Champions Online

[RobinGBrown]

I've bought a lifetime subscription and I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that Cryptic will keep it together. Last day of the open beta is today and I've enjoyed playing. It's a lot like City of Heroes but with better questing/missions, and it was the poor quest systems in CoH that stopped me playing that game.

Animation isn't as good as CoH, overall looks are better, gameplay feels a bit clunky but I'm sure it will get better, and I enjoyed playing Hellgate as well.

Hopefully they're onto a winner.

Edit: Won't be multiboxing it though.

[Kopitar]

There are some really strong support classes that you can create, but you don't really need any help to do 99% of the stuff.

[Mercurio]

Yep, it is a fun game. I don't imagine it will ever take a ton of my game time away from WoW, but they have definitely done a lot of stuff right. There are a number of things that are much better than the WoW equivalent:

- Character creation
- /follow - works from one end of the zone to another!
- Quest completion - if someone else is near you and they complete the quest, you usually get credit
- Character naming - name your toon anything you want, even if there are already 18 "Indigo Girl" toons out there, you can still name yours the same! No more weird characters just to get the names "Earth", "Wind", and "Fire"
- One world, heavily instanced, but you can always play with your friends (not 208 different servers like WoW)
- Flight from level 5 on (or whatever travel power you want)
- Select your new abilities as you level, then try them out in the "Powerhouse" before you get stuck with them (swap them out free withoutthe respec cost if you don't like them)
- No classes - take a power from any power set you like at almost any time or follow a theme - your choice

But along with the good there is some bad:
- Documentation - there is none - is this abiltiy good or bad for your build - total guess
- No software boxing
- Not much support for macros

Defintely worth a look for $50 in my humble opinion. Very different feel from WoW makes it a nice side-hobby.