Are you looking for a delightful waste time? Then look at Champions Online, it is a fantastically fabulous time waster. What makes this game so great the inquiring mind may ask? It knows it is a waste of time. And let me be clear: self actualization is king. Even in the video game world there is no substitute for knowing oneself.
For those of you out there who remember the first generation of Cryptic Studio’s Super Hero gaming experience, City of Heroes, know that while Millennium City is still there, it was once again destroyed and rebuilt in the story line. Result: Atari gets a brand new city and server configuration, and we don’t have to worry about that whole City of Heroes/City of Villain thing. Champions gets to wipe the board of the rigid architecture of the “City” but gets to keep the back story.
Death penalties, XP debt, rigid character structure, permanent team rolls, and fixed avatar all get blown away. The designers of Champions have given the paying customer maximum value for their buck: a video game with no down time. Fluid character specialization and appearance modification allow the user full dominion over their digital representation in the cyber world. What is the catch? All the player has to invest is time (or pay farmer cash under the table for digital cred). In Champions your Champion has millions of possibilities to fit your needs or style. Do you have a regular gaming crew that would benefit from a division of labor? Are you a loaner that needs to be able to handle it all? Are you a guild member who out logs your mates? No problem. Champions gives you the ability to make 3 tunes for the price of one by having balance options and gear sets that cater to the players needs. Find yourself under or over specialized? No problem. Get over to the trainer and change you powers, traits, or stats. Cryptic has found the winning formula: give the customer freedom to play the game however they like, and then get out of the way.
Champions Online is a big shot of adrenaline into the heart of any comic book junky. What is the purpose of a video game? Is the video game supposed to educate? Is the video game supposed to inform? To instruct? No. The video game is to entertain. It is to flood the brain with high levels of Dopamine; to make the user drunk with the satisfaction of the easy money of quick reward and intense action. For all the blathering the RPG crowd has about “suspension of reality” and “getting in character” the MMO geeks forget the abject reason they log on for in the first place: stimulation.