THE PACK Message Boards

I clued the local game store in as to the fact that CO's been released, and he said he'd try to get it in stock, but so far no joy. I'll probably grab a copy as soon as I can, but I'll likely wind up sitting on it for a while as I'm quitting my job and moving, don't really have much spare time at the moment.

Sadly the feline sets blow chunks. I made Pariah, but that feline head makes her super fugly. Plus you can't have hair, a mane, or any kind of neck ruff with the felines you you end up with this bald monkey head perched on a scrawny neck. Then the feline tail is just awful. It has no fur, it looks like you glued a pool noodle to your butt. It was so bad that I went with a wolf tail for her, but it's way too short. I'm just horribly disappointed with the feline costumes.

Ugly bald, bulbous, grimacing head-


That tail needs to be twice as long-

Well, have to tried notifying the dev team? Last I checked, they were pretty keen on appeasing customers and keeping/attracting subscribers. It's worth a shot, as they might fix it.

Yeah, but the suggestion box is so flooded, my post got lost very quickly. That and anybody who brings up the beast sets gets labeled a furry and automatically dismissed as unimportant. As if we aren't customers too... -_-

I am still thinking of getting this game. I might pick it up on my next paycheck. The crazy character customization is a big plus for me. And hopefully the developers will be able to get the quests fixed as I heard it an be way to easy.

Don't get me wrong, it is definitely a fun game. I have a few gripes, but gameplay is pretty decent.

It doesn't feel as streamlined as CoH yet, but I'm hoping with time it will continue to improve.

as purdy as it looks, I think ill stick to wow, they are getting werewolves too.

I would like to see videos of werewolves or werecreatures of your design from Champions Online on youtube or any way you can. I wanna see how amazing they are!!!

They're OK. I certainly wouldn't call them amazing. More like decent.

Well, that's a matter of opinion Berserker, based upon what one person might like.

I like:

• Tails! Hooray! And well animated tails which have different animations for each state, such as combat, flying, idle, and so on.
• There are claw and bite attack powers, and the ability to summon other Wolves for aid. No need to rely on weapons!
• There are different animation sets available, including one where the character runs on all fours! This really exemplifies the werewolf look.
• Customisation, so you can be 'Just a werewolf,' or you can go far, far beyond that, as far as your imagination will take you.

We all have our likes and dislikes, but these are some of the best werewolves I've seen, and in my opinion they blow everything else away.

I was excited about the Worgen in World of Warcraft, but the lack of a tail, and the lack of being able to run on all fours (even in Darkflight) soon enough brought me under the sway of Champions.

It really is all opinion though, but I dig these werewolves. They're amazing. The felines might not be so hot, the female feline necks need a thickness slider, and the felines all in all could use manes.

The problem with the felines is that they went with a very Silver Age comic book/80's cartoon look for the felines, they remind me of the felines from that one Batman cartoon. Very stylised, but missing bits that make them distinctly feline.

Cryptic tend to be good listeners though, so they may very well do something about that.

As it stands though, the werewolves are bloody perfect and I wouldn't change them for anything.

<Edit>

It's not just the werewolves though, it's everything about Champions Online, especially how camp and cornball it is - which I admit some people might choke on but I'm into that.

Yesterday, in the desert, I was fighting robot cowboys!

Robot cowboys!

And it was one of the best parodies of Westworld (possibly the only parody of Westworld) I've ever seen.

The have everything from lawmen, to ranchers, to preachers there. All under the control of VIPER, an evil organisation which is a parody of Cobra.

And where else might one get to see a werewolf slug it out with a buch of robot cowboys?

Gods, I dig that game.

<Edit Again>

Oh, and I was fighting tanks earlier too. Yes indeed, tanks! Big, futuristic tanks, with zappy lasers! And I was winning! Well, admittedly my latest character had an unfair advantage...

VIPER Tank: AHM CHARGIN MAH LAZOR
Hypnowulf: Silly VIPER~, tanks have drivers. Ha, mind-control success!
VIPER Tank: AHM FIRIN MAH LAZOR... at those guys!
VIPER Grunts: FFFFFFFFFFF

Okay, I'll behave and leave this post alone, now. <.<

Don't get me wrong. It's not the player design that I don't like... I mean you can only do the best you can with the tools available. For what it is the design is great.

I think it is the cel shaded art direction that gets to me. There's just something about it that doesn't seem right... it looks really jagged, almost robotic. They could have taken cel shading a step further to achieve a really great comic book look. Like Team Fortress 2. TF2 isn't traditional cel shading by any means... they take out the hard edges between cells and go for more dynamic shading, which just looks 100% better. I think the cel shading in Champions is outmoded, and the hard clashing lines just don't lend themselves well to a modern gaming engine.

Meh, I'm ok with the outlines if I didn't have such an aliasing problem. I don't know if it's the game itself or just my machine, but it is indeed very jagged.

Two things!

1) You can turn the cel-shaded look off, but since Champions Online is pretty much ... er ... Campions Online, I dig the cel-shaded look.

2) There was a bug with AA that made it not work, this was fixed in the Sep 18 patch. I cranked up AA to full and it completely got rid of the jaggedness of the cel-shading.

It kills my performance, but I don't have a very buff laptop.

I love the cel-shaded look to bits though, it appeals to me, and I can overlook the jaggedness of it because of that.

<Edit>

I'll post back later with a shot of the ultra-camp Hypnowulf, sans cel-shading. Just to illustrate the difference.

Moar pikchers!

Apparently three attachments is the max for a post! So...

Two things again!

