Champions Online Preview

Eurogamer goes hands-on with Champions Online.

Before you even get to the action, however, there’s one button in Champions Online that you may never be able to stop mashing: the “randomise” button on the character-creation screen. Cryptic made its name with a character-creation system of unparalleled flexibility and depth on its first superhero MMO, City of Heroes (so much so that Alec wrote us a love letter to it). We expected Champions’ equivalent to be powerful, but nonetheless, what we saw blew us away.

You start by picking your gender and some basic variables – height, body mass, muscle size. Then there’s the more unusual “stance” – a set of poses and animations, from Heroic to Beast, that gives your character some personality and defines how it moves. We pick the crouched, lolloping Beast.