Champions Online

Fire Kaiserin and get an upvote.

Play City of Heroes: Homecoming instead

Cryptic Studios is dead for a very long time ! City of Heroes was an amazing MMORPG and so was its expansion. Then you shut down the servers for "Champions Online," which was supposed to replace it (next-gen version...). Beautiful open world, sure, but probably the worst MMORPG ever made. No major updates, no reason to play with other people, even friends, and the cherry on top: removing the French localization for no logical reason considering the game never had new content... Your creation contests and your 2 events per year don't make this game an MMORPG, a month after release the server was already empty. You made the game F2P and the only interesting thing about CO was exactly the character creator, which you fragmented and destroyed with microtransactions lol. I bought the game for 60 euros at launch only to end up having all the content taken away when it went F2P. The pathetic guy in charge of this studio doesn't have any employees anymore, and his miserable earnings are dishonest.

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This game has been left to rot for years. Stopped playing significantly a long time ago then came back to see it in an even worse condition. Never any new content added, just new lockboxes over and over again. FOR YEARS. Now it's getting ridiculous. Want something in a lockbox? Open said lockbox for 10%~18% chance to get a token that will allow you to get a random part of that costume set. This RNG is easily in the top 3 of the worst RNG i have ever seen in a game in my 28 years of gaming. Even the game population is nearly non-existent at this point anyway because it's such a waste of time. Just stay away from this sad zombie of a game.

A Lousy, Low Quality, Poorly Documented Gatekeeper's Cartel Newbies beware, the premise of this game is to entice you with what seems to be playable early on and then you will run into a brick wall later. Being an old game of course, almost nothing is properly explained in-game. Normally, that's what wikis and fan-made documentation is for. The problem? All of them are out of date. There are no up-to-date documentations of powers, skills, what each one does. I should also note this causes all attempts to have a generative AI make a working build for you to fail. There's no comprehensive documentation in-game, only way is to manually buy skills and then pay to refund them. It's one thing to not have user-friendliness, this game goes out of its way to be user-unfriendly. A well-made game has mechanics that make sense. This one's mechanics are nonsensical, unintuitive, and there's no natural sense of progress or what to do next. The devs don't do anything about this, and the community would rather gatekeep behind "ask the experts" instead of actually having a usable product that isn't loaded with technical debt. Don't be fooled - this one isn't casual-friendly, it's not even user-friendly. AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.

someone alert the world wildlife fund, they're killing all the whales

Nobody is a more OG fan of this than me. I remember in 1993 when the founding dev came to speak at the SJSU RPG club about the new superhero game he was trying to build. That turned into City of Heroes (CoH), the first superhero MMORG. I remember the Mountain View dev office across from Costco. Champions Online was supposed to be CoH 2. I've played both CoH and CO since beta. I originally bought the $250 lifetime CO account the day it dropped. I've spent loads of cash on this since. I once met the devs out back and they gave me a tour of the Los Gatos office. I also met the owners at Menlo Park irl. But I'm done. This once great game full of potential is dead and needs to be released to the player community to resurrect ala CoH Homecoming. The one thing that City of Heroes did right was have a massive "sidekicking" xp rate. This encouraged teaming up and formed an ocean-sized lifelong community. I still text players I met in CoH beta. Meanwhile Champions Online sidekicking xp rates penalize teaming up. That creates servers full of solo players that barely talk. Lately the publisher has stopped all meaningful development and only nerfs CO going forward. Seems they only bought it to keep it in whips and chains in their basement. Champions has a better engine, runs smoother, looks flashier and has "freeform" that allows mixing and matching of powers. But the maps are stuck in Minimal Viable Product mode, the grind is real, and it's pay-to-win now. Cryptic executives, whom I've personally met irl back in Menlo Park were nice once. But the latest owners are pointy-haired slum lords who've never actually played this or any other MMO. They've replaced joy with dead presidents and hate for comic book primary colors in their hearts. Avoid this game going forward unless it is someday released to open source. Meanwhile go play City of Heros Homecoming instead. I'll be back there too. Investors enshittify everything. Regrettably Champions Online is no exception. CoH broke free. CO needs to next.

Game's dead. Go play something else.