A Week of Champions Online, part 2

Wednesday
After managing to create a character I am mostly happy with, it's off to the tutorial. I am gladdened by the fact that one of the keybind selections is "Paragon", meaning I don't need to re-learn 5 years of City of Heroes habits.

The very first thing I do make sure that the exceedingly-fugly "black comic book outline" option is disabled. In light of my earlier comments regarding preference to line art over color shading, I interpret this as sarcasm on the game's part: "You want lines? Here, have a thick black outline! It'll make everything look like a Colorform!"

There are a few things I notice upon login. One is how quiet it is in terms of in-game chatter. Sure, there are lots of explosions and sirens and sound effects -- heck, the loading screen was an aerial view of the tutorial zone, complete with over-the-top voice acting -- but in terms of player chatter, this is the quietest MMO I've ever played.

The second thing I notice is that I really like the clock just below the in-game map. No, it's not showing game time, it's showing your actual time based upon whatever zone you're in. I find this impressive and useful, if not a bit frightening in the implication that I need a tangible reminder of what time it is in order to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Normally at this point I'd be taking the piss out of the inane tutorial missions ("This is how you attack! This is how you block!" I'm surprised there isn't a "This is how you use your inventory" mission, and they convey the lesson through dialog instead), but Shamus Young over at Twenty Sided has done a remarkable job of this, and at great length. Since I am lazy and by no means a professional reviewer, I'm going to take the easy out and just link to his review instead of actually doing it myself.

After leaving the tutorial, you might think you are ready to enter the game proper. This is understandable, yet utterly incorrect, because you are now shunted to one of two slightly larger and more complicated tutorial zones, Project Greenskin in the American Southwest (think Hulkbusters) and Steelhead Station in Canada. You'd think this last would be a Weapon X thing, right? You'd be wrong. It's a Great White North thing, filled with McKenzie Brothers references, lots of "eh?" and "hoser" dialog, and at least one "aboot" hiding somewhere. At its best, it reminded me of old Alpha Flight issues where Shaman and Snowbird would fight the Great Beasts, but those moments of flavor were few and far between. The rest of the time, you might as well have been in Montana for all of the regional flavor. But in this first instance, I chose Greenskin, which in this case is a military complex that is under assault what appear to be radioactive hillbillies from the 1950s. (Don't ask.)

After exiting the first tutorial, I am now level five, and I am informed that I've gained a variety of powers and should make my way to the Powerhouse for training. Fortunately for me, there is a teleporter to the Powerhouse right on the helipad.

The Powerhouse is another concept that CO gets right. It's a zone unto itself, and when you go there you can pick your powers from several trainers, and then you can go to various "danger rooms" to try them out. The elegance of this system is that your powers aren't locked into place until you exit the Powerhouse, meaning that you can test-drive whichever powers you want to try out without having to commit to one without adequate knowledge and possibly gimping yourself. This is one of the best ideas I've ever heard, and I hope the next version of City of Heroes makes use of this concept.

Another very sweet thing is that you get your travel power at level 5, and there's a choice selection of them. In addition to the typical flight, superspeed, leaping, and teleportation (which is so much better than its COH counterpart that it's not even funny) there are all sorts of other ones, like Swinging and Hover Disks and Ice Slides and Tunneling.

Freshly powered up, I exit the Powerhouse, only to have my ass kicked multiple times as I try to find the damn starting contact. Apparently, if I had immediately ran forward when I first entered the zone, I would have noticed the flashing elevator which indicates an interactive object, but (like most new players, I imagine) was far more interested in getting my new abilities, and now I am constantly being defeated by toothless, radioactive hicks in overalls as I try to understand why I can't find the contact when goddammit the map says I'm right on top of it! Ironically, the contact was actually right on top of me -- in the level above me, actually.

Frustrated and tired, I log off and go to bed. When I return to the game later that day, I find the elevator right off, so it's entirely possible my tiredness earlier was making it harder for me to find the contact than it truly was. Still, I feel that if I had been told to meet my contact and then train up, a lot of pain could have been avoided.

One more gripe about the CO costume editor

I couldn't fit this into last night's rant because I was having difficulty capturing the body sliders in a screenshot. Sadly, I still can't take a picture of them, so you just have to take me at my word on this:

The body sliders for women are ridiculous.

