By coincidence I logged into Champions Online for the first time in five years about a week ago, and saw a character called Josh Strife Hayes standing atop a building. I flew by thinking 'Wow, an impersonator'. But no, I now see it was the man himself. ^^
Oh boy, I almost forgot this game, but now seeing it gives me serious nostalgia. I remember creating a robot character with ice powers. He had a backstory about being a fridge that gained sentience and updated his mission from preserving food to preserving humanity. There was a charged frost shot ability with a modification that would deal extra game on every hit against a frozen enemy. But the additional damage would be the same regardless of how long you charged the shot. So I would freeze my enemies and then spam uncharged charge shots for ridiculous dps. I don't know if the skill was intended to be used that way, but it sure felt like bug abuse to me back then.
My friend played this. Due to the level of customization my friend was able to make an accurate Monarch Henchman from Venture Bros. And he actually found more people that did the same and they ran like idiots acting like they're Monarchs henchmen.
I've a few thousand hours in the game and I can confirm that the character you saw the absolute most was a big green guy called The Incredible HuIk (with an uppercase i to dodge the name restriction)
@@Varsaar My favorite Hulk clone I've seen was someone who'd named their character, "The Inconsolable Sulk," and taken their green beefy boy and gave him an emo haircut.
I am sorry my dear but I no agree four you are say. He try his best his branes. Hulk is very xcelent and working hard four study the book and make the mussels four green power. I enjoi and I hope you improve four understanding how games working my sweet.
The Qularr invasion used to actually be the first thing that introduced you to the game and it wasn't a simulation. After the qularr invasion you would get dropped into the power house and yeah, you actually used to have to visit the powerhouse to level up and it let you test abilities there. The weird video things were not there in earlier versions of the game, they added that later if I remember correctly.
Thanks for the confirmation, I was pretty sure that was what I remembered but not 100% sure. I actually don't even remember the Powerhouse existing, but it's been a long time.
@@ShjadeNexayre The Powerhouse used to be super-important in the days of freeform builds, but once the game standardized on boring classes, it didn't really have a purpose. It's a relic of a more fascinating age.
@@bwarhol I played before they changed to the F2P model. Had a light powers/dark powers mixed character with fire flight (because turning that on changed her outfit from white to purple for the light/dark aesthetic switch) whose whole schtick was being, essentially, a Death worshipper who brought the blessings of life as well as its endings, etc. etc. It's just been so long that I don't remember a lot of it, like the Powerhouse. That's all. ;p
I loved this game as a kid. I remember making my super hero called The Light who was a Brazilian doctor. While tending to a small village a meteor fell from the sky and touching it gave him powers. He used golden energy powers and healing abilities it was such an experience.
I was there from the beginning. Part of the CO beta, Lifetime sub bought way too early, and seen it devolve... The original tutorial IS the Qularr invasion. It's actually been cleaned up since it's original inception. Then you went first to either the Desert or Canada as your starting zones. You didn't go to the City until level... 15? 20? I don't remember, the main quest eventually sent you there. The videos you complained about were actually added later as part of their Free-2-Play relaunch to address complaints of confusion over the original tutorial. Also the F2P conversion introduced the problems with the voices overlapping.
I was going to say this, but you already said everything that I was going to. It's sad that it's fallen so far, and hasn't seen any real content added in almost a decade now.
@@dientimuri3956 This is what happens when PWE buys any developer. They monetize and destroy any quality in their sight. I currently haven't finished the videos but so far a lot of the issues he has expressed were introduced after Perfect World acquiring them.
I was there too, still prefer COH (Homecoming) to CO, although I do log in occasionally mostly to maintain the account, and to see if they added anything new ... they haven't not really.
i was about to bring that up, i was a demo player as a child and recalled that the start WAS the invasion, not a simulation of the invasion... really sad i never got to play the game originally, by the time i could buy a subscription it went f2p and gutted the cool part with microtransactions as far as i could tell.
@@number1fen Yeah, the second F2P update they did, when PWE acquired them, gutted the crafting system in favor of the garbage system they have now. Why? They make more money off this system, they can sell catalysts and whatnot. Star Trek proved the system, and they tried to retrofit it to CO.
A slight correction: Champions (the ttrpg) is specifically for a superheroic setting. The HERO system is actually a universal ruleset for any kind of game you want to run. Fantasy Hero (fantasy), Star Hero (space), Ninja Hero (martial arts), Danger International (spies), and Champions (superhero) are all based on the same rules.
Played the fourth edition just last year with a friend. Super flexible, but a bit complicated when you're used to current D&D, we houseruled a lot of simplifications and put a few powers off limits.
@@Stonegolem6 yeah, I imagine it's still a little more complicated than d&d if you take advantage of the entire system. I grew up with Fantasy Hero, so a lot of the more complicated features like throwing people through walls, tracking endurance for everything, or exotic powers didn't get in the way like they can in Champions. Once characters were rolled up and approved we barely needed the books for anything during a session.
And don't forget Dark Champions for the vigilante fans. Though in fairness to Josh it was Champions originally, it got turned generic after Champions 3rd edition with Hero System 4th edition being the first of the line in 1990.
I started to play Masks from Powerd by the Apocalypse with my group recently. I can recommend that, if you want to experience a narrative focused super hero story about super hero teens. A bit like Teen Titans. :D
Lifetimer since 2011 here. Still playing quite regularly. This is a very fair video regarding the good and bad things the game has to offer. It is also very frustrating to think about what it COULD have been, had Cryptic learnt to ride the superhero trend wave, when we see what it currently is. But this is a place where we can be anything thanks to one of the best, if not the best, customization system in any MMO. Many of the dedicated players have dozens of alts just for the fun of creating very different characters, powers and appearances wise. And it never feels out of place because this is a superhero game, so you can have ninjas running alerts with cyborgs, aliens, werewolves, mutants, whatever. Also fun to see one of my ingame friends, Alto the robo kitty, helping you out on the missions. So yes, game is outdated, left to die in the dust by the people who are supposed to keep it alive and growing, but we still love it. And any new player is welcome. There's a non-official Discord channel to help newcomers. Feel free to give it a try, folks. In memory of Scott "Thundrax" Bennie.
You mention the fact that Champions Online doesn't use the vertical space in their dungeon design and I'd like to share one of my favorite MMO memories related to that design concept. In City of Heroes I was playing an Illusion/Kinetics Controller doing some group content in one of the instance missions that takes place in an office building. At one point, our group got separated in an area that had three or four floors all open to each other through a space in the middle. The tank was on a floor in the middle with most of the enemies, the two dps were on different floors with smaller groups of mobs, and I was flying from one floor to the next and back again doing my best to throw out crowd control and healing to keep them all alive. It was exceptionally fun and an experience I have not found in any other MMO to date.
The Qulaar Invasion was actually there from the start. It's just that it's place narratively has changed. Originally you were actually one of the heroes that responded to the invasion proper, but now it's considered a "historic event" that is used as a training scenario for new heroes.
The tutorial invasion was introduced when the closed beta launched, and has undergone several minor changes to all the missions in it. It was for a time also the only decent source of a couple of Qularr cosmetic drops, but the drops disappeared with the item rework (though I think they were added somewhere else after a while).
Huh, like how FusionFall's future timeline tutorial would be swapped out for an "academy" tutorial, representing how time had passed and everyone had prepared for Lord Fuse's invasion.
Regarding the Power House. It's actually 100% still the main way of leveling by veterans. There are a few fantastic benefits, such as being able to try your powers/upgrades on holograms. The main benefit though is that any points you spend on leveling can be freely refunded and reallocated until you leave the Power House. So it's key for build crafting and experimenting with new powers/upgrades to see if you like them.
Also, most veterans are running freeforms, so we actually have build choices, instead of it just being given, at most, two choices, and told to kick rocks.
@@StarkeRealm I mean, a FF build that just takes an AT and does ALL the choices is usually pretty good. might need a few tweaks, but there's good stuff to use.
I always thought it was a brilliant idea for theorycrafters, being able to try out lots of different things in action, and holding off commitment until you're happy, is truly great.
If you wanted to do City of Heroes for the Worst MMO series it is still going. A group of fans got access to it after it shut down and created City of Heroes: Homecoming. They've even been updating the game since they acquired it and every time I get on to mess around in nostalgia for a while, there're always people playing.
@@Oddigan Yep! It felt awesome doing a sewer run with people at level 1 again. I cant justify putting any real time into a private server but just being able to relive a bit of City of Heroes was enough for me. Miss it constantly!
@@Oddigan It's true. Finding the downloader is a bit weird, iirc, but Google should be able to get you there. The folks running it have done a lot to improve it for a small team of fans.
I played this years ago. You see that Ghostbusters-esque pillar of light shooting into the sky from the top of a building? I flew there once and there are two NPCs named Gatekeeper and Keymaster on the roof! It's actually a Ghostbusters reference. I did not expect to see that in a MMORPG, but it's really cool they did it!
Now I'm just imagining them asking if you're a god. If you say no, you get hit with a knockback. But if you say yes, Legally Distinct Gorr appears as an open world raid boss
@@Veladus That would've been great. I don't know if they did anything with it, because I didn't really play that long. But I could see it being part of a quest later on.
@@skyknight0408 Oh yeah, they totally do. It is the culmination of the entire gang war raging over in Westside. It's the first Big Event you run into in the game these days.
@@xeltanni8999 I see. I didn't ever take parts in any big events in the game, because I was mostly running solo and flew to the next area when I ran out of quests I could beat alone to level up and come back later. Didn't get very far in the snowy region before I stopped playing...
@@skyknight0408 You might consider giving it another shot. I don't have any hard data on this or anything, but it feels like leveling up is much faster and it is very possible to solo the entire base game.
As one of those few remaining dedicated Champions Online players, this was a decent review! I will say that there is a LOT more to the game then just what's shown here. The character customization is even CRAZIER with all the different unlocks you can get and that they are still making more and more of every week! A LOT of the game CAN be earned for free, but there IS definitely a lot of predatory microtransactions available, though none that are really necessary. The Archetypes you can unlock are a good way to get a taste of the game, but the fully customizable Freeform character slots really are the BEST way to experience the game. They were more easily available when subscriptions were still a thing, but you don't HAVE to purchase the expensive Lifetime Membership option, you CAN purchase singular Freeform character slots for $30, which might seem a bit pricey, but it IS a one time purchase that lasts forever instead of a monthly subscription. Leveling up is definitely a slow grindy pain, but there are ways to make it easier if you ask for advice, and the mechanics can be a bit confusing, but the community is always willing to help out and give advice if you ask. The fights can sometimes be a bit repetitive, but the world and the lore and the stories and missions can be great if you give them the chance, and there is TONS of it. So, yes, it is a 14 year old MMO with some bugs and rough edges, but honestly, I've NEVER found a game with better customization in your character design and abilities, and with a Freeform character there is a surprising amount of depth to explore in making your own build. I whole heartedly LOVE this game, and I'll be here until they pry the servers from my cold dead hands.
