Champions Online

Purchased the full game for 60 bucks and all my characters are gone years later.

I cant really post a review because the last time i played was in 2014-2015. By that time the game was kinda great, i did left when they introduced the flying transports as another microtransaction grind. At that point the game was a little mess already. But what i can say is that i came back in 2024, to realize that most of my most beloved arquetypes are now locked under paywall or whatnot. Yes you read it right. I didnt even finish the tutorial because the game looks rubbish until you can get all your powers, flying power and such and the arquetype i selected was rubbish, because i didnt have any other choice. But again, locking specific arquetypes under paywall, like the automaton (i came back only for the purpose of creating one....) is just idiotic. But what can you say about this company (cryptic). All they do is rubbish unfortunately. If you are new, dont bother with this game. If you are an old player ike me, think twice as i said, most arquetypes are locked now.

I remember when, once upon a time, every character was freeform, where you could completely customize your character and didn't have to buy things nickle and dime. It's a shame they changed it, that's when I left the game, and every time I boot it up since then it just infuriates me because it was SUCH a good game before they locked content behind artificial walls.

I started playing this game when it came out ages ago, then when I came back my characters were gone. So you would think combined with that and the bad monetization they have this would warrant a bad review. Well TBH the game is solid and you can make ANYTHING. Want to make X-Men, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars? You can make something very similar or damn near identical in some cases, for looks and powers.

I do wish the game was thriving more. Not that you need a bunch of people to play with to have fun (even though none of my friends want anything to do with it). But, every time I play it, it feels like the last, since there's only ever around 100 people playing at once. It just needs updates and better monetization.

No, do not recommend.
Steam has only recorded some 170-ish hours of time for me, but I've been a lifetimer since the game launched.

Long story short; _Currently_ an inferior product compared to its progenitor: City of Heroes.

Despite the fact they are still selling off (Lifetime?) subscriptions; the devs still see fit to push (ILLEGAL) Lootboxes every other drop, the MTX store has more content than the game itself, and while the character creator might be considered by some as being more expansive than her competitor(CoH), keep in mind half of that stuff belongs to Paragon in the first place.
In terms of gameplay; yeah... even as a walletwarrior you -STILL- need a supporting cast thus living up to the Massive part of MMORPG, not much RP in it, though... ever since that fateful takeover much of the story in this once-promising title has been taken out.
If you like the Champions IP, stick to the pen-and-paper variant... but if you desperately want to play a Superhero game on a computer, I would recommend looking up City of Heroes: Homecoming.

An amazing game soon after it's release. The character creation system and storyline was awesome. The nemesis option was a really neat feature. I created an amazing PowerMan-like Afro Samurai who's nemesis was The Man, aka Colonel Sanders, decked out in white suit and everything. His henchmen were CIA operatives and they'd pop up in the middle of quests and attack. It was amazing story telling. Sadly, the content was slow to come out and after a while it got boring. Tried to reinstall it recently only to find that it's been turned into a major cash-grab. All of the unlocked content is now paywalled, and you're only allowed simple customization. It doesn't look like much has changed since I left, apart from a complete castration of the game unless you pay for every single option.

It's tragic that such an amazing IP has been destroyed by greed. Makes me think of a plot for a comic.

I have played this game off and on for around 8 years. While I've never been as invested in the game as I have with other MMOs, it has drawn me back in ways that other MMOs do not. While many MMOs are highly focused on balance and engaging endgame content with a gear grind, Champions Online focuses on being fun. If you want to be able to design a tremendously customizable superhero and beat up bad guys while looking and feeling like a badass, this is the game for you. While the game doesn't hold my interest for months on end, day in and day out, I continue to come back to try out a new character idea.

I will say that playing totally F2P is much less satisfying. Purchasing a freeform archetype is where the real fun comes in allowing you to mix and match powers from any of their many sets. At at $30 one time cost that you can then use til the game servers go offline at some point in the future, I'd say that's a heck of a lot better value than a 2 month sub to any other MMO out there.

10 Years of fun and now I'm done! The character creator was therapy for me. I spent thousands of hours relaxing after work re-creating obscure Marvel, DC, Image, etc. characters (everyone loved my Super-Skrully My Vision got me in trouble!). 10 Maxed Character classes of male & female heroes, I loved fighting the good fight along with my fellow heroes of Millennium City. I even won the Halloween Costume Contest a couple years ago!

Hero On!

Whatever you do, don't play the game. It used to be fun and affordable but now they lure you in with "free-to-play" that has horribly limited gamplay. Then they try to sell you a lifetime sub for ridiculous amounts of money. They do shady business. Don't support a company like that.

The price of the lifetime subscription, which is the equivalent of buying the game, is ridiculous.

