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I was never big into the traditional superheroes of Marvel and DC but I had a real soft spot for this game. They got into animation as they matured but the orig

I was never big into the traditional superheroes of Marvel and DC but I had a real soft spot for this game. They got into animation as they matured but the original walls of text from missions were pretty good reads. Heroes and villains had a lot of polish. I had to stop for a while and by the time I was ready to get back in they were shutting down. Champions Online came afterwards but the IP it was based on seemed stereotypically awful. Dr. Destroyer as the main villain? Come on. There's a project called Ship of Heroes that might be a good substitute if they make it to release. https://www.shipofheroes.com https://www.shipofheroes.com

WorldMaker 8y ago
Dr. Destroyer isn't the main villain of Champions or of Champions Online. He does have a somewhat strong arc in the central hub city of the game, that was briefly played up in one of the versions of the tutorial. Part of the problem with the IP is more that it doesn't have a main villain or follow a central storyline. It's decades of tabletop adventures that go in all sorts of directions (some light almost parody, some power fantasies, some mixtures in between). Paragon City of CoH/CoV had the opportunity of being designed as a singular place with a natural story flow built to roughly coincide with player level flow. Champions Online is much more a loose association of vignettes and interesting settings with less of an over-arcing story. As a player you could see some of that problem directly too in the way Cryptic kept rebalancing the levels of zones to try to offer more variety to early players, more introduction to other plot lines in the game in the idea that maybe you'd fine the one that most interested you/your player faster. One interesting thing Champions Online attempted (and didn't quite succeed at) was letting players build their own main villain. It's a shame that the Nemesis system still takes far too many levels to unlock, because had they found ways to wrap that into even low level storytelling, that would have been a big deal. That should have been something more of the game was built around. Most people don't even realize it exists because it comes around at a very high level and is basically optional at that point.

WorldMaker 8y ago

Dr. Destroyer isn't the main villain of Champions or of Champions Online. He does have a somewhat strong arc in the central hub city of the game, that was briefly played up in one of the versions of the tutorial. Part of the problem with the IP is more that it doesn't have a main villain or follow a central storyline. It's decades of tabletop adventures that go in all sorts of directions (some light almost parody, some power fantasies, some mixtures in between). Paragon City of CoH/CoV had the opportunity of being designed as a singular place with a natural story flow built to roughly coincide with player level flow. Champions Online is much more a loose association of vignettes and interesting settings with less of an over-arcing story. As a player you could see some of that problem directly too in the way Cryptic kept rebalancing the levels of zones to try to offer more variety to early players, more introduction to other plot lines in the game in the idea that maybe you'd fine the one that most interested you/your player faster. One interesting thing Champions Online attempted (and didn't quite succeed at) was letting players build their own main villain. It's a shame that the Nemesis system still takes far too many levels to unlock, because had they found ways to wrap that into even low level storytelling, that would have been a big deal. That should have been something more of the game was built around. Most people don't even realize it exists because it comes around at a very high level and is basically optional at that point.