I loved Champions, not so much for its world or game mechanics but for the greatest custom character designer ever made and a range of freeform powers (and devices!) that had a good go at supporting any daft concept you could imagine. Combined with a great, helpful, chill community that were just there to have fun and run costume competitions. And then it went free to play and the game basically stopped existing, just people standing around AFK at spawn queuing for the next currency farming instance. If they'd kept an old-school subscription server running like Runescape I'd still be there today.
@@puzzlejinx City of Heroes customisation is just insane. Recently played one of the new fanmade private servers. You can make almost any damn character you want.
Too bad the gameplay really wasn't there. In my opinion city of heroes was incredible. Now that I think about it though I only had a pretty shifty computer to play it on so that probably accounts for a lot of that.
To be fair, whenever players are given such robust character creators they always go overboard and try and make the most freakish and inhuman abominations possible. So to see someone running around as just a normal guy in a vest and slacks, they end up being the unique one.
@@smward87 honestly yeah, and just think the creator in this isn't even a third of what they had in city of heroes, coh's character creator still legendary as the best character creator ever made for a game.
@@ikpts A tiny bit has been done but the fact of the matter is that CO had better costume customization than CoH when that game was still live and has far more options now than it did then. Some CoH fans simply can't accept that reality and make blatantly false claims otherwise.
I was always a big fan of just taking every ability that gave me a pet and stacking them up as much as possible. The results were an absolutely massive army following me around, so much fun.
I remember when they shut down City of Heroes. Support and devs gave management the middlefinger, and rumors of sourcecode leaked. Players recieving massive reimbursements. It was an amazing community and devs/GMs and players ran around side by side. Sometimes a new thing needed testing and they would ask if anyone ingame wanted to join the fun. A one time amazing online gaming experience, never seen since.
The source code did get leaked. Google City of Heroes Rebirth or City of Heroes Homecoming. The devs of Rebirth play regularly (I have teamed with two of them that I know of) and they have community managers who do fun things like host costume contests and then spawn a dozen Giant Monsters on the people who gathered for it once the judging is over. (Which is not nearly as trolly as it sounds; it's a fun, chaotic mess. xD)
Back in the day this game was indeed lit. No limits to what you could make, everyone was creative and helpful, nothing toxic, cool music and effects. Just simply fun. I personally won a costume contest for my power armor/strength build that kinda looked like a Japanese take on Iron Man. My dude even had a cool backstory involving him delivering the power suit, but then having to use it during the initial Qular invasion to help the city win. After that, the suit's a.i. recognized him as the only user, and thus his story was born. Fun times
I seem to remember CO having a really neat feature - Creating a villain nemesis for your character at some level, finding clues to their next caper, and stopping it and arresting said nemesis. Was that taken out or is that a paywalled feature now? Or maybe it's a level 20 thing...
Though it's been years I'm pretty sure the Nemesis system was both blessed and cursed - they never updated it to be a paywalled feature, but never updated it at all (to my knowledge). I'd be surprised if they did and didn't stuff it with microtransactions.
Josh, I absolutely love the way that you never really give a good or a bad review. You just leave it up for the viewer to decide how they feel on their own from what they saw in the video. It's such a cool way of doing a review, love it. Subscribed!
As a note on your comments about the tutorials you actually got it backwards. The Qulaar invasion was the starting tutorial and they sent you to the powerhouse after you finished it. The voices used to work fine when I played it near launch so I guess something has gone wrong since then. The second tutorial you experienced is newer. Edit: The powerhouse used to be really important because you used to be able to freely build your character, mixing and matching tons of powers and the powerhouse was where you could test them as you weren't locked into your choices until you left.
Lani Minella is actually most famous for her years spent voicing Nancy Drew in Her Interactive's incredible series of point-and-click mystery games! Unfortunately the Nancy Drew games would seem to be a thing of the past, and if they ever *do* release another they have a different voice actor now anyway, but she was an essential part of the series for quite some time, and what a magnificent series it was.
lol, i dont htink anyone else would consider Nancy Drew in a discontinued point n click series a more famous role than Alexstrasza in the biggest longest running MMO ever. no offense to Ms. Drew
Regarding the lack of design for flying characters in the dungeons -- it's probably a consequence of flight not being the only travel power in the game. I remember reading reviews of this game near launch which said that super-speed and other ground-based traversal powers were completely inferior to flight, because a lot of the maps were designed with cliffs everywhere. If you couldn't fly, you would often have to spend ages climbing up staircases to get from place to place, and those staircases often contained a lot of mooks standing around the landings to slow you down even more. It's possible that the dungeons were designed so that they wouldn't slow down ground-based characters... at the cost of being incredibly boring for flying characters.
DC Universe online managed to solve that by letting the nonflying character climb walls, probably because Th Flash can just straight run up the side of a building.
While that would probably solve it, the other travel powers include but not limited to, digging underground, chain swinging(just imagine spider man but with chains) bat man grapple hook and cape gliding, parkour and teleporting.
The amount of knowledge Josh seems to have about superhero media is honestly impressive. I didn't know he was into so many things. Good chap, good nerd.
I remember at one point you could mix powers from all classes , rather than being locked into a class with predetermined powers. it was probably a premium thing
Freeform characters, yeah. They're still a thing, sort of. You can get them as a lifetime subscriber (and it's the main reason to go lifetime sub IMO), but there's also a thing called Freeform Character Slots which can be used to create a single character with a mix-and-match powerset. The slots're pretty expensive though, but occasionally they're on sale or, very rarely given away; I think I saw one given to every player for Christmas last year for example, IIRC
yeah, its called freeform, you can either buy a spot or run premium. im a lifetime founder so i just have all my slots freeform, but you can buy them and they go on sale occasionally
As someone who bought Lifetime when this came out, I was looking forward to the day you'd eventually make a video on this. Would've loved to see your thoughts on the world bosses, but guess you didn't get the chance to encounter any. It really is a shame what the monetization did to this game. Started with lockboxes, and never stopped from there. It really was a fun game at some point. The review that mentioned people just pose at the Rec Center isn't wrong at all either.
I loved this game, and it was legitimately fun to make themed heroes- I had a radiation shooting Iron Man rip-off called Iron Curtain with the Arch Nemesis Mecha-Lincoln- I also had a gun hero called the Gunisher. But when the company running this changed and changed again, my account was basically lost and my cosmetics with it, plus all my heroes. It was a huge shame- if not for that I think I may have stayed indefinitely.
Fun fact: There is a Champions tabletop RPG, it's been around since the '80s. The ruleset is currently in its 6th edition with some very fat rulebooks -- and one set of books is specifically in the MMO's setting. It focuses on Millennium City, and the major events in the MMO are considered canon events in the timeline.
Oh man! I played this when it launched. The tutorial videos actually weren't in the game back then. The alien invasion was the start and it wasn't a simulation. Overall it was a great intro to the game.
I agree and also don't remember the videos at all. But to be honest, I wish they were there back then, because I remember I struggled to understand all the interface and skill point things.
I remember that opening area so much because I made so many characters based on characters from other games/shows/etc. I think I spent my first 30+ hours making characters, rather than actually playing the game xD
I've always wanted a hero who just doesn't bother with a costume. You go to rob a store and one of the randos checking the beef jerky proceeds to wreck your entire gang, because they're that one hero who doesn't bother with a costume. Someone posts a video to a youtube expy of 'worlds worst bank robbery' and it's that same person who stepped out of line when the robbers came in and thrashed them. That kind of fun angle.
@@kasocool2812 That is wonderful. My new headcanon too. I'll add this: did you know Wolverine once had a secret identity called Patch? He just wore a suit and an eyepatch. After he gave it up, someone remarked "oh good, you quit with that silly patch." He's like "you knew?" "Everyone knew." "Why didn't anyone say anything?" "You know what your reputation is like? No wanted to risk pissing you off." I'm going with this too. Everyone knows he's Josh, but everyone is afraid to say anything and he's blissfully unaware that he's not fooling anyone.
My biggest problem with CO is that Jack Emmert was so bitter about his split from City of Heroes (most of the dev team at the time stayed and renamed to Paragon Studios) that he made an "anonymous" forum account to try and poach players to Champions. He used a ton of the suggestions and wishes the CoH players had in order to craft Champions into a convincing facade of a better game. Unfortunately for CO, the reason he left CoH was that he wanted to incorporate WoW-like systems into it and no one would allow it. We played CoH specifically because it *wasn't* WoW, so none of us were surprised that CO was stuffed full of gear grinds, auto-attacks, and a combat system that punished you for trying to play it alone with an overly-specialized/concept build. In my experience, most of the people who play/played CO did not come from the CoH playerbase. The largest CoH private server's population dwarfs CO's active population, too. Sure, CoH is technically "dead" and CO isn't, so I guess Jack "won," but I know which of the two games is better.
I worked at Cryptic Studios a while back, and although Jack had been gone for probably 10 years when I started, he was still legendary for being the most epic asshole anyone had ever met.
@@danieldelavega7605 I have heard stories and that is all. Whispers from people who have met him or worked with him implying he is a gigantic piece of shit and probably on coke.
I had an extremely displeasurable run-in with Jack on the COH forums when he was still the Design lead. I'll never forget what a terrible liar he was when asked if he was putting the game on "a skeleton crew" ... only for every game he's been in charge of since then to have the same exact pattern of abuse
And _this_ is funny because our current head dev, one Julia Sprenz, has repeatedly gone on record stating that CO "wouldn't be dying if it was more like WoW." Unsurprising that each new change to the game punishes non-MMO-trinity gameplay aggressively, and breaks more and more nonmeta playstyles and builds, and she also goes out of her way to make balancing decisions to spite players she doesn't like (like the Anniversary 2022 rework to Force and Auras (as well as under-the-hood changes to pet AI in following weeks) where she bragged about doing it specifically to get rid of Decimatrix, and... you know. Those changes wound up forcing literally every single player in the game to play differently, and introduced a host of new problems like aura fighting that have gone entirely unfixed because fixing them would require admitting making one singular mistake, which our "you're all gaslighting me to make me buff your favorite powers!!!1!" head dev would never do.) Don't worry though, her prior work experience is (apparently, if she's not talking shit) running a fan-made MLP MMORPG, so she absolutely knows what she's doing more than all the players who quit after she targets them with "balancing" tweaks.
