Hands On: Champions Online



£24.99

Last weekend, Cryptic invited IncGamers along to the Atari offices in London to check out the upcoming superhero MMO, Champions Online, and the ever convivial Bill Roper was on hand to show us around the Champions world, give us the low-down on characters and explain how Cryptic has developed the game.

There were a handful of characters already lined up by the developers to demonstrate various aspects of Champions, the first one was something that can only be described as a Shark Man on a floating surf board. This particular character specialised in ice powers, and threw shards at enemies while zooming around on his Silver Surfer-esque vehicle. While taking in the extremely smooth graphics and gameplay mechanics, I took a good look at the user interface. Anyone who has played an MMO in the past should have no trouble navigating this system; the health bars, chat box, action bars and mini map are all in the usual places. Roper later explained that this sort of familiarity, including the famous yellow exclamation and question marks over NPC's heads, has become almost canon, players know what they mean so why change it?

Shark Man was now in the zone known as Lemuria, showing off his combat skills underwater and we saw how players can change the colour of their powers to suit them. Ice could indicate white but it didn't have to be. Do you want your Lizard super hero to be powered by the sun? Make his powers yellow if you want to. At this point, I wondered how far the character customisation could go in Champions, we've all seen the stereotypical superhero on the game's website; cape, mask, tights, gloves etc. Sharky had none of these, he didn't even fly unaided. Champions offers a vast - no, gargantuan - selection of customisation choices, as I was to discover later in the hands-on. Due to this, Roper said that they expect a larger percentage of Role Players than in other MMOs.

Roper moved us on to another character in a new area of the world. This time we were in a jungle zone, which contains giant monsters that require 10 or 20 players to take down, and countless bad guys. As with the previous superhero, this new character didn't fit the regular mould - his preferred method of travel was burrowing. When underground, the player can track their avatar's position by a trail of rubble, however, other players and enemies will not see any evidence of an approach until he pops out of the ground, a method that will be favoured by players who prefer stealth tactics.

Champions currently has over 900 quests, which are story and mission driven. A popular system from other MMOs, public quests, has also been adapted for Champions. In Millennium City, the hero's hometown, players will often see robberies or other crimes taking place; it is their choice to step in and help other heroes tackle the problem, or carry on with their previous tasks. Interestingly, the more players help out in the city to keep crime off the streets, the better the city will appear (less graffiti was an example that we were given). One such quest is the 'Jailbreak'. Heroes will be alerted by their crime computer that a number of dangerous criminals have escaped from Millennium City's prison. Help round them back up and you will be rewarded.

The Nemesis feature in Champions is one that many players are particularly looking forward to, and it's easy to see why. Roper explained that the exact method for creating a Nemesis hasn't been implemented into the game yet, but at some point early on, players will be given a mission in which they describe the evil menace that they must face. At this point, players design their ultimate foe, choosing the powers and look of their Nemesis. After this stage, this Nemesis will send his or her minions to attack the player in what Roper described as "Popcorn" missions, meaning they just pop up unexpectedly at random times, as well as very specific missions where players will actually face their Nemesis, who gains levels as the player does.

There are five major zones in Champion, we were able to explore Millennium City and we had a brief glimpse of the jungle area and Lemuria in the demonstration, but Roper described a desert wasteland containing Snake Gulch, the home of some robot cowboys gone bad. There is also a frozen area in Canada that has been seen in screen shots released by Cryptic.