No game is worth that much.

Go play City of Heroes instead, several servers to pick from and 100 times the player base to play with.

CHAMPIONS ONLINE REVIEW

Greetings, all! Welcome to my review of my all time favorite MMO called "Champions Online".

My Gameplay Experience

(For a full description, visit my Blogspot. Link coming soon!)

For years, I've played this game. It is my second most played game on Steam. I have a total of 2,567 hours on record. That's a total of 106.96 days. I love Champions Online. It gave me the inspiration to write stories and (non-sexually, you perverts! -_-) roleplay in-game as my characters to develop their background. I roleplayed as my characters with friends, my brother and even complete strangers. Their support and input made much of my stories possible. Champions Online is where my first and most famous fan fiction story came from: Blood & Steel.

Shortly after using Steam, I was hyped for "Star Trek Online". When Cryptic obtained the rights to STO, I saw that they made "Champions Online". They were having a free weekend for the Halloween event. So I decided to give it a try. I was into Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' "Watchmen" when I first discovered this game. When I made a character and saw that the police worked together with superheroes was strange to me. But I got used to it eventually. lol

My brother & I loved this game. Of course, my brother made a rip-off of Deadpool on my account which nearly got my account deleted when they were doing a crackdown on players making characters based on copyrighted ones. Won't get fooled again! lol I made my first characters "Agent E. Blake", "Dark Owl" and "Metal Overlord". My main was Agent E. Blake. He had (honestly) the most famous Nemesis of all my characters: Communism Man. He was shown in the middle of my "Champions Online 1st Year Anniversary" video. He got a lot of praise from other players. I was proud of creating him.

We joined guilds and fought with our leaders many times. But, in the end, we had fun. Making a Nemesis was fun. I was so proud of my brother when he tried following me in making stories for our characters. Making characters and costumes was a little overwhelming at first, yeah, but it was easy to adjust to over time.

Champions Online was one of the first MMOs to have achievements in them, unlocking titles and costume pieces (which required a lot of effort to do). The game was one of the first to have "microtransactions" in them. But the in-game money was interesting. It wasn't the typical "gold, silver and copper" money you'd see in modern MMOs. It was reputation. "Charity", as they once called it. Cryptic loved us and we loved them. They gave us the first large-scale expansion/DLC "Vibora Bay" for FREE! They asked us, the community, and they delivered. THAT was dedication! Soon, the game became free-to-play.

However, after 11 years, the game is finally falling. "Star Trek Online" was making them more money than they could count. Champions Online was losing members, Cryptic stopped giving the CO community the updates they deserved and they began transforming it into mandatory pay-to-play game. With repetitive holiday events as "game updates". A lame cash cow. They even spam you with lock boxes!

That's all Cryptic wants from the Champions Online community now: Money and nothing else.

Pros
- Detailed character creation.
- A lot of in-universe lore.
- Great weapon and power Customization.
- Community roleplay support.

Cons
- Lazy Developers.
- No new updates.
- No more "monthly" subscription. Only subscription option is the $300 lifetime subscription.
- You have to pay for the most basic features of character customization.
- Dying community.
- Minimal PvE and PvP content.

Review Score (Pre-STO)
8.7
Review Score (Post-STO)
2.1

Afterword
As much as I love Champions Online, I'm not going to recommend it. If it was the same as it used to be, I'd recommend it. If you want to play it for free, go ahead. Play it while you can.

Thank you for the years of fun memories despite all the pain!

*Salute*

- Oniell.

It pains me to give this game a thumbs down, because I played it for hundreds of hours through Steam and outside of it as well long ago. I was going to try to get back into this game since I had not played it for several years and kind of missed it. However, after learning that the ONLY way to have an active subscription anymore is to shell out $300 for a "lifetime subscription", I was quick to cancel the game downloading and patching itself and promptly uninstalled what little of it had gotten onto my computer.

You cannot have a monthly subscription in this game at all anymore. Considering the game locks you out of playing characters you've made, and spent real money on in order to unlock item packs, if you have not thrown $300 at them is just ridiculous. I am not going to pay $300 just to play my old characters again, that is completely insane. What if I end up only playing for a few days before I get bored? On top of this, nothing new has come to the game since I last played several years ago. Who the hell is going to pay for a lifetime subscription to a stagnant game?

Locking people out of a majority of the game's features unless they shell out $300 is nothing short of just plain dirty.

This game deserve an other chance !
I play this since day 1 , but stopped a year there and there .
Missed alot of good times , I think the game is cooler now then was when it came out !

SO much creation ! this is art !
the lack of good story telling is the weakness of that game

Some people say all the cool stuff cost alot of real life money ?
EVERYTHING is unlockable with in game money !!!