I love this series and I'm always eager for the next release. Each chapter you release is a chapter closer to you covering MapleStory and I simply can't wait for that one.
The alien invasion was the original intro at launch. It was laid out slightly different, but all the non-invasion stuff is an after-add. And back at launch I remember having a spider-swing character who used two guns to fight a fake-hulk in a desert and got punched a half mile. Good times.
The countless digs at other superhero franchises during this playthrough has me laughcrying like I was hired under J. Jonah Jameson for the Daily Bugle
I actually bought lifetime membership for this game 9+ years ago back when it was in full operation, never regreted it, now i mostly check in with the game once or twice a year to spend the monthly in game store credits that's accumulated to buy some costume pieces or something and just take a quick peek around to see that yep.. nothing is going on the game is dead, it was fun while it lasted and i got some good hours out of the game and its still yet to be beaten customization, but like so many others i am waiting for one of the projects in the works to hopefully pay off so we can get a more modern super hero mmorpg and try and relaunch the genre
I remember i had a character called the puppeteer because everyone in pvp assumed it was a summon build. It was not a summon build it was a mele oriented dps, and the enemies were the puppets he punched.
I remember preordering this game. I was such a fan of City of Heroes I wanted to see what their next iteration of a superhero MMO was. The game hooked me for a while but life got busy. I only came back after free to play went live and saw that some of my already-created characters were now behind paywalls to continue playing because their archetypes we're now also locked. I refused to play it again after that. Asking me to pay more to play characters I had already created was just the biggest stab in the back for me.
I feel this exactly. I loved the game a lot, and suddenly wasn't allowed to play characters that even had paid cosmetics on them, unless I paid. I stopped playing at that point.
Same thing to me, it sucked so bad having characters i spent time AND currency on being locked unless i paid for the ransom. They could have at least allowed me to turn them into archetypes, or unlock them as freeform for a small fee as an appreciation for the long support, but nope. We were treated like trash. Havent given them a single cent since
One of my favourite things in your video is to see the Patreon thank you page grow every time, and patiently wait for it to just become an illegible screen 😂
Homecoming if you want the officially sanctioned, highest populated server with the most (non costume) content additions. Rebirth if you want a tone of costume work and a more live approach to most things. Thunderspy is a bit of a lawless land. I've hardly had good interactions with any of their staff/fans. But they do have some good stuff aswell.
@@SoggySoupyou forgot to mentiom Thunderspy has custom Mastermind pets. Which that alone makes it the best server to play on. Which sucks bc Homecoming is where the pop is now.
The Qulaar was actually the original tutorial, with out the part about doing a simulated attack as part of a group initiation. The game actually began with Defender telling you "The Qulaar are attacking!" The video stuff I don't know when they added. Edit: Flying and the blimp-- back in City of Heroes the main starting zone also had a blimp. Players would fly up to and and land on top if it and ride it around. It was a low poly blimp that only looked good from far away. I guess the decided to go extra on the blimp the second time around since they knew players would go there.
Theres a good reason why nobody will revive you in an alert: theres no boss lockout and the loss of stars on respawning is actually negligible and not a real disadvantage. you lose practically nothing by respawning, and can still re enter the boss area. Also many people in those alerts may be lower level and not have picked a rez power yet, even the support characters take a revive late, because it's not needed until endgame. Honestly it would be better design if rez powers didnt exist, and everyone got it by default, without having to spend a point, and just choose an animation.
Thanks for these. One of my favorite series on UA-cam. Ever thought of reviewing a really good mmo in this style? Would love to see you talk about things like training section falloff for a game like FFXIV
This game has SO MUCH CONTENT IT NEVER TELLS YOU ABOUT! Legit after I hit level 40 I thought the game was basically done unsure what else to do, but then people told me that that's when the game actually BEGINS. And indeed, the time before and after level 40 are like 2 different games. The end-game content is cool and requires teamwork. There are giant bosses that require an effort of like 30+ people to beat and the cycles where it's done are agreed upon in between players, aka you have no way of knowing how and when a cosmic boss will happen unless you ask people about it. Luckily the community is extremely friendly and welcoming for new players, very willing to help out and tell ya the things the game just doesn't. Controary to the reviews, this game is actually NOT really pay to win as the best end-game content is locked behind currencies you can ONLY get through doing end-game content like cosmic bosses or hard adventure packs. No matter how much you pay you will not get the best gear and the stuff from the premium shops is outright worse compared to what you can only get by grinding, a lot. The expensive part is getting the most desired "Freeform" character slot. Aka instead of a specific archetype ya choose at first, you can pick a list of ALL abilities in the game and mix match them pretty much however you want. This means that the creative building potential in terms of what character playstyles you can have in this game is astronomical, and of course, complex to understand and of course the game tells you NOTHING about it. You again rely on advice from other players. Getting a slot like that either requires you to be playing at a time when it happened to be given away for free (which happens around once or twice a year), grind a load of questionite and convert it into Zen to buy it, or spend money on Zen to buy it. Also like you said, a lot of the items from the premium shops are sold on the autction house where ya buy stuff for a regular in-game currency that drops from anywhere, meaning that people who don't spend a penny get access to those items just by playing the game, and those who spend money have a quick and easy boost of wealth. Some parts of this game are indeed boring and repetetive but some others are extremely fun. So as a guy who was playing since 2022 halloween I would actually reccomend to try it. I didn't spend a penny on it and have no need to. Lockboxes and stuff are a thing but they're basically all cosmetics and when it comes to the realistic power stuff ya can get from them, ya can also buy directly from an auction house, so no need to dabble in those at all. In fact I got multiple characters to lvl 40 before I decided to open my first lockbox :D
Champions Online has a lot of customization, but I always found DCUO to be the more complete and well paced of the 2. I would have loved to see Champions get as continually developed as DCUO though, it certainly had potential.
Holy shit I haven't thought about Gunz in so long... I played the hell out of that game for a while. Playing attack and defense, running shotguns and butterflying all over... What a blast from the past
watching you play this made me realize there aren't enough British superheroes there's Captain Britain, Constantine and that guy from the Elites who I'm pretty sure is the same voice actor as Constantine. I would love to see more.
I actually like when a game that does have paid for items gives you the option to sell it in game because it gives a chance for dedicated not paying players to get it as well. But always better to just not have premium stuff
Well. Never expected to see my old stomping grounds get covered here, glad to see some old faces again (still miss you Piffle, hope you're doing alright). Hell, I still log in at least once a week to make custom characters whenever I can, it's always fun to see just what's possible via the costume pieces I unlocked piecemeal through community events and grinding.
Played this quite a lot back in the day. Sad to see it go down this much. I remember it being fun time making hero ideas you had. I was even in a RP guild for awhile. I think it was fun to create a history for the character and have his situation change. (Updated his armor to the superhero groups colours instead of the one he used before and all that).
It hasn't gone down. In fact it is getting more attention as of late that it had for some time, as they are currently working there way through revamping powersets.
@@kevinarnold8634 I played this like 10+ years ago and you could do so much with splashing different abilities together and making really unique heroes. Good if it is getting better but what I am seeing here is a downgrade from what I remember. Or I am just looking at it with rose-tinted glasses.
I played this game for far too long, almost 8 years haha. Started my big love of RPing on a MMO, and the gameplay was solid until it went free to play and you needed to fork over money just to be allowed to make a build you wanted that wasn't just the set archetype they made for you.
I played this game on release, and for a brief time it was my favourite MMO ever. The character creation alone blew me away. I thought it would be the future of MMO's. I don't remember any of the pay-for-power stuff, but I also remember having a paid subscription for this game, so maybe that was something that changed later, but it has been a long time and I probably don't remember it all clearly. Something that I wonder may have been removed, because it was a big deal back then, was the travel skill selection. You mention how the level design doesn't really accommodate flying, but back then not every character could fly. You actually had to choose between one of four travel skills: Flight, Super Jump, Super Speed, or Acrobatics which was a 50/50 compromise between Super Speed and Super Jump. It turned out that Super Speed was basically just always the best choice, because traveling faster in an MMO is always good, and you could even basically replicate super jumps by jumping at the right angle with enough momentum. Speaking of choices, classes weren't so rigidly defined back then either. Every single skill slot was fully customizable. You could mix and match everything to create absolutely any combination of power sets you wanted. I think one of the reviews you read was referring to this. And yeah, as others have pointed out, the Qularr invasion was actually the original tutorial. All those video tutorials weren't always there.
"It look like a cosplay convention marched through a Pride parade and they ended up teaming up" - best description of anything in all written works throughout history
Ah man. I remember actually playing a game of Champions for 2 sessions where I was a Gun slinging cowboy with a tazer pistol. It shot a lazer that exploded in a stunning explosion at the point of impact, and I had a secret identity, being a scientist during the day. My wife hated my super hero identity. Thanks Not Strife for another video.
I played this game around when it first came out, and a couple more times every few years on a whim. The Qularr invasion was there from the start (you were there for the actual invasion, though, not in a simulation). I also remember doing quests to learn the crafting as well. I do not remember those video tutorials at all, so they started with a good tutorial system and then downgraded it later it would seem.
Played the heck out this game before I jumped to dc online only to be extremely disappointed in the character creation compared to champions but I wanted to hang out with batman
Hey Josh, Flare here; the fire shooting vixen from the video that shows up around the 31 minute timeline. While I occasionally watch your videos, I did not expect to end up in one of it. (Or at least one of my hero characters) YAY, I am famous now... I guess. However I really did not notice that I was playing in that alert along with you. Those darn sun glases must work better than expected. Also I appologize to all viewers for the orange flashes that may have caused discomfort while watching the video. But hey, the name is Flare. No false advertising regarding this foxy. Anyway, there is a thing I wanted to point out: While you are right about the fact that players barely rez a fallen team-members; it's mostly because most heros don't have a Rez-Power. Silverplayers are stuck in their progression tree, so only healers will get it and Goldplayer tend to buy powers for "BEEEEG Damage" first. I myself tend to buy the Rez at Level 32 or later. You are also right about people simply storming ahead.. . it is almost like a typical a WOW- Dungeonrun, just faster. BUT... VERY BIG BUT(T): it feels a bit off to me to criticize people not rezing you, while you have not one but two self-rez items in your toolbelt ready to go. (Slot 2 and 4) The really heroic thing would have been to click one of the items, getting up with new vigor (and maybe a lil thirst for vengence) just to slap the Boss in the face some more. Why should THEY rez you, when you don't even rez yourself while you can? Sincerly yours, Lemrethh aka Flare PS.: Make more of those awesome videos. :)
What's funny: I played this back when it went free-to-play on Steam, and the alien invasion was the original intro-slash-tutorial, they've added those awful videos somewhere in the years since. I have absolutely no idea why they'd do that, the invasion worked really well at the time. The adventure packs used to be pretty much your character getting on a plane and flying elsewheres to fight evil-doers. I put a lot of hours into it, watching goofy movement powers like rolling up into a ball and blasting off, saving the cast of lost, rescuing cats. You didn't get far enough to get a Nemesis (I think? Maybe they paywalled it or just removed it all 'round)--you get to design your character's arch-rival, give them powers and a backstory and all sorta sorta. They'd then pop up periodically doing evil things that evil people do, starting short questlines. I personally loved that, it gave the whole thing a bit of camp that superhero media often needs--here I am as a hulking supermodel transformed by radioactive champagne, being chased by a grotesque lizard-woman who tried the same thing but didn't have the good fortune.
