Champions Online Exclusive Hands-On - Hero Powers and Custom Archvillains

April 23, 2009 7:36PM PDT

We get our hands on this upcoming cross-platform superhero online game from the creator of City of Heroes. Here's our exclusive report.

In days of old, when knights were bold, you created characters for ye olde massively multiplayer games, taking these characters to repeatedly fight the same rats and skeletons until they gained ye olde experience level, at which point they became strong enough to tackle ye olde slightly larger rats and skeletons. But these games have grown and changed, offering new experiences in new settings, like the gigantic, modern-day city found in the superhero-populated City of Heroes developed by Cryptic Studios. Cryptic is now giving superhero online games another shot with Champions Online, a cross-platform massively multiplayer game for both the PC and the Xbox 360, and we couldn't resist the chance to give the PC version of the game a try.

Champions is being developed concurrently for the PC and the Xbox 360. It's planned for a simultaneous worldwide launch and is being worked on by a team of more than 170 people at Cryptic's home office in California, where the hot Silicon Valley sun provides the perfect excuse to...stay indoors and hang out in the Cryptic break room, which appears to be fully stocked with every single board game and tabletop game in the history of the universe. Many members of the team love their tabletop games--not surprising, considering that Champions Online is based on a tabletop game--and they apparently play games like these all the time...when they're not developing online games, of course.

Champions Online is Cryptic's current primary project, and the team is in full production mode, adding and tweaking content and balancing play with the in-house testing team. For those who aren't familiar with Cryptic's previous work with City of Heroes, that game was all about serious character customization--there were thousands upon thousands of combinations and permutations you could choose for your character's appearance and a decent-sized selection of superpowers you could choose as well. The idea behind Champions Online is to offer even more appearance customization options while completely opening up the hero powers with just as many options, from the origins of your powers to "talents" to character-based advantages that should all hopefully make your character a dynamo when push comes to shove. Champions will feature what design director Bill Roper refers to as "four-color combat"--that is, battles that take place with four general classes of powers: "might, mind, machines, and magic."

Having superstrength will come in handy when you need to jack a few jaws.

To figure out what this meant, we sat down at a PC terminal with a pre-generated character, the appropriately named "Jitterbug," a somewhat fragile female character wearing a gray costume with purely ornamental wings. As it turns out, this character was set at a very high character level to give us a chance to try out some of the higher-level powers, including "travel powers"--after a certain character level, all characters may choose a single travel power to help them get to where they're going a bit faster. These include flight, teleportation, and superspeed.

Our character was equipped with superspeed, which was still in an early testing state and wasn't working perfectly. But we were able to figure out the basics of this, and our other powers, which involved "small lightning bolt," "medium lightning bolt," "self-enhancing power that makes lightning bolts more powerful," and "big huge giant lightning bolt," though several of these abilities had secondary effects, such as briefly stunning our opponents. All things considered, this was a pretty straightforward character loadout that worked best when blasting enemies from a distance while other, tougher teammates made their way to the front lines to soak up the damage, but Champions will apparently have a hugely open-ended character creation system that will grant you tremendous control over customizing your characters' power sets.

You'll fight plenty of weird foes...some of which you'll create yourself.

We'll get to how that worked out for us in a bit, but for starters, we first set about diving into our first mission, which took place in an instanced area generated for our party. The area was in the subtly titled Monster Island region (which may or may not actually be a mislabeled peninsula), where we took our powered-up heroes. Monster Island will be one of many different environments woven into the game's overarching story, which will involve key allied superheroes and key supervillains.

But more interestingly, your heros' paths will be crossed constantly by their very own archvillains, whom you can create using the game's powerful editing tools, from their hair to their power sets to even the appearance and powers of their henchmen. Our own archvillain was born of an extremely clever combination of carefully choosing different, matching color schemes and textures (such as chain mail, vinyl, and leather) and different body parts and body accessories (such as robot arms, deer antlers, wings, and bug eyes) and then giving up and clicking the "random" button a bunch of times, which you can do for pretty much any individual body part.