Gabrielle, Warrior Nun

In the course of the Ricknas Sarn interview my co-host, Fran, offered to take up the Champions Online blogging duties for Project Endgrind. Knowing Fran’s penchant for limiting her talent to on air appearances and wrangling soft ware I volunteered to be her “back up blogger” and so began my recent foray into the world of Champions Online.

I will admit that I had a few misgivings before I downloaded and logged on.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised.

Let me say at the outset here that Bill Roper’s influence on the game as Design Director for Cryptic Studios can only be a positive one. Of any issues I may have had with Flagship Studios the last thing would have been the design – I loved the game design for Hellgate London. It’s the business model end of the game I would have done alot differently.

So far, at least, the fears I had about the advent of “Cryptic Bucks” have been allayed by playing the game. I was a bit concerned when I saw “from the developers of City of Heroes” on the back of the box. I played that game for a couple of weeks and didn’t like it. The sole reason, however, was that the combat in City of Heroes made me feel more akin to bar room brawl than superwoman standing tall. The initial tutorial in Champions Online where I had a chance to “save Millenium City” was a lot more fun than the “here’s a rusty sword, go kill those starving wolves” approach that World of Warcraft’s tried and true approach takes. I am glad to see more games (as Fallen Earth does as well) embroil players in a story line right from the start.

A friend of ours, R.W. Harper from “lorewriter.com”, has a fun story going on his web site about his Champions Online superhero named Mactavious – a plain ol’ jeans wearing super hero that wears his mama’s tablecloth for a cape just to try and blend in. R.W. told us on a recent No Prisoner, No Mercy show that the character creation process was like a mini-game by itself. He wasn’t wrong. I could (and did) spend more than an hour just experimenting with all that was available and I just scratched the surface of what was possible. In the end, as you can see, I decided to create my own answer to “Areala, warrior showgirl…er…nun” and Letrange’s warrior nun from Canada who looks more like a truck driver toting around an Uzi submachine gun strapped to a crucifix.

And so was born Gabrielle, Warrior nun: She got bored and traded her ruler for a sword…

Gabrielle, Warrior Nun

I was pleased to find that the approach that Cryptic Studios took to instancing the world allowed the player to choose from among multiple instances populated by other players, rather than the Guild Wars approach (the same approach that Hellgate London chose). The combat was more along the lines of what I expected and the game ran smoothly, even on my lap top computer.

So initial fears allayed, my warrior nun avatar forges ahead into the brave new world designed by Cryptic Studios.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather