Cryptic had sold CoH to the masses as this do anything engine that would mirror “Champions” the role playing game, without actually saying the word champions. And to be honest, it turned out to be much less than champions. Still a good game, but not the freeform system that everyone envisioned. Lots of work and updates went into the game and it’s still pretty fun. I still play it.

In November of 2007 Cryptic sold their ownership of the CoH and City of Villains franchise to NCSoft so that they could work on their new super secret project!

Enter, the real Champions Online. Everyone kind of assumed that the super secret project that Cryptic was working on was Champions Online. I don’t know this for sure, but I get the impression that they were trying to get the Champions Intellectual Property license for a long time — like even back while working on CoH. They didn’t get it until recently,  once they got it they dropped CoH like a bad habit.

The Champions Online website was pretty lack luster to be fair and in all honesty the game as awhole looks like nothing but CoH 2.0.   I’m okay with that — I think that the City of Heroes game is a great game with a lot of casual game play, and a lot of hidden depth as well for the hard core gamer..    So seeing them simply move forward with what City of Heroes is, but meld it a bit to make it more Champions like with new and improved, safe for carpets hotness..

Oh man that’d be great!  Having said that, the Champions Online website had a count down clock that finally counted down just the other day.  Most of us expected a new video, graphics, eyecandy or someting.. But I doubt anyone expected, what we got..

Star trek online’s website went live..  Cryptic got the Star Trek IP!!    So.. what that means is that Cryptic is doing two major MMO franchises at once!     Ugh..

This sorta seems bad to me.  Firstly, Star Trek seems to have a bit of a curse associated with it..  And now they are saying they are going to do both Star Trek AND Champions Online at the same time? Hrmmm This is worrisome.. I fear that this means we are going to get 2 bad games..  Bad for business, bad for the customers.. just.. bad.

I love those little green bastards but I have a billion of them to paint.. (Okay, a billion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.) Over the years I have had Necron, Tau and Orks as my 40K armies, and Orcs & Goblins, Skaven and Tomb Kings as my Fantasy armies. I played the role playing game for years and really preferred it to D&D or any of the other traditional role playing systems..

I tell you this so that you will come away with the understanding that I have a pretty good idea about the Warhammer universe and to convey to you how absolutely excited I was about Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning. I had long thought this universe was ripe for computer games.

I was proven right when Blizzard pretty much raped the Warhammer universe for all of it’s games — but that’s for another post..

Needless to say, after doing a lot of looking, I’m a little disappointed in the direction the Warhammer Online game is taking. Firstly, it looks terrible. The graphics look extremely “Last Generation” in my mind. My first thought was, wow.. it looks like Dark Age of Camelot. I then learned it was being put out by the original DAOC creators.. that gave me a chuckle, and worried me. If their mark was to make a game that from launch looks 4 or 5 years old, then kudos boys, ya did it. If you’re intent was to make a modern looking game then you failed.

It has a wonderful Cinematic Trailer but that doesn’t tell you anything about the game play — and that trailer is over 2 years old at this point..

It really looks like they are trying to duplicate Blizzards World of Warcraft art style, all the while blizzard is basically using clones of their intellectual property.. It’s just sad. Especially considering one of the Q and A presenters when asked how they would deal with competition like World of Warcraft responded, “Kill them!” But.. you’re imitating them.. OH.. I see.. kill them, then you can say what you’re doing is original.. Got it.

More over in the modern era of dual and quad core machines they are intentionally keeping the system spec’s dreadfully low. They haven’t released the system requirements yet, but I bet you I could play it on my phone.. It doesn’t look any more advanced than Everquest 1 was.. To be honest, World of Warcraft actually looks a little better.. (I shun myself for saying that.. ) The Beta footage of Warhammer Online looks extremely lack-luster. They are talking about not wanting to make users need “liquid cooled super computers”, but from the looks of it don’t come anywhere near close to that. They may be very high poly count models, but they use the blizzard art style and thus they all look flat with sharp corners in an almost cartoon style.

During the Q and A session one of the devs was bragging about how he plays it on his old laptop and has zero problems.. *sigh* I can’t help but feel the game industry is going the wrong way here.. This is yet another case of “Blizzard did it so, it must be right!” I’m not saying go extreme high graphics like Crysis or Vanguard, just more than WoW cartoon blockiness.

They claim to be looking to the future, but it doesn’t appear that’s the case with regards to the LOOK of the game. Now I will be the first to stand up and say that game play ALWAYS comes first.. But why start with it looking old and outdated?

I do appreciate that they are looking to the future with content though.. they have 2 years of content planned to include the first 2 major patches, as well as being in planning and pre-production of the first expansion.. that’s nice.. That usually means they have budgeted it and that the game wont be here today, gone tomorrow. But, When do we get a graphics update? (Even World of Warcraft desperately needs one at this point and is my major sticking point with Wow. I hate the look.)

They are all proud about how their game doesn’t start until you have gotten to the end of your leveling. Meaning, you play the game from 1 to 50 and at 50 the game “really starts”. They tout that as being original and exciting when that’s EXACTLY what World of Warcraft does, the WoW game doesn’t start until you get to 70.. Period. All the grind to get there has nothing to do with WoW.. Its actually true of most games..

They are excited about all their “unique” advancement systems, but none of them sound unique. WoW gives you all the armor stuff, EQ1/EQ2/WoW gives you the alternate advancements and traits.. D&D Online gives you stat advancements.. City of Heroes gives you the badges, awards and trophies.. etc.. It’s been done. Move on.

And what the hell, if you want to customize the look of your character above the standard 2 or 3 sliders you have to buy the special copy of the game?! Fuck you! That’s just asinine and is the first HUGE red flag for me. Talk about nickel and diming the hell out of people.. I can’t think of anything that will make me not want to play the game more than being forced to play the same looking toon someone else plays simply because I didn’t want to fork over the extra $40 to get the “special” edition of the game. I want to be able to customize and I should be able to using the standard edition of the game.

It really seems the ONLY thing that Warhammer online has going for it is the realm versus realm, and player versus player game play. To be honest, I could give a crap about that. I didn’t enjoy it in DAOC, and I don’t know that I’ll enjoy it here. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like they have any end game PVE?! Are you kidding me? Of all the shit to NOT copy from WoW or EQ, you miss this one?

In the end, if I wanted to play world of warcraft, I’d play world of warcraft — if I wanted to play DAOC, I’d play DAOC. I have yet to see anything that makes this game stand apart from blizzards blatant IP theft of the Warhammer Universe or DAOC.

This game seems like nothing but DAOC 2 using the Warhammer IP. And that’s sad, it could have been so much more. Games Workshop, you should hang your head.

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head — you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game — you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard — I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do — don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. *shrug* Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..