I hadn’t even really thought about the fact that Champions Online has been out for 15 years now until I saw the anniversary post yesterday, but it shouldn’t really surprise me. The game was something I was covering after its launch rush back when I first started working at Massively-that-was, and ironically it was my enthusiasm for the game pre-launch that actually inspired me to apply to the site and try to leverage my writing for a job.
This made it very funny that the first beta for the game drove me away from it, but I have never claimed to be perfect at predicting the future.
The thing is that CO is an odd case for a game that’s been running this long. The game isn’t dead, as it still gets some very minor sputters of new content, but it has spent a frankly astonishingly long time in that state. Major updates petered out for the game ages ago. So how and why did this happen? Because if you listened to the hype before the game came out, this was going to be the new superhero MMORPG to take the crown from City of Heroes back in the day… and a lot of the reasons it didn’t do that are symptoms, not causes.
Let’s start with the obvious. There are two things that I see cited a lot as reasons behind the failure of CO to catch on. The first is that the game at launch was a bit of a technical clownshow, and the beta definitely was. And don’t get me wrong – I experienced a form of the game during the beta that barely ran, so I can definitely speak to that.
The second is that CO had a box price, a subscription fee, and a cash shop. This in and of itself is something that was not normalized at the time, but even more important was the fact that the cash shop had not just cosmetic sets but also things like respecs. Since the game’s freeform character system introduced significant risk into the building process, you would quickly find you really need those respecs, and that felt… not great! Like logging into the game and being afraid you’d screw up your character.
But here’s the thing: From my perspective, neither of these things was really what made the game a problem. They were bad, but if the game had been good, people would have overlooked them. And it wasn’t.
The thing about building a freeform character in any game is that it’s really easy to wind up with unplayable trash if you don’t know what you’re doing. This is as true in tabletop games as it is anywhere else; it’s why most games place constraints on power horizontally as well as vertically. You can still screw it up, but the goal is always to make it as difficult as possible for a player to make something hideously overpowered or hideously underpowered, or accidentally go into a D&D adventure with someone who can pass every skill check but dies to a stiff breeze.
It’s even more of a problem when you are dealing with a brand-new system where you don’t know how things work, and this goes basically triple for a super-hero game. Lots of superhero media makes even simple powers seem really, really awesome, and it’s easy to either overload on the wrong kinds of powers or misunderstand what you’re building, what sort of resources you need, and so forth.
All of this would probably be more acceptable if the game had taken inspiration from CoH in its most persistent aspect, but… it didn’t. The hidden reality of CoH that isn’t even very hidden is that for 90% of the game, any given group can perform about as well as any other. No tanks? That’s fine. No pure healers? Barely matters. There’s only a handful of content that really requires specific roles, and there are lots of people who can fulfill those roles.
CO was very clearly built with an eye toward the way that World of Warcraft built its gearing and gameplay loop (which might sound bizarre now, but in 2009, even with Cataclysm stinking up the joint, it felt like the arc for that game was the formula). It was, to be fair, clearer and more straightforward than CoH’s Enhancement system. It also didn’t matter because the people who wanted that style of gameplay were already playing a game. That game was WoW. People who came to CO wanted something else, and with the well-intentioned but messy freeform character creation…
Looking at it this way, I think it really seems like a no-brainer that the game wasn’t going to have the kind of legs its designers intended. It was too like CoH for the crowd that the designers were initially targeting and not like CoH enough for the actual superhero MMORPG fans. And I also think it’s worth noting that Cryptic did wind up getting another big license shortly thereafter, and that very quickly eclipsed anything and everything that CO had in the tank anyway.
But here’s the part where I pull the rug out: It’s kind of a shame because at this point, CO is actually a pretty cool game. Or the starting point of one.
Changes were made to freeform generation over time, more systems were added over time, and by the time that CO started quietly slipping into being the kid that Cryptic very occasionally sends a birthday card to with a $5 bill inside, it had developed into something closer to what the game had been promising at launch. The problem was more that it took so long to get there, and it didn’t have the long tail of development to get re-invested. By that point, Cryptic was onto other things and didn’t want to really press a bunch of resources into the title.
But it’s still an interesting game. Resources are out there for building your freeform character. Heck, through September 26th (2024), the studio is letting people claim a freeform slot for free (and they normally cost like $20). I’m not saying it’s the best value you will ever see for the experience, but if you like superhero games, it’s not a bad tour to see what could have been.
My focus this year when it comes to superhero MMORPGs has been City of Heroes for obvious reasons. That game went away, and then it came back, and the fact is that even coming back to it has reminded me of how well several parts of it aged. (And how poorly other parts have… you know how it is.) But a part of me is always going to have a soft spot for CO. It showed up at the same time I started writing about this industry. It never really got its full engine going. It’s messy and it isn’t perfect, and it probably could have used another couple of months to cook at least… but what couldn’t?
So here’s to you 15 years on, CO. You really could have been something. But at least you weren’t nothing, and sometimes the participation trophy means something after all. Not often, but sometimes.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti covering superhero MMORPGs, past, present, and future! Come along on patrol as Into the Super-verse avenges the night and saves the world… one column at a time.
