One of the main reasons I got into RPGs back in the day was that if you bought one, you were getting a lot of game for your money. That was important when there was only one birthday and one Christmas a year, and not much chance that some relative might pop their clogs in sync with Ultima VI coming out. Years later I no longer need the Grim Reaper's help to fill my collection, and other genres have done their best to replace scouring maps for objectives with, y'know, game, but there's still few that can match it in terms of raw Stuff. It takes a lot of content to fill an RPG.
This week then, I'm turning the spotlight on a few small bits and pieces from various games that I think back on fondly. Not entire games. Just a few ideas and moments from them that stuck with me, whether I liked the actual game they were in at all. Add yours in the comments, yadda yadda, you know the drill. Also, I thought I'd try and pick a few things that aren't brought up that often, hence the lack of, say, Heather Poe from Vampire: Bloodlines or any of The Witcher III's awesome stuff. Got that? Cool.
Note: you can browse through the list using the arrows alongside the image at the top of the page, or using the left and right arrows on your very own keyboard.
]]>In this era of a hundred comic book movies a year plus spin-off shows, it's getting harder and harder to remember that not so long ago trying to take a superhero off the printed page and onto some kind of screen was basically a recipe for failure, mockery, and a way of flying a promising creative career into a great big rock. Hell, even now most superheroes without the word 'Bat' in their name are still waiting for someone to even attempt a game, never mind make a good one. For every Batman on NES or Arkham Asylum, there's an Aquaman or Superman on Nintendo 64.
On PC, it's always been particularly weird. Especially when you look at which companies have tried and failed over the years to bring us the ultimate superhero RPG. Is there anything out there that comes close? Ignoring Freedom Force, since that's not an RPG? Well, some! Enough not to have to hold out for a hero, at least.
]]>It looks like Atari, recently the focus of negative attention after Test Drive Unlimited developer Eden Games went on strike due to their treatment, are looking to gather some more cash. Via PCG we see Gamespot spotted the news that the publisher is selling Cryptic, the studio behind Star Trek: Online and Champions: Online.
]]>It was announced back in 2010 that Champions Online would be moving to a free-to-play model, but that has now been dated: JANUARY 25TH IS THE DATE. Needless to say, you can keep subscribing to unlock loads of the content that will now be available via the "C-Store", or you can play for free and buy various content packs with micro-cash. Here's an FAQ that may answer and questions you might have. I link to that because can't answer them, not accurately anyway, but if you do want to ask questions in the comments below I'll have a wild stab at answering them when I wake up in the morning. Or I might just forget, or idly blog links to Minecraft texture packs instead. Anyway, you can already play some of Champions for free, because there is a trial mode thing, or "demo". Hooray!
]]>Champions: Online, the spiritual successor to City Of Heroes, has announced that it will move to a free-to-play model from the first quarter of 2011. This also involves a new closed beta test that starts on the 9th November, mostly aimed at current players, with a possibility of outsiders being let in too. There's more super-details underneath the sentence I'm super-typing right super-now.
]]>It's been a year since Champions Online went (er) Online. What are Cryptic Studios doing to celebrate? "Re-do an interview with Jim because it didn't record first time he did it?" you say? No, you're wrong. That's just something they're doing because we're rubbish. They're having a free week. How free? "From September 1 (at 10:00 a.m. Pacific) until September 7 (at 10:00 a.m. Pacific), you can play Champions Online absolutely free!" says their website. That's how free it is. Go and sign up to play from scratch or continue your sadly abandoned Superchaps. Champions Online is a year old! What are we gonna do, Kool & The Gang?
]]>Cryptic, they say:
]]>I'm not convinced many, if any, of our regular readers are still playing superheroic MMO Champions Online - general interest seemed to dry up pretty soon after release. Would love to hear some earnest talk about what it's like these days, though - are the servers busy, is there plenty to do at the high-end, has it managed to diversify its quests yet? CO was probably the biggest disappointment of last year's games for me - not a critical failure, but meatless enough that it killed my plans to spend a couple of merry months in an online world stone dead. At least Cryptic aren't throwing in the supertowel yet - they're continuing to tinker under the hood (although earlier attempts at that pissed fans off royally), plus they've just revealed the first expansion's in the works... If they had any sense, they'd call it CHAMPIONS ONLINE VS SIR BIFF BIFFINGTON III OF THE MEGA-BIFFINGTONS. They haven't announced the name yet, so it's not too late - CAMPAIGN! CAMPAIGN! CAMPAIGN!
