Play Champions Online

This was one of my favourite MMORPGs simply because of the extensive amount of customization. You could make pretty much anything, whatever powers you basically wished, and change the colours of these powers (as well as animations) in many cases. I enjoyed this game for a very long time, still have a longing to return...

However, my experiences with the customer support was completely atrocious. To explain, I had a subscription to Champions and, as with many MMORPGs I played, would unsub when I wasn't going to play much that month or if I hadn't played in a bit. Let me clarify beforehand that I only unsubbed from Champions this once, this one time, and only did I return and want to play Champions again did my story start.

I initially had unsubbed as I was busy with other things and games. Months go by and I am suddenly noticing a charge on my account that I'm unable to track down, so I begin to do some inevstigation. It turns out when I unsubbed from Champions, although I received a confirmation of doing so in my email, they still charged me. It took me about a year to notice that they had still be charging me monthly actually, and when I contacted their customer service/support they fought tooth and nail in their own defense.

It was mostly a finger pointing game of who dun it, but it was made to be as if it were my fault entirely on either end. I was very clear and concise, however the people I spoke with were extremely unprofessional, accusative, and insanely defensive. Basically, it was insisted that since it took me so long to notice they were basically stealing from me, it was my fault and they'd do absolutely zilch to compensate.

Only after I had shown the email with the exact date and time of my cancellation did they cease trying to give me the run around. I convinced them to reimburse me for half of what they charged me over that time, but they had tried to convince me to take less than a third of that, in addition to offering me a free month or two of subscription (hah, THANKS.) I figured that was as much as I was going to get at this point after the customer service/support hooligan I was dealing with not only got my account information wrong regularly, but also threatened to "permanently remove me from gold membership."

Now, if you are unfamiliar with Champions and gold membership, it is a permanent subscription in a one-time fee. It costs $300 and I'd actually known several in-game friends who'd invested in it. The fact of the matter is that I never bought gold membership in the first place... and had I, that would mean I'd not have to pay a subscription in the first place. Funny, that.

Please be very, very careful with these people. The game is wonderful, but watch your bank like a hawk.

It was great when it was full of players like 6 years ago...

This may be a good game, underneath it all. But it's so strangled by it's f2p restrictions that it's hard to really get into it.

This looks interesting.
First of all I really like the customization. It's really cool, I just dreamed to create a hero like this one when I was a child, haha. Really nice gameplay, lot of hero-types, I'm glad someone managed to bring this action into this free-to-play game. I'm looking forward to experiment, I guess I'll play a bit more and update the review. I'm glad so far to play it!

Okay, so, Champions Online. I'm just gonna ramble about this, because I can't be bothered being neat and succinct with it.

TL;DR: Game's dead.

EDIT: Yes, I have a lot of hours clocked on this game. I basically use this title as a more populated version of Paragon Chat. I log in, I screw around or roleplay for a bit, then log off. I rarely, if ever, actually use this software as an actual video game. It's a chat client at this point. I've been at this game since 2011, and I'd wager 2/3rds of that playtime was just me being AFK or RP'ing.


Most people will say that the character creator is the highlight of this game -- and they'd be right. The character creator is one of the highest points this game achieves, and it achieves it in style.

...However, don't expect to make anything particularly awesome without first dropping real cash on this thing. Costume sets are quite overpriced, too, sometimes requiring the user to spend up to $10 for a single set (mind you, each set doesn't contain that many costume pieces to begin with). Being under the F2P model, you can expect the game to nickel and dime you, but ever since the takeover from Perfect World Entertainment, they've really gone overboard with the microtransactions, all while the devs have simply stopped caring about the game as a whole.

There's no ambition to be had; anything cool you see upon booting up the game was very likely put there years ago, when the game was in its prime, under the guidance of developers with the drive to make a legitimately good game. The ambition once had by the development team has since dwindled to nothing. As a result, content is largely stagnant. Most of the new content is half-♥♥♥♥♥ shlock they expect you to pay top dollar for, and anything that's halfway decent is shuttered away behind a lockbox which is essentially a big gamble that you have to pay $1 a pop to open -- and believe me, it may not sound like much, but that will add up quick.

Beyond the diseased, sickly cash cow Perfect World reduced this game to, it's also not that amazing as a game in itself. Sure, the gameplay can be deceptively nice at first, and may even feel like it has great variety -- and in some aspects, it does. But like everything in this game, it seems to only get worse as time goes on, and you'll find yourself fighting the same classes of reskinned, repurposed bad guys over and over again, doing the same types of objectives passing off as something more interesting, all while running around in relatively uninteresting, mundane locales that only have the passing resemblance to something with inspiration put into them.

You can also largely forget about questing, because an expansion introduced a while back basically made it redundant to do so. Instead of adventuring through the game and leveling your character up through time, dedication, and some approximation of hard work, you can instead just queue yourself up for one of the many "alerts" in the game that takes you and four other players to a self-contained instance to fight a boss and get an easy XP or monetary reward. Rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.

The graphics themselves can be summed up in one word: "Meh". They're not bad, but they're not exactly that great, either. On high settings, the visuals can look crisp and well-defined, with pleasing particle effects scattered about to whet your appetite. But the keen eye will notice that the art design is all over the place. This game has a BIG problem with artistic cohesion: you'll often find high-poly models with highly detailed textures in one place, and as little as five feet away will run into a very low-poly, blurry-textured mess of a model right next to it. It can't decide if it wants to look like a PS3 game or a PS2 game, and can be very distracting.