I was a City of Heroes addict, and when Champions came out I was super excited. Turns out that was a mistake - the thing that I loved best of CoH was teaming up. I could be a healer, I could be a tank, I could be a mastermind, but I always felt better in a group. Champions frowns on that, I think
Like most modern MMOs, the quests and "story" are easily soloable but the dungeons and world bosses are still group content. It isn't much group content, admittedly.
It's also the way CoH scales its content. 8 player teams are pure chaos, with massive mob sizes to mow down, and lots of interesting task forces that fulfil that. I think the only that lets it down is that by end game it's possible to make your hero so OP that several classes feel redundant, outside of the wildest incarnate content
I had exactly the same experience. Cryptic knocked teaming out of the park with CoH, but completely botched it with CO. I think that, more than anything else, killed a game that had a huge uptake on release. People were expecting better-than-CoH, instead they got better-in-parts, except the one crucial area of ease of teaming, where it was much, much worse. I think the mistake Cryptic made was to try and copy WoW instead of iterate on CoH. By that time, WoW had lost a lot of the reason for teaming up itself, and was was VERY congenial to soloing, and I think Cryptic had hoped that they could do something similar, but they would have needed a ton more resources.
CO doesn't frown on teaming, but like CoH doesn't require it for much of the content. When alerts open up you can team up all day, every day if you want. You also have the option of deliberately playing with other people, by joining a supergroup or teaming up with a friend.
@@kevinarnold8634 Don't get me wrong, you can certainly play teamed up in CO and it's fun, it's just that the whole system in CoH was much better for casual teaming up "out in the wild." I remember leading PUGs that would play on for an hour or 2 or even 3, the same PUG, picking up and dropping members, doing mission after mission, and at the end there would be only like 1 or 2 of the original team. It was just that easy to team up because that's how the game was set up, both in terms of incentives and in terms of the UI mechanics being easy to use. CoH was a very social game and I think that was its biggest secret - a way of making social gameplay casual fun, but not in such an impersonal way as sheer drop-in-drop-out events (like in GW2 which did those really well).
I feared this day would come. For real though, despite it being the Ralph Wiggum of the MMO world, Champions Online is a very sentimental game to me that I've spent thousands of hours in. It is with a heavy heart that I say: I look forward to you taking it apart. I hope you at least somewhat enjoyed your time in Mirery- Mireny- BAH!! MC.
I always wished I could have gotten into Champions. I was a bit late to the party and the game was already pretty dead. But I enjoyed my brief time there.
Champions Online is often rough and downright janky, but it's got great customization and it's still around, unlike many other MMOs. Easily my favorite MMO. With some more support and funding, it could have been truly great. Edit: As of today, and for the next month, CO is having their 14th Anniversary Event, and you can get a Freeform slot for free, which is a character slot with full customization, where you can use any powers you want. They usually give away a freeform slot every year or so. If the game sounds like something you'd like to try, now is the best time to start.
This game was so much fun. I had come up with a build that was basically immortal in PVP. No one could beat me, the only way to escape defeat was to last 20 minutes and draw out. Best part of the build was it was all about the passives you picked. You could make all sorts of heros. I had a samurai cowboy, a bionic man, and a psychic angel that were all very different in looks and attacks but all unkillable do to just 2 passives and how they synergised. Sitting in the city center and dueling people was a blast. Great memories.
I have spent hundreds of hours into this game, a good chunk of that only creating a variety of costumes and different characters. Back in the days, costume contest held by players was pretty popular.
I have so much nostalgia for this game. Aside from Warhammer Online and EVE Online, it was one of my most played MMOs and easily the one I enjoyed creating new characters in the most.
Hello. I’m a streamer that plays this game. This game has quite alot of potential, and unfortunately with the current dev team for the game, it’s not going to receive any big meaningful updates for a while now. The combat is… subjective to everyone. The tailoring is amazing. However, since this is a Small Populated game, any form of drama is significantly magnified in a sense
So many fond memories of this. Could really make some very very custom hero's ended up making most of my heros varients on a small lizard species with gear based on power set. Had so much fun and my main tiny space marine melee tank was so much fun. My alternative lightning tank with yellow crystals spread across various bracers and across his armour to match the lightning colours looked amaizing! Adventure packs were also the most fun I had in the game, great system.
Fun little tidbit, City of Heroes is actually still playable. Since the rights were lifted, some of the old Paragon Studios employees who developed, picked it back up and the servers are functional. Basically all holiday events go on all the time randomly.
Easily the best epiosde of Worst MMO yet. Josh was ON POINT with the script and those superhero puns were superb. RIP this game though I loved it a a kid.
Oh man, I used to love Champions Online! I ended up dropping something between $200- $300 AUD on this, ENTIRELY on additional costume packs and cosmetics! I had about 6 characters and each of them had multiple costumes, mostly Golden Age/ Silver Age/ Dark Age variants of their original costumes. 😅
Josh will never stop amazing me with the sheer amount of nerd/weeb stuff he's into. From SAO references way back, to warhammer stuff, to now the perfect MHA shout out
![[VOD] Nikke: Secret Garden & Part of chapter 23](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/w02wt41MGN4/mqdefault.jpg)
Not naming the hero Josh Strife Saves is a tragic missed opportunity.
I mourn for thee
Fuck, it I'll do it then just to commemorate this vid
Missed opportunity birthed this joke so we good lol
josh strife loads
Could have been Johnny Kage
By coincidence I logged into Champions Online for the first time in five years about a week ago, and saw a character called Josh Strife Hayes standing atop a building. I flew by thinking 'Wow, an impersonator'. But no, I now see it was the man himself. ^^
You know you're dealing with a true mmo player of the old days when they still use ^^ in 2023
;-P
@@MrBoooooring plop ^^ xD lfg
@@MrBoooooring Oh no. Guilty as charged. ;;
@@MrBoooooring me, when someone indicates that "^^" is old:
:
I tried a couple of weeks ago, but the servers seemed down half of the time and it crashed when I was loading my character.
Oh boy, I almost forgot this game, but now seeing it gives me serious nostalgia. I remember creating a robot character with ice powers. He had a backstory about being a fridge that gained sentience and updated his mission from preserving food to preserving humanity. There was a charged frost shot ability with a modification that would deal extra game on every hit against a frozen enemy. But the additional damage would be the same regardless of how long you charged the shot. So I would freeze my enemies and then spam uncharged charge shots for ridiculous dps. I don't know if the skill was intended to be used that way, but it sure felt like bug abuse to me back then.
That backstory is amazing. Now I want to build a warforged paladin in D&D with that backstory!
City of heroes did it better.
That backstory puts a whole new meaning on "preserving humanity!"
Putting villains on ice, eh?
That wordplay in the mission statement switching from literal to figurative is peak comic book logic. :D
My friend played this. Due to the level of customization my friend was able to make an accurate Monarch Henchman from Venture Bros. And he actually found more people that did the same and they ran like idiots acting like they're Monarchs henchmen.
I remember making Dr. Orpheus, good times.
Now all we need is Brock, Al, and Jefferson. Go Team Venture! and Hench 4 Lyfe (please tell me your friend did Henchman 21)
*Go Team Venture!* ✌️🌟✌️
The Clark Kent approach is genius though
"Look, let him keep his 9 to 5. That's 8 hours less a day he's out there stopping us, so just go with it!"
I loved the customization options in this game. You could make just about anything. **proceeds to make The Uninspired Bulk**
I've a few thousand hours in the game and I can confirm that the character you saw the absolute most was a big green guy called The Incredible HuIk (with an uppercase i to dodge the name restriction)
@@Varsaar I’m not surprised. 😂 I remember making a really nice Samus Aran and would just spend hours making random-looking costumes.
@@Varsaar My favorite Hulk clone I've seen was someone who'd named their character, "The Inconsolable Sulk," and taken their green beefy boy and gave him an emo haircut.
I am sorry my dear but I no agree four you are say. He try his best his branes. Hulk is very xcelent and working hard four study the book and make the mussels four green power. I enjoi and I hope you improve four understanding how games working my sweet.
@@StarkeRealm Hulk is dark and emo
The Qularr invasion used to actually be the first thing that introduced you to the game and it wasn't a simulation. After the qularr invasion you would get dropped into the power house and yeah, you actually used to have to visit the powerhouse to level up and it let you test abilities there. The weird video things were not there in earlier versions of the game, they added that later if I remember correctly.
You do, indeed, remember correctly.
that's such an odd choice, huh. thanksgiving for clarifying that for the rest of us
Thanks for the confirmation, I was pretty sure that was what I remembered but not 100% sure. I actually don't even remember the Powerhouse existing, but it's been a long time.
@@ShjadeNexayre The Powerhouse used to be super-important in the days of freeform builds, but once the game standardized on boring classes, it didn't really have a purpose. It's a relic of a more fascinating age.
@@bwarhol I played before they changed to the F2P model. Had a light powers/dark powers mixed character with fire flight (because turning that on changed her outfit from white to purple for the light/dark aesthetic switch) whose whole schtick was being, essentially, a Death worshipper who brought the blessings of life as well as its endings, etc. etc.
It's just been so long that I don't remember a lot of it, like the Powerhouse. That's all. ;p
I loved all the superhero themed jabs given throughout this entire episode. Got to hand it to Josh, he goes for a theme and sticks with it completely.
The ones in Genfanad and Albion are my favorites.
'Harder then Homelander in a dairy factory' was definitely one that had me chuckling.
I didnt get the she hulk one
3 days after "harder than Homelander in a dairy factory" and I am still not okay.
I loved this game as a kid. I remember making my super hero called The Light who was a Brazilian doctor. While tending to a small village a meteor fell from the sky and touching it gave him powers. He used golden energy powers and healing abilities it was such an experience.
Doutor brasileiro XD, coincidentemente eu era um dos poucos brasileiros que jogava esse jogo.