]]>Just a hyper-quick post on this, as it had somehow slipped my mind. The recently-released Superhero MMO Champions Online is free to play this weekend. All the details are here, including their Blood Moon Halloween event. And if you want a taste of what it's like, here's our What I Think. Who's still playing Champions? How's it changed since then?
]]>Sometimes... bless Champions Online. Bless those SA kids.
]]>The Maker Of Supermen Returns! Cryptic have had their Champions Online out in the wild for a couple of weeks now. It's time to pull on the Spandex and see Wot I Think...
]]>This broke yesterday, but I thought was worth giving a nod towards. Showing some kind of developmental superspeed, Cryptic have announced the first update for Champions, which is due for late October. And being that period... well, Halloween. It's actually thematically right on in terms of the superhero zeitgeist, with both Marvel and DC having stories around zombie superheroes. Some people call this Superhero Decadence, and - oh - I'm going to have words with them sooner or later. Anyway - there's lots of battling fallen heroes, becoming infected as a zombie in PvP, Werewolves and a new powerset based around Celestial power. More details here. At the least, already giving players something to look forward to strikes me as good marketing.
]]>The Champions Online beta has been in full swing for a while now, and the current phase is a beta for pre-order folks and Fileplanet subscribers. Here are a few thoughts on the game as it stands in the weeks before release.
]]>From the very first moment I heard about superheroic MMORPG Champions Online, I had one question - could I recreate my beloved City of Heroes character The Entomologist in it? With the open beta now live (rather unhelpfully, only so long as you're a Fileplanet subscriber or have preordered), I finally got to find out. Live, little man, live!
]]>I do love me an evil lair, and the latest trailer for Champions Online shows off some of the evil lairs that we'll inevitably be cruising into with the RPS Superchums spandex-lovers guild when the game comes out later this year. Plenty of game footage, lots of ludicrous creations, and splendid enemies: giant robots with laser eyes, the "ultimate psychic super-soldier", dudes with silly overwrought mucus-gargling evil voices. Yeah, I'm probably going to be playing that one.
]]>The weekend before last Cryptic opened the doors of their Champions Online beta to the gentlemen of the press, and let them have a crack. And lo! a crack was had. Well, John and I did, anyway, and then John gave up after the interface annoyed him. He intended to come back later in the week, not realising that it was only open for a few days. I, on the other hand, persisted manfully, and managed to play the tutorial section and get to level five before I had to go and hammer together some shelves or something. This proves that time limited previews for journalists are a little rubbish for time-limited journalists. But I did bring back some opinions which I present herein...
]]>[NYCC is getting ever more distant, so this is probably the last of the round-ups of games I played swiftly there. Unless I do a round-up post of the things I played hyper-quick or just watched. And... go!]
This is a Comicon. Clearly, I couldn't help but play these two. With the two competitors for the MMO Superhero crown within twenty or so metres of one another, it makes a lot of sense to play one, then immediately head over to the other in a feat of superhuman videogames journalism. By which I mean, playing a game and saying what I think of it. I'm hardly Batman.
]]>Following on from this morning's demonstration of Star Trek Online's character creator, there's finally more footage of Champions Online. Since Kieron brought you the definitive coverage of the game so far last July, it's been pretty quiet. However, a very brief glimpse appeared at New York Comic Con, and it's below.
]]>Here's another of those stories we should have posted about a little earlier, but we were too busy trying on each other's clothes and saying how nice we looked. In a fair old shocker of a move, Infogrames-In-Disguise announced yesterday that they'd scooped up Cryptic Studios, the MMO outfit behind City of Heroes, Champions Online and Star Trek Online. It was a weird, and possibly kinda sad, thing to hear about a developer who've been famously independent - so much so that in parting ways with ncSoft they lost control of the august City of Heroes.