I'm sorry about the hand-outstretched thing in combat for both shots, that's my idle energy builder which provides me for power for bigger attacks, it's hard to turn off the UI, take a screenshot, and fight at the same time, I had to just use my endurance builder for the combat shots, I'll try and get a shot of something more powerful in use though. Maybe Ego Storm!

Annnd... about his peculiar shades of green and yellow, his origin tale is that he's an irradiated mutant thing, which fits in with the camp nature of the Champions Universe perfectly. I went with a bit of a comic parody for him just for laughs. A sort of what-if. What if a meta-human with innate hypnotic powers ends up bitten by a bunch of mutated animals and exposed to various kinds of radiation and toxins?

In the real world, death. In a comic book Universe? Ridiculously silly mind-controlling beast guy!

Then again, it's a bit silly to hypothesise about reality in the first place, since our reality doesn't exactly seem to have any meta-humans in it. But you know what I'm getting at!

And time to leave this thread alone again now. <.<

Okay, Shadow asked me to create a werewolf in Champions Online to show him, so I thought I'd show it here, too. I know the proportions are buffed out, but that's because that's what I think Shadow likes (but I might be wrong!).

And the belt buckle? Errr... sorry about that, I simply couldn't resist! I can't help but feel it's criminal for me to create something in Champions Online without at least one mildly camp element to it. <.< So I threw that silly belt on him.

Well, Shadow just had to dare me... <.<

XD

Bwhahaha, that's hilarious.

Should've made his fur pink, too!

Every time I open this thread I'm more and more tempted to get CO.

I've heard some scuttlebutt about how Champions is starting to bomb, with a fair portion of players canceling their subscriptions, as well as things like wacked game balance and general preference towards turning the entire thing into some sort of furry/therian RP game. Can anyone provide additional information?

Wingman wrote:Can anyone provide additional information?

Oh Gods, the Super Bug again. Yeah, Shadow heard about this too and I had to explain it to him, because he's been having no trouble with the game.

The thing is, they swung the nerf bat a little too hard, they realised this and because they're Cryptic and they listen, they planned on lowering the survivability and offensive output of all critters across the board by 3-4~%.

However, that's not quite what happened. What actually happened is that due to a math error, they increased them. Some mobs had offensive boosts of between 3-30~% on sustained powers! It doesn't stop there though, they made another screw up (it's actually all related), where gear below a certain level (15 I think) got lowered in effectiveness by 50-66~% across the board.

Suddenly everyone was a wet paper bag and no one knew why, this bug lead to more cancellations and whining than any other thing Cryptic had done, people left in droves because of it. Even I was scared and aired my thoughts. Cryptic was all "WTF?!" because they thought they'd made the game easier. When the bug was figured out, I have to admit I found it pretty hilarious.

The thing is, when the bug was active, there was this level 18 critter (which was already kind of overpowered, by his nature) I had to kill for a quest, he wiped the floor with me at level 22. I tried eight times to kill him, trying every type of tactic I could think of. I died all eight times! This is because my character is a tank, I rely on defence and low offensive output, his amazing mind allows him to defend as much as any muscly man! But I digress. <.<

His gear/stats are a huge part of his defence too, so the Super Bug hit him so hard. There was loads of discussion about this, but as I said, the bug was found. Cryptic soon put it right, by reverting the bad code (and thus putting everything back to how it was) and then properly implementing a minus 3-4~% to all critters. After that, people were actually feeling more super than before the patch, because the game felt much more like it was in open beta - before they started the nerfs.

Since then, the forums have been abuzz with praise, and the one or two rare threads about the game being hard have been pretty much troll posts (baseless), and anyone who's asking for the game to be made hard is being told to STFU, with the Super Bug as evidence. So things are actually evening out now, and the dust is starting to settle.

---

Oh! I almost forgot...

Wingman wrote:[...] turning the entire thing into some sort of furry/therian RP game.

I know what kind of person you very likely heard that from.

The goons (the Something Awful griefer crowd) are kicking up a fuss because the one and only small area in the game that's intended for socialising is being made a duel-free zone, and the devs are cracking down on the goon-based griefing that goes on there.

Because they're such astoundingly petty people, they're now trying to paint the game as a furry/therian/roleplayer (where roleplayer is furry/therian or not) paradise, just because of this tiny two-room zone. It's really kind of sad. They can do whatever they want in the entirety of the game and all of its massive zones, but they're kicking up a fuss over Club Caprice.

They can't grief any more. Boo hoo. So yeah, that's what that's about. The game is not becoming purely a furry/therian/rolelayer paradise at all, Club Caprice might be, but the rest of the game is as it always was.

As Kruunch might say: I HAZ SUM UB DOSE FREEBEE KEEZ, NOOZ AT ELEBEN!!

I have three buddy keys for Champions Online to give away, along with a link to download the client so that you can get that downloaded and installed before you activate the account.

Priority will go toward those who've shown interest in the game before. It'll net you a fortnight of play time, which may even be enough to get one character to the incredibly awesome Monster Island, which is filled with beastmen, dinosaurs, and is lots of fun!

Even better, there's no expiry date on the buddy keys, so you can save your key for the upcoming Halloween event if you like! That event, called Blood Moon, will add an entirely new zone to the game and focus around the undead, vampires, creatures of hte night, and yes, indeed, werewolves!

If you want a key, post here, the first three to post will get keys. Keep in mind these keys don't work if you already have an account with the game (sorry Shadow!), these keys are intended for people who are entirely new to the game. Also remember that the priority will lean toward those who've expressed interest before, over those who haven't.

And there you have it!

Ooooh, nice. I wondered when they'd start doing demo/trial type things.

I can haz key, please?

I've given Aki his key, there are two keys left! If you want to try romping around in Champions Online as a werewolf, you can try it for free, now! So any other takers?