To be more honest, Cryptic refers to it as a "free expansion patch", but that's just semantics. "Revelation" features all new costume pieces, zones, perks, meta-powers, and characters. The focal point of the expansion is Vibora Bay, a seemingly New Orleans inspired city teeming with magics and mystery. Look forward to this content sometime later this month.
Our experience with Cryptic has been kind of scattered. Foe, Joe, and Xenodyne played City of Heroes for a little while, but not on the same scale as our World of Warcraft obsessions. When information for Champions Online began making its way onto the web, Joe and I got pretty excited. The cel-shaded look was distinct and the customization it offered sounded too good to be true at the time.
When Cryptic posted on their blog calling for locals to volunteer for in-house beta testing, I jumped at the chance. A week or so later, I was invited to Cryptic Studios for some serious alone time with their new superhero MMO. Well, that may be exaggerating a bit, the actual testing only took around an hour, and the servers crashed probably about a dozen times in the process. It was a beta though, and the actual open beta began the next day, if memory serves correctly.
The level of customization was amazing, especially compared to other MMOs on the market at the time (or even now, for that matter). For the most part, you would never see characters that looked very similar to other characters. Unless of course you decided to count the billions of characters that ripped off of actual intellectual properties from comic books or movies. If I had a dollar for every "Iron Man" clone I saw on Champions, I would be typing this blog from my diamond-encrusted yacht in the Caribbean while Xenodyne, Foe, and Joe popped expensive bottles of champagne over my naked form.
I really did enjoy Champions Online, for a month or so after the release. The customization offered to players was, to me, a breath of fresh air. Years of playing World of Warcraft and raiding for the right to look like every other Tier-set Mage have conditioned me to like customization in MMOs. That's the main reason I'm so excited for APB.
However, after regenerative powers were nerfed, fighting six or more enemies was no longer possible. Some missions a level or so above you would be impossible to solo unless you had the correct (see: overpowered) powerset. It no longer felt heroic to me. Do I miss leaping large distances as a beefy luchador and uppercutting enemies into the air en masse? Sometimes yes, but I'm not sure if I could ever see myself playing Champions Online again.
As I write this, Joe tells me that the next patch involves a buff to melee-based characters. This is one of the main reasons I quit in the first place, so maybe its time to look at Champions again.
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