Furthermore, the actual work put into the environments is lazy at best. There's misaligned and missing textures all over the place, spots where you can see straight through the level, and even simply disgusting corner-cutting measures that one can only assume the developers thought nobody would notice, such as entire buildings being misplaced and left out in the middle of the street, or pieces of level geometry hanging a full meter away from where they're supposed to be placed.

The community is also quite lackluster. The overall population of the game is low at best, so I don't know where they're getting this "thousands of heroes" figure from on the bullet points. Maybe Cryptic means in terms of individual characters created and stored in the database, not even taking into account whether they're still active or not. Anywho, the PvP community is - as you'd expect - largely full of pompous blowhards that gloat over their ability to break this game's move sets or exploit some failure of the lackadaisical developers. On the other hand, the roleplay community is largely full of ERP'ers looking to get a quick fix off similarly horny players, all while roaming the one populated RP zone in scantily clad, large-chested women.

In terms of the general "I'm just here to level" player, I can't really complain there. They usually don't say much unless they want to sell an item in zone, or party up to do an alert.

All in all, I'd say avoid this one, unless you REALLY want to make some characters, like being begged by desperate devs to spend cash, or don't have much else better to do, such is the case for me.

...Oh yeah, and the game's kind of broken, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGVHlTnonQ

UPDATE 8/4/16: This game also became a huge grindfest ever since PWE took over.

Some years ago I would have (and did) recommend this game to people. It was fun, allows for some ridiculous levels of customization on one's character, and had a relatively decent leveling experience. Unfortunately nowadays I can't really give it much positive merit. Instead of working hard to release actual new content and deliver on a promise to raise the level cap and give us new content with an expansion, the developers instead pulled the rug out from us by revamping some systems to tie into their in-game store, completely ruined the leveling experience from what it used to be, removed crafting in favor of something that tries to get you to spend real money, and added a few other things that cost real money. All they do now is just half-heartedly produce a new vehicle or costume piece once in a while with pointless fanfare. There's no real incentive to level one's character through dedication and hard work anymore. Just idle in the city center and queue for the new "Alerts" (dungeons) until you can't stand it anymore. There's little effort that's been put into making these alerts consistent in terms of balance, structure, and bugtesting, and it really shows.

Customer service is abysmal and it feels like it's been outsourced to people who are only there to earn a paycheck and nothing more. If you have a problem, tough cookies. You'll most likely get a canned-ham response attempting to tell you in a roundabout way that policy states you just have to deal with it. The developers rarely communicate with the players except to try to put together some sort of meaningless community event once in a blue moon. Their lack of interaction with players and the direction the game went really shows that there is zero passion for making and keeping this as a quality game anymore. There's no real reason to pay for a subscription, the ONLY incentive being that you get some coins for the in-game store every month, it unlocks a bit of costumes and content that's otherwise behind a paywall, and you get unlimited access to freeform builds.

If you are coming into this expecting an awesome superhero MMORPG that you go out and fight bad guys on and save the world, prepare for disappointment. You're better off playing DC Universe Online or paying a subscription to play something that's actually worth it and with a diverse and active community such as WoW or FFXIV.

If you like playing a free superhero paper doll simulator and like coming up with ridiculous or cool costume and power concepts, then this might be right up your alley. Just don't expect much in the realm of actual gameplay.

Do you like massive customization? are you always coming up with characters, and stories in your head? or maybe you like superheroes, and think it could be cool to create your own, then take on the bad guys?

if so, give this game a shot. I've been playing around 3 years so far, always had a blast. although the game's seen some neglect lately by the developers, theres a new dev team on the job now, and they seem to be on the ball.

also, subscribers can not only completely customize how their hero looks, they dont need to choose a class either. instead it's build your own hero using any powers and skills you please. sound good? then try it. because I at least think its awesome.

Unable to use a character i made 2 years ago because its archtype is Inventor and costume consists of parts i PAID for.

SO basically they wont let me use my character untill i pay them for stuff ive already paid for.......

I just punched Space Hitler in the face, then rocket jumped onto the roof of a nearby building to gun down his army of summoned daemons.

I'm level eight.
Level nine is gonna be awesome.

Maybe if you'd asked me a few years ago I could have reccommended you try out this game as while it had a rocky start and was somewhat buggy its really started to see an improvement around the time they introduced Vibora Bay and the story arc missions...

However that all changed when PWE took over and content took a steep nosedive off a skyscraper while tied to an anvil.

These days its hard to not make an overpowered hero that can blow through all content and this is coming from someone most may veiw as a 'filthy casual' player. What challanging content that was in the game has been nerfed into a joke and thanks to the alert system most can't even realy connect with what lore and interesting villians the game has beyond the ones that pop up to be beaten down in the alerts. I'd be surprised if most newer players that reach cap even know about any of the actual dungeons you had to unlock like Telios Tower.

Pretty much PWE has rendered most previous and interesting content obsolete and the only thing Champions has going for it anymore is its extensive character customisation, which would be great if it wasn't all held behind paywalls.

And as a lifetimer from launch it saddens me to see the state of what could have been such a great superhero MMO and makes me miss City of Heroes all the more /em torch