Champions Online or City of Heroes II?

[Drac]

Champions Online Official Site

I cut my MMO teeth on City of Heroes so I'm quite excited about this one. I also played a few sessions of the Champions pen and paper role playing game back in the day, was a very flexible point based system if my memory serves.

It's being developed by Cryptic who did City of Heroes and City of Villains which they'll probably wind down once Champions goes live. The good thing about the City of Heroes MMO was it's fast paced action heavy combat and it looks like they're going to try and push that even further in Champions. The visals also look much better, from what I can see in the screen shots the cell shaded style is one of the best attempts I've seen at comic like rendering.

I've picked though the dev posts and thus far they're mostly keeping mum about the details. They don't want to announce anything untill it's 100% going to feature in the final game. Aparently they made a lot of promises with City of Heroes that they never really delivered on and they don't want to dissapoint anyone so this time around they're playing things closer to their chests. However, a few detials have emerged. The max team/group size will be 5, down from 8 in City of Heroes, but you'll be able to form raid-like groups with multiple teams of 5 and there will be even more character customisation options including the ability to choose custom colours for your powers.

I can't wait for the beta.

[Reoh]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a press release about CoH/V a while back about it being moved onto another developer so that they could focus on their new IP? Or something... not 100% sure on this, might have been the opposite and they were getting the full rights to both so they could completely control it.

I have my hopes on DC atm in the superhero/villain sweepstakes. I didn't like the style from the screenies I've seen so far from DC but to be fair there's usually a big difference between screenshots and actual gameplay footage and sometimes cool elements in one don't translate to the other.

[Drac]

Yeah, I'm keen on DC too, but there's so little info about it, it's kinda hard to get too excited. However, with Champions being done by Cryptic and knowing that the CoH devs are working on it and given the current tech and past experience, I've much higher expectations.

[Reoh]

I'm mixed on that. I liked some of what CoH/CoV had, and not others. My experience with playing it ended up being that I couldn't actually play any missions, I came across so many bugged ones and at the time at least (not sure now) you could only abandon one a week, so consequently I couldn't do any more missions and was stuck just grinding about outside which I didn't much like.

[edit]
not to meniton the constant zoning. I get sometimes its necessary, espsecially for private instances but otherwise I don't think you should have to zone much if at all.

[Deadfyre]

Ive done a bit of COH/COV. The only reason I didnt stick with it was I wasnt looking forward to the actual grind. As far as flexible characters, the abilities set them of right and nice. Skills like super leap and super speed were just staggering.

Im keeping an open mind about COH2.

DC makes me hope to play a green lantern (or maybe black/blue lantern).

[Reoh]

I want to bring back my Icetacular! (ice/ice coh tanker) haha.

[Corpeces]

Also keeping on eye on it but nothing out there that would let me have a real opinion.