Champions Online: Free for All
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Meet the Warden, a master of the long sword who uses his super speed and quick precision to protect the innocent and punish the guilty.
Champions Online, spiritual successor to the popular "City of" superhero MMO games, recently went free-to-play in response to dwindling subscription numbers. Champions is the latest in a line of MMOs to convert to the micro-transaction based model which operates under the philosophy that the game itself is an advertisement for the purchasable content.
I've tried many of these free-to-play games, including Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Fly for Fun, Maple Story, Ragnarok Online, Runes of Magic... each seemed rather stifled by the presence of micro-transactions, like I wasn't really enjoying the game to its fullest without paying. But with Champions, maybe its a factor of me really liking superhero stories lately, but I feel like I'm enjoying a full game.
In fact, some of Champions most prominent features, such as the vast character creator, have not been diminished at all by the new model. Rather than force players to purchase equipment from the store that was previously available for free, they've added new equipment in sets - purchase one set, you get the whole bag of goods. They've decreased the number of characters you can have to a measly 2, with additional slots purchasable, but that doesn't prevent you from using the creator and saving hero designs to show off.
There's a lot of specific details I could go into, so if you have any questions, please ask! In the meantime, I highly recommend this game, if not to play, then just for the character creator. That alone makes the download worthwhile, as I'll show you once I start posting my character designs. In the meantime, enjoy the Warden, my primary hero.
Note! I didn't like the gameplay of this game all that much until I started using a gamepad! The tutorial kind of drags a bit in places, but it's no more than an hour of game time. After you do it once, you never have to do it again, and you get your first travel power at level 5, which means you can get around much faster.
Also note that you can have any name you want because your account name is attached to your tells, but your character's name remains prominent. But, names like Batman, Superman, Wolverine, etc, are locked up. I believe Bruce Wayne would be locked, but not Bruce, same with Clark, etc. I think I saw more Flash ripoffs than anything else, with names like Speedster, Barry, and such.
And there's no server choices or Europe-America segregation (I think), thanks to the way the worlds are instanced. Everyone's in one world, yet it doesn't feel crowded.
BY THE WAY, post your characters when you get them. Every account has an account name and a handle - the handle is attached to your character names for distinction with friends lists and such, so provide that as well as your character names.
So far I've just got The Warden @Joshuran
And here's some other pictures of the Warden: