CO: Week 1

Jack Emmert has a vision.

Everyone has one. Usually, after regurgitating that vision in your first (embarrassing, conceited) work, you get over that vision. In Emmert's case, if his vision version one didn't work out the way he wanted it, he'd make vision version two.

This is his vision, version two. In this world, one player equals three minions, crowd control is worthless because you shouldn't fight statues, and you press buttons gameboy style (one to build energy, two for your big attack) until you hit on the combination to win. Oh, and his love for the classics show everywhere.

It's not a bad thing, if you take all of this into account and play from that framework (haha) of understanding. The world is beautiful, the designs, the Champions IP, the costume creator, the music, the travelling powers. The new engine capabilities enable new types of quests. 

This could be a really nice sandbox game...if it gets its act together.

After 1 week of play, I can see some problems that need to be solved if the game is to survive.

First of all, the open skill system is great, but the powers are not balanced. As I pointed out, crowd control is useless. As well as most of the other defense powers (or so I read). It happened when I tried to pick another defensive power besides regeneration, which I had during the trial weekend. My survivability plunged. It wasn't that it wasn't working. I did notice it working. But it wasn't enough to keep me alive with the ease regeneration was. Superficially, I had a lot of choice in picking powers, but given that I had limited number of power slots that came once in a while in the levelling process, I effectively was coralled into a certain path because there was an obvious choice on what powers to pick. Why pick useless powers?

The second problem is the lack of teaming. People didn't team, and when they did, I wasn't sure they were different from bots in that they didn't make human responses to me at all. When I get bored of the content, there would be nothing to keep me around. (In CoH, I log on at least twice a week to play on the static teams.)

Stay tuned for the next report.