Imagine you're in beta for the most fun mmorpg you've ever played. It seems perfect. A friend gets you and another life-time subscriptions. Then the game releases and there are countless nerfs that hinder the fun of the game. They then treat the game as more or less done, buggy as all hell and no content. Max level is 40, and the only notable update is that they gave up on the game, sold it, and the new dev made it F2P with most fun stuff premium only.

I guess they did release some furry heads that looked terrible. So I guess there's that.

Fun for a short Superhero fix, But not being able to utilize all the powersets even after having purchased the game when it originally came out without subscribing is a little painful.

If you ever played City of Heroes, playing Champions Online going to be like trying to fix your cocaine withdrawl with crushed up asprin.

I played this game during Beta and payed for the subscription all the way until Champions Online was sold off and became F2P. Suddenly all my characters were behind a pay wall. If I wanted to use characters with certain powers, I had to pay. If I wanted to use my characters with certain costumes I had to pay. Suddenly everything was behind a pay wall and I couldn't access any of my characters that I had spent so long playing. It would have been nice if the new owners gave a little leniancy to folks who had BOUGHT the game, and payed the MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION to play. I shoveled enough money into this dying game and now they expected me to throw more money at it just so I could continue playing my characters. If they had allowed previous owners to continue playing those characters/using those power builds and had any new characters they made using that stuff behind a pay wall this review would be positive.

As it stands now, this game is kinda dead and has lost much of its former glory.

Got this game when I came out. Had an upfront price. When the game went ftp with a sub model the players who paid full price got nothing. I never forgot it. So 8 years later here is my thumb going down.

After playing the game for 300+ hours and having a really fun time with a few really awesome characters, my main character was deleted without warning because he looked too much like megaman, and was named rockyman (like Rockman the Jap name for Megaman). --- This was before they put in the TOS that you couldn't have character look-alikes owned by other companies.

After which I opened a support ticket only to get my Lifetime status removed and my other two characters deleted for literally no reason other than i had a single character that looked like megaman, and was named Rockyman.

Right off the bat, this game is very frustrating...


Pro's:
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+ Character customisation allows a wide variety of costumes, materials and colours.

+ Tutorial sufficiently covers important aspects of the game without going overboard.

+ No apparent exp loss from dying.

+ Sizable, active community.

+ Missions have loads of variety.

+ Scenes are voiceacted.


Con's:
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- Most classes locked behind paywall.

- Melee class feels severely imbalanced in combat.

- Flying is only marginally faster than walking.

- Community seems to ignore you entirely.

- Missions that require groups are generally impossible to beat because noone at low lvls group up.

- Cheap voiceactors, bad dialogue.


Overall:
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As a double sword class, I was unable to get past lvl 11 and that's where my review data stops. The constant dying and the group missions I was forced to do solo make the game an incredible chore. While I feel the tutorial explains everything adequately, there's no helping the fact that Perfect World has screwed up player survivability.

Can I recommend this game based on the hope that PW fixes this, or that you can simply join a group for lvling? Not in the slightest. Perfect World is well known for being stubborn even in death (see Perfect World International), and the community itself would seemingly prefer to sit in the main city and talk nonsense than organise groups/raids.

Despite appearences, Champions Online has very little to offer the player. There's a million pricetags of premium content, loot is mostly spammed with costume lockboxes and missions give pitiful rewards for the effort it takes to complete them.

This was my second attempt to play this game, and it only took 30mins to remember why I quit the first time.

This game is straight up terrible. Think City of Heroes but with an extremely active energy bar. The combat is ridiculously fast paced, the powers are... well, kind of boring. About 75% of powers and archetypes and such are locked behind paywalls. We're talking non-cheap paywalls per item.

You cannot send Tells to someone (unless they're on your friends list) or use Zonewide chat until you've accumulated 20 in game hours. So asking people to group is right out unless you come to the game with a group prepared.

I don't recommend this for solo players at all. It's definitely not as good as CoX was, the controls are kind of spotty even though they support keyboard and controller.

Friend who got me into City of Heroes tried to get me to play this when it launched. I tried it but wasn't a fan as it compared poorly, for me, with CoH. I tried it again in more recent times and it is fun but not enough to get me to sub or play the heavily gimped free version.

I wish there was a neutral option but, since there is not, I'll have to go with not recommending this game.

Stupid Company gouges players and leaves game on life support while luring in stupid people who throw stupid amounts of money for stupid expensive costume peices.

Forget playing if you aren't subbed. Might as well bend over and give them your money if you want to be able to do anything.

Stupid game. Made by people who don't give a shit about quality or fun.

FYI the RP community is pretty shit too.