The default setting for a female avatar in Champions Online has the following characteristics: Six feet tall; breasts cranked to maximum size; in the Vixen pose, which consists of cocked hips and out-thrust chest. This is so ridiculously uncomfortable-looking that it's not even funny. Once again, I levy my "Greg Land" accusation at the character builder, because the only time you will ever see a woman in this pose is when she's modeling.

For the record? The other poses available are Heroic (legs shoulder-width apart, hands at side, looking relaxed), Average (standing pretty normally, one foot slightly in front of the other), and Beast (kneeling crouch).

There are also 8 pre-selected body types for women: Acrobat, Beast, Brawler, Brick, Slim, Stretchy, Strong, and Vixen. This last pose, to no one's surprise, has maximum boobage. Okay, no problem. But what about the others? Strong rates a 15 out of 20; Stretchy has 20 out of 20 (same as Vixen), and so does Slim for fuck's sake; surprisingly, Brick rates only a 16, and Brawler actually manages to be the smallest with a still very healthy-looking 10. Beast is a 14, and Acrobat -- a gymnast, for crying out loud, and we all know how goddamn stacked a gymnast is -- is a fulsome 17 out of 20.

Now, let's look at the men. Is there a "package" slider? No. What's their default pose? Heroic, of course. They also have Average and Beast, and a Huge pose (legs wide, shoulders hunched, arms hanging loose and slightly forward -- I think it looks more like a caveman than anything else).

Now let me be absolutely clear on this this: I don't object to boob sliders or Vixen poses. (This is a trope of the superhero genre, after all). What I object to are these being the default settings for women, while men default to being heroic. (Sadly, this is also a trope of the superhero genre.)

In the name of gender equality, CO should not have its women default to being large-boobed vixens. We are heroes, not whores, thank you very much.

And for the love of Dr. Manhattan, let's give the boys a crotch slider. It's only fair. ;)

A Week of Champions Online

Unbeknown to you, dear readers, for the past week I have been playing a 14-day free trial of Champions Online. Today, for your game-playing benefit and reading pleasure, I shall give you a review of said game.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that:

1. I have been playing City of Heroes (i.e. that other superhero MMO) since summer 2004, which has no doubt spoiled me rotten;
2. I'm one of those folks who thinks that the best thing to ever happen to COH was when Jack Emmert -- the former head developer of COH -- left to manage CO instead;
3. I have played the Pen and Paper version of Champions for many years.

And now, on with the show.


Monday
After an afternoon wasted at the courthouse, I decide it's time for some justice, Palette-style, and that I really should give CO the benefit of the doubt and try it myself before declaring it to be ugly and stupid and awful like I'm already certain it will be, based upon fugly screenshots and the fact that Jack Emmert, the MMO Antichrist, is its head developer. (NOTE: I am biased.)

First I download the client and install the game while I eat supper. This takes about as long as you'd think, so no points off there. Then, however, begins the harrowing adventure of Getting the Damn Thing to Work. You would think it would be a simple matter of entering the trial code and starting the game, but you would be wrong. After going through the exceedingly tedious registration process -- I wasn't taking notes, but I swear this had 3-5 more steps than any other MMO I've ever played -- I close my browser, fire the game up, and...

... have to download and apply multi-gigabyte patch for the next hour or so. No, I am not exaggerating that amount, it is at least an hour to download and apply a patch for a game that is a month and a half old, and I have cable internet with decent bandwidth.

Disgusted, I realize that Double XP Weekend on City of Heroes has been extended to Monday to take advantage of the holiday, and I quite happily play that until I go to bed.


Tuesday
The game is finally operational! I gleefully anticipate making my favorite COH character, Kenku, in CO. Now I realize full well that this cannot be a direct port due to differences in how powers are designed and animated, and how costumes are drawn, but I expect that I should be able to craft a good approximation of "Japanese martial artist with defensive darkness powers in a black and silver/gray costume with bird motif."

An hour later, I am ready to log off in disgust, and I haven't even started playing the damn game.

Okay, look, this next bit is going to be completely and utterly subjective, so just bear with me, all right? I tried to be fair, and it's just not gonna happen.

Here's the good part: I like that there are a lot of options, and costume pieces have at least three textures (cloth, leather, metal), and that you can have up to 4 colors per piece. I also like that you can easily shuffle the colors around so you can do that optometrist trick of "better, or worse?" when deciding which shades to put where. I also like how you can lock things so that they don't accidentally get changed, and the ability to have capes, wings, and even backpacks at level 1 is fantastic.