]]>Champions Online is taking registrations for its closed beta. Is it that time already? Blimey. And hurrah. If you want to apply to be one of the early few to fight crime and bugs, you need to head over to Cryptic's site, sign up an account, and then apply. While the game is also coming out on 360, the beta is PC only (at this stage at least). You can read all about the game in our extensive coverage here. Or, if you're really lazy, here's some video footage of the whole superhero thing in action which we haven't linked to yet.
]]>Cryptic invited us over to have a long, hard look at their Champions Online. We had a good stare, talked to anyone who never actively hit us and came back and wrote up a full week of features about it, which I compile now here for the full-on RPG ultromegafeature experience.
]]>Halfway through my time at Cryptic, we stop to gorge ourselves on takeaway Chinese. I find myself sitting alongside the worryingly silent Craig Pearson of PC Gamer, the ever-lovin' Keith Cross of MMORPG.com and the charmingly self-effacing Lead Designer of Champions, Randy Mosiondz. Since he couldn't run away as he had food in front of him, I figured it would be a good time to have a leisurely talk about the problem of flexibility in Champions, his biggest influences, the crossover between paper-games and videogames and... oh, whatever else we could yabber out before we ran out of fried vegetables.
]]>Shayne Herrera, Cryptic's Art Development Director, has finished his presentation about the whole art side of Champions Online: its comic-shading approach which hybridizes trad-characters with cell-shading, tranforming comic-dynamic poses into action and masses more. I'm left with a single, burning question.
“Can I have an enormous head?” “Like you do?” “That was a set up.” “Thankyou.”
It's official. In Champions Online, you can have an enormous head.
]]>With twenty five years of history, there's more to Champions than Cryptic's forthcoming game. Present, and putting the game into its context, was original pen-and-paper designer George MacDonald. We grabbed an opportunity to chat to him about the history the Superhero role-playing game, the power of game mechanics to create emotions and how gargantuan Cryptic's intellects are...
]]>If any single figure's connected in the public mind with Cryptic games, it's its oft-outspoken Chief Creative Officer, Jack Emmert. While he was particularly busy showing off his new child to anyone in the buliding, we managed to grab him to talk about the interface between online MMOs and Pen and Paper games, the biggest challenges of Champions and the sacred cow of MMO design that's next for the slaughterhouse.
]]>Los Gatos is the Beverly Hills of The San Francisco satellites. It's not just home of people who really fancy a posh ZIP code, however. It's also Cryptic Studios' base. The veterans of the City of Heroes games are giving their first, real public showing of now-to-be-2K-distributed Champions to a selected band of gentlemen of the press. For some reason, I was invited. Spooks.
Since I've interviewed anyone who didn't actively run away from me, I've a whole week of content to amuse you. But let's start a little more general than that. Here's an Jack Emmert and John Needham quote-packed overview of their action-influenced take on the MMO game, Cryptic's love of the Champions pen-and-paper RPG, the tranquil-yet-troublesome expanse of Monster Island and what they have planned after Champions...
]]>Three new screenshots of Champions Online have appeared today, each showing off the distinctive style the game, probably better than any others so far (apart from the one that's apparently some logs). Click on them for a fullsize version, the other two below the jump, along with three other older ones we've not posted before. I've officially decided this game is going to be great. Cryptic, the pressure's on. Official site is here.
]]>There's one sort of press-release which we don't tend to do anything with - the standardized Q&A. Reposting someone else's questions? Pur-lease. However, when Champions Online's Q&A came through the pipe, including some of the first real information about Cryptic's new superhero MMO it left 3/4 of RPS completely befuddled. Because - like most gamers - they don't have the Champions-Pen-and-paper-RPG specific knowledge which a lot of these assume. So I thought doing a little directors commentary on them may be somewhat useful. So I did. Yes.
]]>My favourite MMO? Well, that would be City of Heroes. So it's happy news indeed to see the developers, Cryptic Studios, have unveiled details about their next project, Champions Online.
Cryptic were of course, until recently, working with Marvel to create Marvel Universe Online. With this project cancelled, Cryptic have wasted no time in picking up a new license to develop, which they say they'll self-publish. It's safe to say it's at the opposite end of the fame scale. Hero Games' pen and paper RPG, Champions, began in 1981. Cryptic explain if only you'd superclick.
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