4 ZZZ😂ire n I c76sv ft😅😅pn
reading about a brazillian person touching a foreign object...... cesio 137 flashbacks💀💀💀
@@uyfg7u6 NÃO NÃO NÃO NÃO
He also loved tibia and ragnarok online.
23:28 "Now is not the time for fear. That comes later."
Surprisingly raw line
I was there from the beginning. Part of the CO beta, Lifetime sub bought way too early, and seen it devolve... The original tutorial IS the Qularr invasion. It's actually been cleaned up since it's original inception. Then you went first to either the Desert or Canada as your starting zones. You didn't go to the City until level... 15? 20? I don't remember, the main quest eventually sent you there. The videos you complained about were actually added later as part of their Free-2-Play relaunch to address complaints of confusion over the original tutorial. Also the F2P conversion introduced the problems with the voices overlapping.
I was going to say this, but you already said everything that I was going to. It's sad that it's fallen so far, and hasn't seen any real content added in almost a decade now.
@@dientimuri3956 This is what happens when PWE buys any developer. They monetize and destroy any quality in their sight. I currently haven't finished the videos but so far a lot of the issues he has expressed were introduced after Perfect World acquiring them.
I was there too, still prefer COH (Homecoming) to CO, although I do log in occasionally mostly to maintain the account, and to see if they added anything new ... they haven't not really.
i was about to bring that up, i was a demo player as a child and recalled that the start WAS the invasion, not a simulation of the invasion... really sad i never got to play the game originally, by the time i could buy a subscription it went f2p and gutted the cool part with microtransactions as far as i could tell.
@@number1fen Yeah, the second F2P update they did, when PWE acquired them, gutted the crafting system in favor of the garbage system they have now. Why? They make more money off this system, they can sell catalysts and whatnot. Star Trek proved the system, and they tried to retrofit it to CO.
A slight correction: Champions (the ttrpg) is specifically for a superheroic setting. The HERO system is actually a universal ruleset for any kind of game you want to run. Fantasy Hero (fantasy), Star Hero (space), Ninja Hero (martial arts), Danger International (spies), and Champions (superhero) are all based on the same rules.
Played the fourth edition just last year with a friend. Super flexible, but a bit complicated when you're used to current D&D, we houseruled a lot of simplifications and put a few powers off limits.
@@Stonegolem6 yeah, I imagine it's still a little more complicated than d&d if you take advantage of the entire system. I grew up with Fantasy Hero, so a lot of the more complicated features like throwing people through walls, tracking endurance for everything, or exotic powers didn't get in the way like they can in Champions. Once characters were rolled up and approved we barely needed the books for anything during a session.
And don't forget Dark Champions for the vigilante fans. Though in fairness to Josh it was Champions originally, it got turned generic after Champions 3rd edition with Hero System 4th edition being the first of the line in 1990.
I started to play Masks from Powerd by the Apocalypse with my group recently. I can recommend that, if you want to experience a narrative focused super hero story about super hero teens. A bit like Teen Titans. :D
Thanks for that bit of info!
Lifetimer since 2011 here. Still playing quite regularly. This is a very fair video regarding the good and bad things the game has to offer. It is also very frustrating to think about what it COULD have been, had Cryptic learnt to ride the superhero trend wave, when we see what it currently is. But this is a place where we can be anything thanks to one of the best, if not the best, customization system in any MMO. Many of the dedicated players have dozens of alts just for the fun of creating very different characters, powers and appearances wise. And it never feels out of place because this is a superhero game, so you can have ninjas running alerts with cyborgs, aliens, werewolves, mutants, whatever.
Also fun to see one of my ingame friends, Alto the robo kitty, helping you out on the missions.
So yes, game is outdated, left to die in the dust by the people who are supposed to keep it alive and growing, but we still love it. And any new player is welcome. There's a non-official Discord channel to help newcomers. Feel free to give it a try, folks.
In memory of Scott "Thundrax" Bennie.
It was PWE that dropped the ball on the superhero trend. Shame Gearbox has maintained the status quo.
I actually draw my own hero characters and was amazed at how well I could replicate the looks and abilities of those characters in this game.
You mention the fact that Champions Online doesn't use the vertical space in their dungeon design and I'd like to share one of my favorite MMO memories related to that design concept.
In City of Heroes I was playing an Illusion/Kinetics Controller doing some group content in one of the instance missions that takes place in an office building. At one point, our group got separated in an area that had three or four floors all open to each other through a space in the middle. The tank was on a floor in the middle with most of the enemies, the two dps were on different floors with smaller groups of mobs, and I was flying from one floor to the next and back again doing my best to throw out crowd control and healing to keep them all alive. It was exceptionally fun and an experience I have not found in any other MMO to date.
The Qulaar Invasion was actually there from the start. It's just that it's place narratively has changed. Originally you were actually one of the heroes that responded to the invasion proper, but now it's considered a "historic event" that is used as a training scenario for new heroes.
its
Honestly that’s really cool, especially for a game as old as this. I think it fits perfectly for a narrative of superhero mmo as well.
@christurner4873 I'm talking about the second "it's." As in "it's place"
The tutorial invasion was introduced when the closed beta launched, and has undergone several minor changes to all the missions in it.
It was for a time also the only decent source of a couple of Qularr cosmetic drops, but the drops disappeared with the item rework (though I think they were added somewhere else after a while).
Huh, like how FusionFall's future timeline tutorial would be swapped out for an "academy" tutorial, representing how time had passed and everyone had prepared for Lord Fuse's invasion.
Regarding the Power House. It's actually 100% still the main way of leveling by veterans.
There are a few fantastic benefits, such as being able to try your powers/upgrades on holograms.
The main benefit though is that any points you spend on leveling can be freely refunded and reallocated until you leave the Power House.
So it's key for build crafting and experimenting with new powers/upgrades to see if you like them.
Also, most veterans are running freeforms, so we actually have build choices, instead of it just being given, at most, two choices, and told to kick rocks.
@@StarkeRealm I mean, a FF build that just takes an AT and does ALL the choices is usually pretty good. might need a few tweaks, but there's good stuff to use.
I always thought it was a brilliant idea for theorycrafters, being able to try out lots of different things in action, and holding off commitment until you're happy, is truly great.
If you wanted to do City of Heroes for the Worst MMO series it is still going. A group of fans got access to it after it shut down and created City of Heroes: Homecoming. They've even been updating the game since they acquired it and every time I get on to mess around in nostalgia for a while, there're always people playing.
No way! Really? I checked for ways to play it a few years ago and things were looking bleak. Super cool to hear someone picked up the torch!
@@Oddigan Yep! It felt awesome doing a sewer run with people at level 1 again. I cant justify putting any real time into a private server but just being able to relive a bit of City of Heroes was enough for me. Miss it constantly!
@@Oddigan It's true. Finding the downloader is a bit weird, iirc, but Google should be able to get you there. The folks running it have done a lot to improve it for a small team of fans.
its still considered a private server so its unwise to make a video about it. josh for certain wont do a CoH video and shouldn't really..
i saw another that said city of heroes: freedom. or is that original site that is somehow still up?
I played this years ago. You see that Ghostbusters-esque pillar of light shooting into the sky from the top of a building? I flew there once and there are two NPCs named Gatekeeper and Keymaster on the roof! It's actually a Ghostbusters reference. I did not expect to see that in a MMORPG, but it's really cool they did it!
Now I'm just imagining them asking if you're a god. If you say no, you get hit with a knockback. But if you say yes, Legally Distinct Gorr appears as an open world raid boss
@@Veladus That would've been great. I don't know if they did anything with it, because I didn't really play that long. But I could see it being part of a quest later on.
@@skyknight0408 Oh yeah, they totally do. It is the culmination of the entire gang war raging over in Westside. It's the first Big Event you run into in the game these days.
@@xeltanni8999 I see. I didn't ever take parts in any big events in the game, because I was mostly running solo and flew to the next area when I ran out of quests I could beat alone to level up and come back later. Didn't get very far in the snowy region before I stopped playing...
@@skyknight0408 You might consider giving it another shot. I don't have any hard data on this or anything, but it feels like leveling up is much faster and it is very possible to solo the entire base game.
As one of those few remaining dedicated Champions Online players, this was a decent review! I will say that there is a LOT more to the game then just what's shown here. The character customization is even CRAZIER with all the different unlocks you can get and that they are still making more and more of every week! A LOT of the game CAN be earned for free, but there IS definitely a lot of predatory microtransactions available, though none that are really necessary. The Archetypes you can unlock are a good way to get a taste of the game, but the fully customizable Freeform character slots really are the BEST way to experience the game. They were more easily available when subscriptions were still a thing, but you don't HAVE to purchase the expensive Lifetime Membership option, you CAN purchase singular Freeform character slots for $30, which might seem a bit pricey, but it IS a one time purchase that lasts forever instead of a monthly subscription. Leveling up is definitely a slow grindy pain, but there are ways to make it easier if you ask for advice, and the mechanics can be a bit confusing, but the community is always willing to help out and give advice if you ask. The fights can sometimes be a bit repetitive, but the world and the lore and the stories and missions can be great if you give them the chance, and there is TONS of it. So, yes, it is a 14 year old MMO with some bugs and rough edges, but honestly, I've NEVER found a game with better customization in your character design and abilities, and with a Freeform character there is a surprising amount of depth to explore in making your own build. I whole heartedly LOVE this game, and I'll be here until they pry the servers from my cold dead hands.
I loved Champions, not so much for its world or game mechanics but for the greatest custom character designer ever made and a range of freeform powers (and devices!) that had a good go at supporting any daft concept you could imagine. Combined with a great, helpful, chill community that were just there to have fun and run costume competitions.
And then it went free to play and the game basically stopped existing, just people standing around AFK at spawn queuing for the next currency farming instance. If they'd kept an old-school subscription server running like Runescape I'd still be there today.
i played heavly for the first 3 years. i won nearly every costume contest hosted during that time because of the character creator lol
City of Heroes (COH) maybe? Now that was the game back in the day and it is the same company that created this after all.
You are dedicated to an MMO that has a hundred players? That isn't really anything to be proud of
Grown ups don't generally base their love for media on the size of the fanbase.
Oh man. The customization potential in this was actually incredible.
*laughs in WWE Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain*
City of Heroes did it better years before
@@puzzlejinx City of Heroes customisation is just insane. Recently played one of the new fanmade private servers. You can make almost any damn character you want.
@@Dynamo33 hey what is the server called? I'd like to check it out. How populated is it?
Too bad the gameplay really wasn't there. In my opinion city of heroes was incredible. Now that I think about it though I only had a pretty shifty computer to play it on so that probably accounts for a lot of that.
