ve been keeping my promise to spend less time blogging and more time trying to develop a game… this hasn’t resulted in much progress on the grounds that I’m a master procrastinator.

All things considered, I think being the frequent updater doesn’t suit me well.  I could mention what I’ve been playing lately but what is there to be said really?   I’ve already said my piece on Sims 3.  The two betas I’m involved in are under NDA.  That leaves Ultima 7 via the Exult emulator… which I’ll talk about today if only to fill the void.

First, somebody else’s video to show off a bit of the gameplay:

Alright, now that you know how the original looks and plays, it’s on to my take.

I think Exult has done a reasonably good job of emulating the original.  Back when computers could barely run it, I enjoyed Ultima 7.  However, from my current experiences in Exult, I have to say that it fairly sucks.   The troubles I’m seeing here in aren’t Exult problems, they’re Ultima 7 problems.  The game mechanics have aged terribly.  The details of my discontent follow the bump.