Champions: Return to Arms Updated Hands-On Impressions

Producer Clint Worley explains what you can expect from Champions: Return to Arms. Double-click on the video window for a full-screen view.

The term "action RPG" is usually used to refer to games that let you play as a character who runs around cutting down armies of goblins, skeletons, and other fantasy creatures by frantically pressing buttons and running like hell. Thanks to developer Snowblind Studios, action RPGs are here to stay on consoles, and thanks to publisher Sony Online Entertainment, they've brought the fantasy world of EverQuest along for the ride. Champions: Return to Arms will be the follow-up to the popular hack-and-slash game Champions of Norrath, and from what we've seen, it will offer both plenty of all-new features and plenty of improvements to the original game.

In the original Champions of Norrath, you had vanquished Innoruuk, the god of hate, and scattered his essence across a dozen different planes of existence, each of which included five or six different areas to explore and conquer. In the sequel, you'll be drafted by Firiona Vie (the infamous blonde elf sorceress who appears on the cover of every EverQuest game for the PC) for a new quest--either an evil quest to reassemble Innoruuk's pieces to revive the fallen god or a good quest to revive and then defeat the god for one last time. To this end, you'll use interplanar travel to jump between different worlds in search of the fragments of Innoruuk's essence, in addition to searching for piles of treasure, experience points, and bonus items along the way.

Like in the previous game, you'll control a single character, and you'll be able to play as any of the original game's character classes, including the Erudite wizard, the dark elf shadowknight, the high elf cleric, the barbarian warrior, and the wood elf ranger. In addition, you'll also be able to choose one of two new character types, including the vah shir berserker, who was revealed at E3. This character class is more skilled at bare-handed combat than any other in the game, though it also specializes in using throwing axes to inflict substantial amounts of damage on enemies. Furthermore, the vah shir berserker possesses a number of skills and abilities that make it highly effective at close quarters. The other new class is the iksar shaman. Like in the EverQuest games for the PC, shamans are animistic healers with magical powers that can heal wounded allies and induce virulent diseases and poisons in their enemies. Also, they can summon animals (like insect swarms or rabid badgers) to aid in battle. The iksar are Norrath's reptilian race, and it is blessed with innate regenerative abilities.

The new game will also let you import your previously played characters from the original Champions of Norrath just by using the same memory card. The development team expects that the new game's more-powerful loot will be more than enough incentive to dig up your old characters. The game's difficulty will automatically scale to your character's level (the game will have a maximum character level of 80), though the development team expects that players may want to try to go through the game more than once.

For one thing, you'll encounter not only hordes of enemies but also "medal rounds," which are minigame challenges that require you to complete a specific goal--usually within a specific time limit--to earn medals that can be traded for unlockable items. Some medal rounds are intended to be highly challenging. For instance, you may encounter an undersea minigame that requires you to collect a series of items before your air runs out. Others are simply fast-paced, arcade-style games, like one that requires you to hide in a bunker and shoot down hordes of incoming kobolds before they can destroy three precious caravans behind you. According to producer Clint Worley, medal rounds will yield both rare and not-so-rare items with repeated play, though once you've encountered these minigames in the course of play, you can go back to play them whenever you wish to unlock more and better stuff.

Having a powerful character with the best stuff will be useful in the single-player game, but it will be critical in some of the game's multiplayer modes. The development team listened to a great deal of feedback on the first game, including several suggestions for online multiplayer play; as a result, the new game will have enhanced features like buddy lists, enhanced chat, and the ability to kick unruly players from your games. You'll still be able to use a headset to communicate online, which will come in handy in the game's co-op mode, in which you and your buddies will start as level one characters with no possessions (you can't import your characters into this mode). Then you must fight off wave after wave of monsters, who will drop weapons, armor, and other items that you'll need to equip yourself with as quickly as possible to survive. However, the game's competitive player-versus-player mode will let you import your single-player characters so that you can go head-to-head in either one-on-one, two-on-two, two-on-one, or even three-on-one battles. Fortunately for players who don't like to lose their hard-earned loot, these matches will be for bragging rights only, rather than for wagered items.

As you might expect from a follow-up game that is building on the technology of an already-solid game in Champions of Norrath, Return to Arms looks extremely good at this point. The game will also clearly feature a great many colorful and varied locales. Moreover, the team's goal is to keep the game running at a brisk 60 frames per second, which is more or less what we saw. The game's frame rate held steady even when using the iksar shaman's most advanced spells and abilities, which sometimes conjured up clusters of glowing particle effects and sometimes conjured up a small herd of summoned monsters. Even the enlarge spell, which makes the iksar shaman grow to almost half the size of the entire screen, held steady. Though the game's levels are only about halfway complete, the development team seems to be on the right track. So barring any unforeseen accidents, Champions: Return to Arms will offer better graphics, tons of items, and even great online modes to play with your buddies. The game is scheduled for release early next year.