The customization is so limitless that Josh decided to do the most unexpected character *ordinary man*
To be fair, whenever players are given such robust character creators they always go overboard and try and make the most freakish and inhuman abominations possible. So to see someone running around as just a normal guy in a vest and slacks, they end up being the unique one.
@@smward87 honestly yeah, and just think the creator in this isn't even a third of what they had in city of heroes, coh's character creator still legendary as the best character creator ever made for a game.
@@TheMichigami That must be something the CoH remakes are missing then because I recently tried it and the creator is far more limited than CO's is.
Having just started, his costume options were actually quite limited... for CO.
@@ikpts A tiny bit has been done but the fact of the matter is that CO had better costume customization than CoH when that game was still live and has far more options now than it did then. Some CoH fans simply can't accept that reality and make blatantly false claims otherwise.
“Harder than Homelander in a dairy factory.” Never change Josh, never change
I was always a big fan of just taking every ability that gave me a pet and stacking them up as much as possible. The results were an absolutely massive army following me around, so much fun.
Same lol my Diablo 3 build was crazy with all the shit following me😂
I love playing Pikmin in any game I can
I remember when they shut down City of Heroes. Support and devs gave management the middlefinger, and rumors of sourcecode leaked. Players recieving massive reimbursements.
It was an amazing community and devs/GMs and players ran around side by side. Sometimes a new thing needed testing and they would ask if anyone ingame wanted to join the fun.
A one time amazing online gaming experience, never seen since.
It was a sad time
I remember when the devs spawned a bunch of random shit in atlas park. I think one of them turned into a bird.
The source code did get leaked. Google City of Heroes Rebirth or City of Heroes Homecoming. The devs of Rebirth play regularly (I have teamed with two of them that I know of) and they have community managers who do fun things like host costume contests and then spawn a dozen Giant Monsters on the people who gathered for it once the judging is over. (Which is not nearly as trolly as it sounds; it's a fun, chaotic mess. xD)
You can play city of heroes ,there is servers online
City of heroes homecoming is very good. Feels like it did when it was live
Back in the day this game was indeed lit. No limits to what you could make, everyone was creative and helpful, nothing toxic, cool music and effects. Just simply fun. I personally won a costume contest for my power armor/strength build that kinda looked like a Japanese take on Iron Man. My dude even had a cool backstory involving him delivering the power suit, but then having to use it during the initial Qular invasion to help the city win. After that, the suit's a.i. recognized him as the only user, and thus his story was born. Fun times
That backstory sounds a bit like Gizmoduck. nice.
"During the Qularr Invasion." Okay grampa. =P
I did NOT expect that rating. Truly fitting for every critic you said throughtout the whole video while hitting that bittersweet spot, amazing
I seem to remember CO having a really neat feature - Creating a villain nemesis for your character at some level, finding clues to their next caper, and stopping it and arresting said nemesis. Was that taken out or is that a paywalled feature now? Or maybe it's a level 20 thing...
That's still available even for free players. The Nemesis-stuff starts at Level 25.
@@Varsaar loads of fun too!
Though it's been years I'm pretty sure the Nemesis system was both blessed and cursed - they never updated it to be a paywalled feature, but never updated it at all (to my knowledge). I'd be surprised if they did and didn't stuff it with microtransactions.
@@kimi7396 well, you see, you can't add powersets via MT, but any COSTUMES you have unlocked via any means can be used. So yes, MT does affect Nems.
It's a shame there's only a handful of presets to use for them, so it wears out its novelty, but the idea is cool.
"Like a family guy character falling down" What a creative and beautiful description which is also true at the same time. Bravo.
Josh, I absolutely love the way that you never really give a good or a bad review. You just leave it up for the viewer to decide how they feel on their own from what they saw in the video.
It's such a cool way of doing a review, love it. Subscribed!
Watch the fiesta online video
Yeah i was gonna say, Fiesta is definitely and unambiguously *bad*
As a note on your comments about the tutorials you actually got it backwards. The Qulaar invasion was the starting tutorial and they sent you to the powerhouse after you finished it. The voices used to work fine when I played it near launch so I guess something has gone wrong since then. The second tutorial you experienced is newer.
Edit: The powerhouse used to be really important because you used to be able to freely build your character, mixing and matching tons of powers and the powerhouse was where you could test them as you weren't locked into your choices until you left.
You still can do that.
Ah you were a drama teacher! That lines up. Good video as always!
Indeed
Lani Minella is actually most famous for her years spent voicing Nancy Drew in Her Interactive's incredible series of point-and-click mystery games! Unfortunately the Nancy Drew games would seem to be a thing of the past, and if they ever *do* release another they have a different voice actor now anyway, but she was an essential part of the series for quite some time, and what a magnificent series it was.
Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic... betraAAAAYs you!!!"
Lani Minella has a LOT of vidoe game credits, even before her work in Champions Online.
lol, i dont htink anyone else would consider Nancy Drew in a discontinued point n click series a more famous role than Alexstrasza in the biggest longest running MMO ever. no offense to Ms. Drew
The only part of the Nancy Drew series I remember is the part that Game Grumps made a meme about the cowboy that cant hit anything for shit.
Drew Crew!
Regarding the lack of design for flying characters in the dungeons -- it's probably a consequence of flight not being the only travel power in the game. I remember reading reviews of this game near launch which said that super-speed and other ground-based traversal powers were completely inferior to flight, because a lot of the maps were designed with cliffs everywhere. If you couldn't fly, you would often have to spend ages climbing up staircases to get from place to place, and those staircases often contained a lot of mooks standing around the landings to slow you down even more. It's possible that the dungeons were designed so that they wouldn't slow down ground-based characters... at the cost of being incredibly boring for flying characters.
DC Universe online managed to solve that by letting the nonflying character climb walls, probably because Th Flash can just straight run up the side of a building.
While that would probably solve it, the other travel powers include but not limited to, digging underground, chain swinging(just imagine spider man but with chains) bat man grapple hook and cape gliding, parkour and teleporting.
The amount of knowledge Josh seems to have about superhero media is honestly impressive. I didn't know he was into so many things. Good chap, good nerd.
I love the aesthetics of this game. It looks really 2000s ish and it has that calm "mmo game you find randomly" vibe that I just can't explain
I remember at one point you could mix powers from all classes , rather than being locked into a class with predetermined powers. it was probably a premium thing
Freeform characters, yeah. They're still a thing, sort of. You can get them as a lifetime subscriber (and it's the main reason to go lifetime sub IMO), but there's also a thing called Freeform Character Slots which can be used to create a single character with a mix-and-match powerset. The slots're pretty expensive though, but occasionally they're on sale or, very rarely given away; I think I saw one given to every player for Christmas last year for example, IIRC
@@Varsaar .well, im sure we wont be getting any more free of those
yeah, its called freeform, you can either buy a spot or run premium. im a lifetime founder so i just have all my slots freeform, but you can buy them and they go on sale occasionally
Yea only buy lifetime if u gonna play and build toons otherwise it’s a waste
Before free-to-play you could freeform any character no additional purchase required.
As someone who bought Lifetime when this came out, I was looking forward to the day you'd eventually make a video on this. Would've loved to see your thoughts on the world bosses, but guess you didn't get the chance to encounter any. It really is a shame what the monetization did to this game. Started with lockboxes, and never stopped from there. It really was a fun game at some point. The review that mentioned people just pose at the Rec Center isn't wrong at all either.
I loved this game, and it was legitimately fun to make themed heroes- I had a radiation shooting Iron Man rip-off called Iron Curtain with the Arch Nemesis Mecha-Lincoln- I also had a gun hero called the Gunisher.
But when the company running this changed and changed again, my account was basically lost and my cosmetics with it, plus all my heroes.
It was a huge shame- if not for that I think I may have stayed indefinitely.
"Turns out it's harder than Homelander in a dairy factory" is not a sentence I expected to hear today, but I'm still here for it.
Fun fact: There is a Champions tabletop RPG, it's been around since the '80s. The ruleset is currently in its 6th edition with some very fat rulebooks -- and one set of books is specifically in the MMO's setting. It focuses on Millennium City, and the major events in the MMO are considered canon events in the timeline.
Wow, why dont they do better in the mmo and update it?
Oh man! I played this when it launched. The tutorial videos actually weren't in the game back then. The alien invasion was the start and it wasn't a simulation. Overall it was a great intro to the game.
I agree and also don't remember the videos at all. But to be honest, I wish they were there back then, because I remember I struggled to understand all the interface and skill point things.
I remember that opening area so much because I made so many characters based on characters from other games/shows/etc. I think I spent my first 30+ hours making characters, rather than actually playing the game xD
@@TuffMelon this would be me but your now pretty limited on slots for them now so oof
My head cannon is that josh's character just completely forgot to change into his super awesome hero costume and didn't realise the whole time
What if that is his super awesome hero costume.
@@HappyBeezerStudios he runs into a phonebooth classic superman style and comes out in a different vest and shirt
I've always wanted a hero who just doesn't bother with a costume. You go to rob a store and one of the randos checking the beef jerky proceeds to wreck your entire gang, because they're that one hero who doesn't bother with a costume. Someone posts a video to a youtube expy of 'worlds worst bank robbery' and it's that same person who stepped out of line when the robbers came in and thrashed them. That kind of fun angle.
@@kasocool2812 That is wonderful. My new headcanon too. I'll add this: did you know Wolverine once had a secret identity called Patch? He just wore a suit and an eyepatch. After he gave it up, someone remarked "oh good, you quit with that silly patch." He's like "you knew?" "Everyone knew." "Why didn't anyone say anything?" "You know what your reputation is like? No wanted to risk pissing you off." I'm going with this too. Everyone knows he's Josh, but everyone is afraid to say anything and he's blissfully unaware that he's not fooling anyone.
My biggest problem with CO is that Jack Emmert was so bitter about his split from City of Heroes (most of the dev team at the time stayed and renamed to Paragon Studios) that he made an "anonymous" forum account to try and poach players to Champions. He used a ton of the suggestions and wishes the CoH players had in order to craft Champions into a convincing facade of a better game.
Unfortunately for CO, the reason he left CoH was that he wanted to incorporate WoW-like systems into it and no one would allow it. We played CoH specifically because it *wasn't* WoW, so none of us were surprised that CO was stuffed full of gear grinds, auto-attacks, and a combat system that punished you for trying to play it alone with an overly-specialized/concept build.
In my experience, most of the people who play/played CO did not come from the CoH playerbase. The largest CoH private server's population dwarfs CO's active population, too. Sure, CoH is technically "dead" and CO isn't, so I guess Jack "won," but I know which of the two games is better.
