I am downloading the game (free) on Steam right now. Is anybody else giving the free weekend a shot?
I am downloading the game (free) on Steam right now. Is anybody else giving the free weekend a shot?
I was planning on giving CO a shot this weekend but Borderlands showed up and demanded all of my gaming time. I don't think I can devote 20 or so hours to really test out this game properly this weekend. Fortunately I'm plenty familiar with Cryptic's overjoyous nerfing ways so I can gauge fairly well how a longer stay in Champions would be like.
I'd rather spend my time on DDO, which won't go back to non-free after a weekend.
I'd like to in theory, but free is too much, done with that game.
Fallen Earth free trial is still going strong through this weekend too. The post apocalyptic setting of that game is far more interesting to me than CO.
I might give the next CO free weekend a shot, to see how things have evolved. As it is, I've let my initial subscription lapse and am back to intermittent DDO.
There are lots of things I like about CO, but the bugs, balancing (frankly, they don't nerf enough, nor fast enough), and weak missions are a difficult combination to overcome.
I will say this: the autopatcher is SLOW and the patch it has to download is BIG. I started the download at 1:31. 3.5 hours later, it's only 35% downloaded.
6 hours later and Champions is still patching. I hope it will be done before the free weekend is over. I just wanted to mess with the character creation.
Patch times are killing me too. Looks like there is no chance it will be done yet tonight. Hopefully it will be ready to play in the morning.
Having such a tremendously slow patch process is really terrible advertising for a MMO. I would imagine the intended purpose of a free trial weekend is to entice people to become subscribers. Making them wait through 7+ hours of patching in order to play has the opposite effect.
Champion online's patcher always became nearly completely useless whenever a lot of people were trying to use it at once. I can't imagine it would work well with something like a free weekend.
After 7 hours of patching, the patching progress was only up to 56%. I went to bed and when I got up I was greeted with this box that said "Oops! Your Cryptic Application has crashed". I can only assume it crashed while patching.
Yeah i took this chance to try it out, however i left the game patching at midnight, woke up 10 hours later and it had only got to 70% and also crashed! Think i will pass on this now.
Wow sounds like we have a winner here.
I just checked steam and it said it was running champions for 15.7 hours. So it patched for 15.6 hours and crashed. Did anyone get in?
Well, that's one way to sell the true game experience to folks!
Ouch :/
Oh and good, it just crashes at launch now. Guess I'll just deleted it. :\
The patcher has been running for 17 hours, it's at 74%.
The patcher ran all night for me and the game launched (and ran) without any troubles at all. I'll report back with gameplay impressions after I've had a chance to play around with it a bit.
So when they say free weekend they mean like free day right? I mean after the 20 hours of patching and what not.
See if you can download the client from fileplanet or something. You want to minimize patching from their servers as much as possible.
Someone call up cryptic and tell them about the wonders of BitTorrent for distributing patches.
I got it! Like City of Heroes, I'm having too much fun with just the character creator.
Kenny from Louisiana:
I wanted to make the description even longer, but I hit the limit. Boo. :(Hi! My name's Kenny. I'm from Louisiana. See, when I was young and dum I got myself minced to bits by a wood chipper. Anyway, pa took my bits all over the world to bring me back cuz he tells it that ma just wouldn't stop cryin' no matter how hard he hit 'er. Every holy man and voodoo man just laughed at my bits, which seems mean to me, but science man said, "BRAIN'S STILL GOOD!" and put me together again. So here I am! I dunno what these buttons do so I just hit things. Like my shoes?
Last edited by Kaigen; 11-01-2009 at 08:24 AM.
This should really have been given a pre-loading install period for a week before the weekend.
I wouldn't be done with this if I started it now.
Same experience here with the anemic Patch downloader. I'm not even going to bother.
The current patch for the game (that adds the celestial powers, among other things) is a hefty 705MB so not only are all the free players having to download everything, any current players also have a fairly sizable download, too.
and... now I'm getting "connection to login server timed out" error message after sitting there for 5+ minutes at the login screen. I don't think I will ever be tempted to spend money on anything Cryptic had its hands on ever again.
DDO Unlimited, on the other hand, was a quick download and install. It's looking pretty nifty so far, too.
After spending the last 10 months playing WOW, this game felt horribly amateurish. The interface was clunky and didn't scale to the screen res, movement was unsatisfying, looting took too many clicks, nothing regarding the loot was explained, and the quest markers were inaccurate. At one point, i was told to hit "I" to access my inventory, except nothing ever happened when i hit that key.
Not getting a $30-$40 buy-in and a monthly fee out of me, that's for sure.
I finally got it installed and rather enjoyed it, at least for the 9 or so levels I played.
I think the interface is clunky, and a lot of stuff wasn't well explained (for example, on my energy bar there are little orange arrows that set my default resting maximum energy.. what determines where they are and how much of my total energy I can build up to start with?)
Crafting seemed clunky and unwieldy. But inasmuch as it was CoH only better, it was, well, CoH, only better. Nice character creation, and the more action-y combat was pretty fun. I could see this as a decent XBox/Live game, but the sub fee is too steep for that.
CoH and Champions both strike me as games that should either be $20 and $10/month or $50 and $5/month. Hell, I'm not sure they couldn't be okay as a free to play game where you paid microtransactions for character archetypes/power sets/costume bits.
I have a sneaking suspicion that going forward MMOs are generally going to fail unless they have radically different gameplay systems (e.g. Eve), because the simplistic gameplay with a ton of content model that used to justify them seems like a lockdown for WoW. But it sure seems like shallow games with a lot of cosmetic options that are just fun to play for a bit ought to be able to attract a big wide audience if it didn't require such deep pockets.
I don't mind so much paying $15/month for something with WoW's depth. And I wouldn't mind paying $5/$7.50 month for something with Champion's depth. But for Champions to get my $15/month, I basically have to need some MMO and be so tired of WoW that it doesn't qualify. That's, generally, a sucker's bet for any company I'd think.
I just checked the inventory button, it works for me. It expands from the lower right corner. Anyway, I think CO is partly getting a bad rap. While I'm really concerned about micro transactions, they've at least said they are going to address some of the concerns and Blood Moon was pretty meaty for an event (along with a new power set already). I really like the skill (or power) system.Originally Posted by RickH
I think QT3 can sometimes build a lot of critical momentum and then it's just trash whatever product because that's the perception that's been set. However, the crafting system isn't particularly well thought out, there are some UI problems, along with the weird content progression because of their XP nerf.
Still, overall I think it's a pretty good game, but I gather it somewhat depends on if you find a character/powers that you're happy with. If you aren't really digging the options they give you, that'd suck a lot of the enjoyment out of the game.
Anyway, even though I like it, I've mostly seen what I want from it and will not be continuing my subscription this month.
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