And that, my friends, is the ONLY good part of the character creation system. Sure, you get tons of sliders so that you can customize every aspect of your avatar's face and body, but Sweet Buttery Eris, you're gonna need them to make a face that doesn't look like complete and utter ass. Here, take a look:


Now I realize that tastes vary, and some of you folks may like what you see. In that case, more power to you. What I see here is "a western artist who is not Adam Warren is trying to draw in the manga style and failing miserably." Huge eyes. Tiny nose. Incredibly large lips? I'm telling you guys, with the exception of the ear slider cranked all the way up, that's pretty close to the default setting right there, and the standard options they give you don't really change your appearance an awful lot. And good fucking luck trying to make a face that looks vaguely Asian. (I managed it by shrinking her lips and then picking the "determined" expression, which gave her a squinty look. Combined with a domino mask and pupil-less eyes, it kinda works.)

The other problem is that everything is done with shading instead of line art. If you read comics today, you're probably aware of how some features (like muscle definition) are done by color separation and not by the penciller or inker, and that's how Champions Online does its art. Some people like that, and that's fine, but I can't stand the look. I prefer crisp, clean line art. I also prefer faces that look human and not cartoonish.

And that's the real crux of my argument here. The art in City of Heroes is comic book; the art of Champions Online is cartoon. (See Seamus Young's series of posts here about why the writers of CO are taking a similar, "who-gives-a-shit-this-is-Super-Friends" approach to adventure plots. And don't get me started on the BAM!, POW!, or FREEM! sfx balloons which appear over an NPC's head when he's about to hit you with a large attack.)

Let me illustrate this point with a compare-and-contrast. Here is a City of Heroes character:



And here is the same character as rendered by Champions Online:



Here, I'll do it again with another character. City of Heroes:



And Champions Online:


I tell you, it's like the difference between Jim Aparo and Greg Land.


Coming next: I gripe about gameplay.

WNW: Court

Continuing the general judicial theme of this week...




Link.

Palette Returns From Court

Well, that was 4 hours of my life wasted. I suppose I should be grateful that yesterday was a holiday or else I'd have lost the entire morning as well!

To be plain, I'd like to point out that I have no inherent objection to jury duty. In fact, I was rather looking forward to it, since as a freelance writer with no current deadlines I quite literally have no better place to be, and I'm fascinated by process in general. As a fan of CSI I was quite looking forward to using my skills, honed from 10 seasons' worth of viewing, to bring justice to the deserving.

Instead, I sat on my arse for 4 hours in a windowless, beige room. No electronics of any kind, just me and a book and 120 other people. By the end of it all, there were 20 of us who never got called at all -- the highlight of my day was when I thought they would need me, but it turned out that a surprise witness had come forward and the lawyers had filed for a continuance to question said witness.

Me, with a bunch of people I didn't know, most of whom were older than I; in a stuffy room; on unpleasant seats; sitting awkwardly in silence; resisting the growing, gnawing urge to shout "FUCK!" at the top of my lungs.

So, rather like church in that regard.

Palette Goes to Court

Sounds scandalous, doesn't it? I wish I could say this was the dramatic culmination of an illicit love triangle between myself, the lieutenant governor, and an aardvark, which resulted in a murder-suicide when the details were leaked to the press, and now I, the sole survivor of our star-crossed love, must now testify. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Unfortunately, I've only been called to jury duty.

The really annoying thing about this is that I can guarantee with near 100% confidence I will be excused from serving. The same thing happened two years ago, when I last was called to be a juror. Apparently, defense attorneys tend not to like it when you say that you know many of the sheriff's deputies personally, either having gone to school with them or them being friends of the family.

So anyways, that's the rest of my day shot. I hope the rest of you have a great Columbus Day and I'll see you tomorrow!

Arse Not Found

Once again, I'm late in updating this blog. But this time I have a good excuse!

I can't be arsed to update.

For those of you non-proficient with British slang, it doesn't mean I have no arse. Oh, heavens no. Were that it were so! It is a dream of mine to be, as the French say, sans arse.

The opposite of sans arse is con arse, which is Spanish for "chili with meat." And my chili is very meaty. Very, very meaty. My chili brings all the boys to the yard... and gives them gas. Which is very sexy, I think you'll agree.



As an aside, I think someone should invent a font titled Sans Arse. I would totally use it for everything. And then when I missed a deadline, I could say "Sorry I'm late, but it's my font's fault. It couldn't be arsed."

So in conclusion:

• I have an arse
• I can't be arsed
• Profit!