CoH Homecoming FTW
I worked at Cryptic Studios a while back, and although Jack had been gone for probably 10 years when I started, he was still legendary for being the most epic asshole anyone had ever met.
@@danieldelavega7605 I have heard stories and that is all. Whispers from people who have met him or worked with him implying he is a gigantic piece of shit and probably on coke.
I had an extremely displeasurable run-in with Jack on the COH forums when he was still the Design lead. I'll never forget what a terrible liar he was when asked if he was putting the game on "a skeleton crew" ... only for every game he's been in charge of since then to have the same exact pattern of abuse
And _this_ is funny because our current head dev, one Julia Sprenz, has repeatedly gone on record stating that CO "wouldn't be dying if it was more like WoW." Unsurprising that each new change to the game punishes non-MMO-trinity gameplay aggressively, and breaks more and more nonmeta playstyles and builds, and she also goes out of her way to make balancing decisions to spite players she doesn't like (like the Anniversary 2022 rework to Force and Auras (as well as under-the-hood changes to pet AI in following weeks) where she bragged about doing it specifically to get rid of Decimatrix, and... you know. Those changes wound up forcing literally every single player in the game to play differently, and introduced a host of new problems like aura fighting that have gone entirely unfixed because fixing them would require admitting making one singular mistake, which our "you're all gaslighting me to make me buff your favorite powers!!!1!" head dev would never do.)
Don't worry though, her prior work experience is (apparently, if she's not talking shit) running a fan-made MLP MMORPG, so she absolutely knows what she's doing more than all the players who quit after she targets them with "balancing" tweaks.
I spent the whole video just praying that by some miracle Josh would run into Knife Dad
I love this series and I'm always eager for the next release. Each chapter you release is a chapter closer to you covering MapleStory and I simply can't wait for that one.
I can't wait for him to choose an explorer, get to level 10 and then be swarmed with event quests on the lightbulb.
Oh man, I've been waiting for this one.
Everyone who played this remembers the customization.
The alien invasion was the original intro at launch. It was laid out slightly different, but all the non-invasion stuff is an after-add. And back at launch I remember having a spider-swing character who used two guns to fight a fake-hulk in a desert and got punched a half mile.
Good times.
Ahh, Grond. I don't miss you.
@@StealthTheFoxz he didn't miss me either. Hence my air-time.
@@Heironeous77 He never does, dodge chance be damned.
I loved all the superhero comparisons, metaphors, and jokes in this review.
The countless digs at other superhero franchises during this playthrough has me laughcrying like I was hired under J. Jonah Jameson for the Daily Bugle
Josh: I need to go undercover, sunglasses will work!
Also Josh: **names his character Josh Strife Hayes**
I actually bought lifetime membership for this game 9+ years ago back when it was in full operation, never regreted it, now i mostly check in with the game once or twice a year to spend the monthly in game store credits that's accumulated to buy some costume pieces or something and just take a quick peek around to see that yep.. nothing is going on the game is dead, it was fun while it lasted and i got some good hours out of the game and its still yet to be beaten customization, but like so many others i am waiting for one of the projects in the works to hopefully pay off so we can get a more modern super hero mmorpg and try and relaunch the genre
“Harder than Homelander in a dairy factory” made me cackle so loud I got looks, I hope you’re proud Josh 😂
I remember i had a character called the puppeteer because everyone in pvp assumed it was a summon build. It was not a summon build it was a mele oriented dps, and the enemies were the puppets he punched.
Not naming your character "Josh Strife Shades" is a tragic missed opportunity
I remember preordering this game. I was such a fan of City of Heroes I wanted to see what their next iteration of a superhero MMO was.
The game hooked me for a while but life got busy. I only came back after free to play went live and saw that some of my already-created characters were now behind paywalls to continue playing because their archetypes we're now also locked.
I refused to play it again after that. Asking me to pay more to play characters I had already created was just the biggest stab in the back for me.
That did hurt, I went through the same thing. We were paying back when we made them though so I kinda get it.
I feel this exactly. I loved the game a lot, and suddenly wasn't allowed to play characters that even had paid cosmetics on them, unless I paid. I stopped playing at that point.
Same thing to me, it sucked so bad having characters i spent time AND currency on being locked unless i paid for the ransom. They could have at least allowed me to turn them into archetypes, or unlock them as freeform for a small fee as an appreciation for the long support, but nope. We were treated like trash.
Havent given them a single cent since
One of my favourite things in your video is to see the Patreon thank you page grow every time, and patiently wait for it to just become an illegible screen 😂
I'd really love to see Josh's take on any of the revived CoH servers. Homecoming, Victory, etc.
Homecoming if you want the officially sanctioned, highest populated server with the most (non costume) content additions.
Rebirth if you want a tone of costume work and a more live approach to most things.
Thunderspy is a bit of a lawless land. I've hardly had good interactions with any of their staff/fans. But they do have some good stuff aswell.
@@SoggySoupyou forgot to mentiom Thunderspy has custom Mastermind pets. Which that alone makes it the best server to play on. Which sucks bc Homecoming is where the pop is now.
The video tutorials are giving me flashbacks to corporate onboarding
Back when I played this, I think the things I liked the most were not being locked in to one specific move set, and the nemesis system.
The Qulaar was actually the original tutorial, with out the part about doing a simulated attack as part of a group initiation. The game actually began with Defender telling you "The Qulaar are attacking!" The video stuff I don't know when they added.
Edit: Flying and the blimp-- back in City of Heroes the main starting zone also had a blimp. Players would fly up to and and land on top if it and ride it around. It was a low poly blimp that only looked good from far away. I guess the decided to go extra on the blimp the second time around since they knew players would go there.
I think they also added the PLATO voiceovers during the invasion, just to make absolutely sure you knew what builders and spenders were.
Videos were added when it went F2P because of people being confused over the early stuff.
Theres a good reason why nobody will revive you in an alert: theres no boss lockout and the loss of stars on respawning is actually negligible and not a real disadvantage. you lose practically nothing by respawning, and can still re enter the boss area. Also many people in those alerts may be lower level and not have picked a rez power yet, even the support characters take a revive late, because it's not needed until endgame. Honestly it would be better design if rez powers didnt exist, and everyone got it by default, without having to spend a point, and just choose an animation.
Thanks for these. One of my favorite series on UA-cam. Ever thought of reviewing a really good mmo in this style? Would love to see you talk about things like training section falloff for a game like FFXIV
The big mmos, like ff14, eso and wow are all going to be covered eventually, there are just a LOT of terrible ones to go!
@@JoshStrifeHayes I honestly hope you cover FFXI at some point. It laid the foundation for XIV but it hasn't aged well unfortunately.
@@BoyahdaIs that even playable? I assumed all the servers were down
@@athormaximoff4634 no it's still very playable. A handful of servers are still going strong.
I mean, it's not like he hasn't already covered good MMOs in the series, just not the big ones.
"What are super stats? Glad you asked!"
I immediately was thinking "I didn't ask."
This game has SO MUCH CONTENT IT NEVER TELLS YOU ABOUT!
Legit after I hit level 40 I thought the game was basically done unsure what else to do, but then people told me that that's when the game actually BEGINS.
And indeed, the time before and after level 40 are like 2 different games. The end-game content is cool and requires teamwork. There are giant bosses that require an effort of like 30+ people to beat and the cycles where it's done are agreed upon in between players, aka you have no way of knowing how and when a cosmic boss will happen unless you ask people about it. Luckily the community is extremely friendly and welcoming for new players, very willing to help out and tell ya the things the game just doesn't.
Controary to the reviews, this game is actually NOT really pay to win as the best end-game content is locked behind currencies you can ONLY get through doing end-game content like cosmic bosses or hard adventure packs. No matter how much you pay you will not get the best gear and the stuff from the premium shops is outright worse compared to what you can only get by grinding, a lot.
The expensive part is getting the most desired "Freeform" character slot. Aka instead of a specific archetype ya choose at first, you can pick a list of ALL abilities in the game and mix match them pretty much however you want. This means that the creative building potential in terms of what character playstyles you can have in this game is astronomical, and of course, complex to understand and of course the game tells you NOTHING about it. You again rely on advice from other players. Getting a slot like that either requires you to be playing at a time when it happened to be given away for free (which happens around once or twice a year), grind a load of questionite and convert it into Zen to buy it, or spend money on Zen to buy it.
Also like you said, a lot of the items from the premium shops are sold on the autction house where ya buy stuff for a regular in-game currency that drops from anywhere, meaning that people who don't spend a penny get access to those items just by playing the game, and those who spend money have a quick and easy boost of wealth.
Some parts of this game are indeed boring and repetetive but some others are extremely fun. So as a guy who was playing since 2022 halloween I would actually reccomend to try it. I didn't spend a penny on it and have no need to. Lockboxes and stuff are a thing but they're basically all cosmetics and when it comes to the realistic power stuff ya can get from them, ya can also buy directly from an auction house, so no need to dabble in those at all. In fact I got multiple characters to lvl 40 before I decided to open my first lockbox :D
Champions Online has a lot of customization, but I always found DCUO to be the more complete and well paced of the 2. I would have loved to see Champions get as continually developed as DCUO though, it certainly had potential.
I just have dcuo to character design and fly around
I want to see a series based on old games that may or may not still be playable. Eg, Gunz: The Duel and anything from BYOND during the mid 2000s, etc
Oh man, I remember playing Gunz, that shit was intense
Holy shit I haven't thought about Gunz in so long... I played the hell out of that game for a while. Playing attack and defense, running shotguns and butterflying all over... What a blast from the past
byond my beloved
@@lithepanther Dude I wonder if we ever shot at eachother before
watching you play this made me realize there aren't enough British superheroes there's Captain Britain, Constantine and that guy from the Elites who I'm pretty sure is the same voice actor as Constantine. I would love to see more.
What about the SpiffingBrit, he can exploit reality itself 😜
Manchester Black? I, uh, wouldn't call him a hero per se...
I actually like when a game that does have paid for items gives you the option to sell it in game because it gives a chance for dedicated not paying players to get it as well. But always better to just not have premium stuff
Well. Never expected to see my old stomping grounds get covered here, glad to see some old faces again (still miss you Piffle, hope you're doing alright). Hell, I still log in at least once a week to make custom characters whenever I can, it's always fun to see just what's possible via the costume pieces I unlocked piecemeal through community events and grinding.
Played this quite a lot back in the day. Sad to see it go down this much. I remember it being fun time making hero ideas you had. I was even in a RP guild for awhile. I think it was fun to create a history for the character and have his situation change. (Updated his armor to the superhero groups colours instead of the one he used before and all that).
