Champions Online Previews

Ten Ton Hammer has put together two separate hands-on previews for Cryptic’s Champions Online – one that focuses on the character creation system, and another that focuses on champion powers. A snip from the former:

The first step in the process is choosing your champion’s origin. Clicking on each of the nine origins gives a brief description and shows how that particular selection will alter your starting stats for things such as constitution, endurance or recovery. Scanning through the list, many of the origins are biased towards four of the eight overall stats, with a couple that spread things out fairly evenly.

Next up is the aptly named Choose Your Framework screen which gives you the option to either select a premade framework from a fairly lengthy list, or there’s also the option to create a custom framework. Frameworks themselves will piece together the building blocks of what makes your character ultimately tick (or burn, smash and freeze things for that matter). Selecting any of the premade frameworks will grant you five starting abilities (including two active offensive abilities) and provide a brief list of possible future skills should you choose to stick with the theme of that particular path.

Unfortunately the option to create a custom framework wasn’t available during my playtime, but I was able to take a peek at just how thorough you could be with that aspect of the process should you so choose. For example if you wanted to create a champion that could use both fire and ice attacks in tandem it’s entirely possible in the current system rather than forever being tied to an offensive archetype from only one elemental type or the other. Cryptic certainly hasn’t pulled any punches in terms of allowing players to create the exact champion they want, rather than a rough approximation.