And Then Life Happened: And Then There Were Superheroes

So, been getting back to doing some Twenty Weeks of Hell. Been doing Vampire LARPing. Moved out of my house. Moved in with friends. Did some fiction writing with hopes of publishing. Etc. And then Champions Online came out.

The first couple days it was like I'd discovered crack and didn't realize how bad it was. The Beta was a blitz of gaming and I find myself diving head first into playing it way more than was healthy. It was the usual high I get when I feel life in my veins- I sleep a few scant hours and awake jazzed and ready for more.

We actually created a contract to control our behavior upon buying the game and so far it's worked- I make sure to do an hour of useful work every day before playing.

So, the game itself is like a really long Beta in many ways. Some powers are unfairly advantageous, some are completely useless, and a few are just right. The basic gameplay is fun, fast paced, and way more interesting than that other superhero MMO. At a quick glance, the game is wonderful, but there are many ugly little pimples to find.

Big Pimples Include:

A content gap
Power Balance
Few Reasons to Team
Not Enough End Game Content

Despite all those, I love this game. This game is heroically geared. A lot of the missions involve saving people, few of the missions are just about beating guys up, you fight a lot of supervillains instead of just thugs, and the personal nemesis stuff, while campy, is still pretty awesome.

The make or break for this game will really be the Blood Moon event in my opinion. They continue to work on problems, and one of the biggest is the content- little end game, and a content gap. If this next expansion can either occlude that or patch it up, then it should all be gravy. But without end game and 40 achievable well within a month... it needs end game content really, really badly. Otherwise, people are just going to lose interest and do something else after getting all 8 character slots to 40. Hard, but not impossible by any stretch.