It hasn't gone down. In fact it is getting more attention as of late that it had for some time, as they are currently working there way through revamping powersets.
@@kevinarnold8634 I played this like 10+ years ago and you could do so much with splashing different abilities together and making really unique heroes. Good if it is getting better but what I am seeing here is a downgrade from what I remember. Or I am just looking at it with rose-tinted glasses.
I played this game for far too long, almost 8 years haha. Started my big love of RPing on a MMO, and the gameplay was solid until it went free to play and you needed to fork over money just to be allowed to make a build you wanted that wasn't just the set archetype they made for you.
I played this game on release, and for a brief time it was my favourite MMO ever. The character creation alone blew me away. I thought it would be the future of MMO's. I don't remember any of the pay-for-power stuff, but I also remember having a paid subscription for this game, so maybe that was something that changed later, but it has been a long time and I probably don't remember it all clearly.
Something that I wonder may have been removed, because it was a big deal back then, was the travel skill selection. You mention how the level design doesn't really accommodate flying, but back then not every character could fly. You actually had to choose between one of four travel skills: Flight, Super Jump, Super Speed, or Acrobatics which was a 50/50 compromise between Super Speed and Super Jump. It turned out that Super Speed was basically just always the best choice, because traveling faster in an MMO is always good, and you could even basically replicate super jumps by jumping at the right angle with enough momentum.
Speaking of choices, classes weren't so rigidly defined back then either. Every single skill slot was fully customizable. You could mix and match everything to create absolutely any combination of power sets you wanted. I think one of the reviews you read was referring to this.
And yeah, as others have pointed out, the Qularr invasion was actually the original tutorial. All those video tutorials weren't always there.
"It look like a cosplay convention marched through a Pride parade and they ended up teaming up" - best description of anything in all written works throughout history
Ah man. I remember actually playing a game of Champions for 2 sessions where I was a Gun slinging cowboy with a tazer pistol. It shot a lazer that exploded in a stunning explosion at the point of impact, and I had a secret identity, being a scientist during the day. My wife hated my super hero identity.
Thanks Not Strife for another video.
The auto attack looks like the character think fairy god parents are the root behind his troubles.
I played this game around when it first came out, and a couple more times every few years on a whim. The Qularr invasion was there from the start (you were there for the actual invasion, though, not in a simulation). I also remember doing quests to learn the crafting as well. I do not remember those video tutorials at all, so they started with a good tutorial system and then downgraded it later it would seem.
Played the heck out this game before I jumped to dc online only to be extremely disappointed in the character creation compared to champions but I wanted to hang out with batman
Kudos for the comic book related jokes.
Hey Josh, Flare here; the fire shooting vixen from the video that shows up around the 31 minute timeline.
While I occasionally watch your videos, I did not expect to end up in one of it. (Or at least one of my hero characters) YAY, I am famous now... I guess.
However I really did not notice that I was playing in that alert along with you. Those darn sun glases must work better than expected.
Also I appologize to all viewers for the orange flashes that may have caused discomfort while watching the video. But hey, the name is Flare. No false advertising regarding this foxy.
Anyway, there is a thing I wanted to point out:
While you are right about the fact that players barely rez a fallen team-members; it's mostly because most heros don't have a Rez-Power.
Silverplayers are stuck in their progression tree, so only healers will get it and Goldplayer tend to buy powers for "BEEEEG Damage" first. I myself tend to buy the Rez at Level 32 or later.
You are also right about people simply storming ahead.. . it is almost like a typical a WOW- Dungeonrun, just faster.
BUT... VERY BIG BUT(T): it feels a bit off to me to criticize people not rezing you, while you have not one but two self-rez items in your toolbelt ready to go. (Slot 2 and 4)
The really heroic thing would have been to click one of the items, getting up with new vigor (and maybe a lil thirst for vengence) just to slap the Boss in the face some more.
Why should THEY rez you, when you don't even rez yourself while you can?
Sincerly yours,
Lemrethh aka Flare
PS.: Make more of those awesome videos. :)
What's funny: I played this back when it went free-to-play on Steam, and the alien invasion was the original intro-slash-tutorial, they've added those awful videos somewhere in the years since. I have absolutely no idea why they'd do that, the invasion worked really well at the time. The adventure packs used to be pretty much your character getting on a plane and flying elsewheres to fight evil-doers. I put a lot of hours into it, watching goofy movement powers like rolling up into a ball and blasting off, saving the cast of lost, rescuing cats.
You didn't get far enough to get a Nemesis (I think? Maybe they paywalled it or just removed it all 'round)--you get to design your character's arch-rival, give them powers and a backstory and all sorta sorta. They'd then pop up periodically doing evil things that evil people do, starting short questlines. I personally loved that, it gave the whole thing a bit of camp that superhero media often needs--here I am as a hulking supermodel transformed by radioactive champagne, being chased by a grotesque lizard-woman who tried the same thing but didn't have the good fortune.
Yeah. That was one of the better idea's they had.
I was a City of Heroes addict, and when Champions came out I was super excited. Turns out that was a mistake - the thing that I loved best of CoH was teaming up. I could be a healer, I could be a tank, I could be a mastermind, but I always felt better in a group. Champions frowns on that, I think
Like most modern MMOs, the quests and "story" are easily soloable but the dungeons and world bosses are still group content. It isn't much group content, admittedly.
It's also the way CoH scales its content. 8 player teams are pure chaos, with massive mob sizes to mow down, and lots of interesting task forces that fulfil that. I think the only that lets it down is that by end game it's possible to make your hero so OP that several classes feel redundant, outside of the wildest incarnate content
I had exactly the same experience. Cryptic knocked teaming out of the park with CoH, but completely botched it with CO. I think that, more than anything else, killed a game that had a huge uptake on release. People were expecting better-than-CoH, instead they got better-in-parts, except the one crucial area of ease of teaming, where it was much, much worse.
I think the mistake Cryptic made was to try and copy WoW instead of iterate on CoH. By that time, WoW had lost a lot of the reason for teaming up itself, and was was VERY congenial to soloing, and I think Cryptic had hoped that they could do something similar, but they would have needed a ton more resources.
CO doesn't frown on teaming, but like CoH doesn't require it for much of the content. When alerts open up you can team up all day, every day if you want. You also have the option of deliberately playing with other people, by joining a supergroup or teaming up with a friend.
@@kevinarnold8634 Don't get me wrong, you can certainly play teamed up in CO and it's fun, it's just that the whole system in CoH was much better for casual teaming up "out in the wild." I remember leading PUGs that would play on for an hour or 2 or even 3, the same PUG, picking up and dropping members, doing mission after mission, and at the end there would be only like 1 or 2 of the original team.
It was just that easy to team up because that's how the game was set up, both in terms of incentives and in terms of the UI mechanics being easy to use.
CoH was a very social game and I think that was its biggest secret - a way of making social gameplay casual fun, but not in such an impersonal way as sheer drop-in-drop-out events (like in GW2 which did those really well).
I feared this day would come.
For real though, despite it being the Ralph Wiggum of the MMO world, Champions Online is a very sentimental game to me that I've spent thousands of hours in. It is with a heavy heart that I say:
I look forward to you taking it apart. I hope you at least somewhat enjoyed your time in Mirery-
Mireny-
BAH!!
MC.
I always wished I could have gotten into Champions. I was a bit late to the party and the game was already pretty dead. But I enjoyed my brief time there.
Damn, that ending though, that is why I keep rewatching your videos over and over again.
I love your videos, thanks for the upload mr. Josh !
Champions Online is often rough and downright janky, but it's got great customization and it's still around, unlike many other MMOs.
Easily my favorite MMO. With some more support and funding, it could have been truly great.
Edit: As of today, and for the next month, CO is having their 14th Anniversary Event, and you can get a Freeform slot for free, which is a character slot with full customization, where you can use any powers you want. They usually give away a freeform slot every year or so. If the game sounds like something you'd like to try, now is the best time to start.
Hearing the constant superhero references was like mainlining dopamine, thank you Josh
This game was so much fun. I had come up with a build that was basically immortal in PVP. No one could beat me, the only way to escape defeat was to last 20 minutes and draw out. Best part of the build was it was all about the passives you picked. You could make all sorts of heros. I had a samurai cowboy, a bionic man, and a psychic angel that were all very different in looks and attacks but all unkillable do to just 2 passives and how they synergised. Sitting in the city center and dueling people was a blast. Great memories.
I really appreciate this. This was my first MMO. I still remember how much fun i had playing this
I have spent hundreds of hours into this game, a good chunk of that only creating a variety of costumes and different characters. Back in the days, costume contest held by players was pretty popular.
I have so much nostalgia for this game. Aside from Warhammer Online and EVE Online, it was one of my most played MMOs and easily the one I enjoyed creating new characters in the most.
He's never done a video about Warhammer Online, has he? I loved that game. The PvP was awesome, despite never being balanced well.
"I die more often than Gwen Stacey..." Love the consistent comic fan jokes. 10 out of 10
Hello. I’m a streamer that plays this game.
This game has quite alot of potential, and unfortunately with the current dev team for the game, it’s not going to receive any big meaningful updates for a while now.
The combat is… subjective to everyone. The tailoring is amazing.
However, since this is a Small Populated game, any form of drama is significantly magnified in a sense
Nice seeing you here.
costume tailoring is the true end game on this game :X
So many fond memories of this. Could really make some very very custom hero's ended up making most of my heros varients on a small lizard species with gear based on power set. Had so much fun and my main tiny space marine melee tank was so much fun. My alternative lightning tank with yellow crystals spread across various bracers and across his armour to match the lightning colours looked amaizing! Adventure packs were also the most fun I had in the game, great system.
Fun little tidbit, City of Heroes is actually still playable. Since the rights were lifted, some of the old Paragon Studios employees who developed, picked it back up and the servers are functional. Basically all holiday events go on all the time randomly.
Easily the best epiosde of Worst MMO yet. Josh was ON POINT with the script and those superhero puns were superb. RIP this game though I loved it a a kid.
Not RIP yet😛
Oh man, I used to love Champions Online! I ended up dropping something between $200- $300 AUD on this, ENTIRELY on additional costume packs and cosmetics! I had about 6 characters and each of them had multiple costumes, mostly Golden Age/ Silver Age/ Dark Age variants of their original costumes. 😅
Josh will never stop amazing me with the sheer amount of nerd/weeb stuff he's into. From SAO references way back, to warhammer stuff, to now the perfect MHA shout out
Josh, you... are a damned fine theater actor. Thanks for slumming yourself down with us all the time.
It's very kind of you, sir.
This concept is so promising, I would love to see the devs make a sequel with adequate support and just full send this idea