tl:dr alright game, lots of customization aside from how you look. They stole a lot of ideas but incorporated it differently. Story does not live up to the preview for the game.
The Steam installation bug was corrected. I have not really run into any other bugs, aside from the chat system sucking and I am currently downloading an 11 gig patch. I hope they are patching chat.
The game: I am still at the beginning. It is hard to get a good idea of MMOs before you figure out how the game works. I have only done a few quests, so my opinion of it is going to be limited to the character creation and what I have encountered in my small amount of play time.
My character moves around a bit like Spiderman, only with no webs, and has ice powers. He hits people with a big ass hammer, and he has glass looking skin. I chose glass skin because you do not have many options when it comes how your characters look. You basically get to pick sex, hair, skin, color and size.
There are pretty sweet power builds in my opinion; you can do a lot of different things with it. You get a powers rotation going with six available power related abilities, the rest have to be shelved for later... (An idea stolen from Guild Wars, but I think think the idea of actually having to roll out of something, instead of having a percentage of hits on you blocked makes the game more
actiony). You have thousands of options for ability combinations depending on what you specialize in, and you also have a physical damage rotation which is done with combos on the mouse.
The story is a bit weak so far. After seeing the trailer they created for it, I was assuming it would have been a bit better thought out. But yeah... come to think of it, you cant really make 1 million super heroes at once and have an origin that makes sense. I think they could have improved the game if you could have had some input on your origin. Basically powers of several different heroes and villains were stolen and dispersed, you created a character and that was your origin. You were a normal guy, and you got one of these things that give you abilities.
So far I have only played on hero side. I have made one with a personality like Batman and one like Superman. There are 10 or more abilities (I do not remember them all, and I have not tried many of them), and you can combine those with 10 or more fighting styles. Then you choose your method of transportation. There is flying, acrobatics (like Spiderman) and super-speed. I think my next one will be a super-speed, mind powers, daggers assassin, with the personality of Batman.
You can create an endless number of possibilities; I think this is the game's strongest point.
They stole this concept from City of Heroes; I can't really fault them for that. I think it would be really hard to come out with a completely new MMO, but I definitely consider this one revolutionary, albeit, a bit cartoony.
I am pretty sure it is the first MMO action game. Not an RPG in the traditional sense. It plays like an action game. It feels more real time, and less like you are standing there exchanging hits. Though, there is a bit of that. They do not have a tank and a healer and some guys damaging. Since there is raiding done by large groups they still have to have roles though. However, there is no person just sitting back healing, staring at health bars. If a player has a super power that can allow the healing of other players, in order to have enough energy for their powers, they have to be kicking ass. Every role does damage.
Aion and Warhammer touched on that a bit, but their game play was carbon copied from World of Warcraft and EverQuest. It is time for something new, give me a few days and I will tell you if this game is it.
(This is a guest blog by my friend and writer, Shain Kirby. You can follow him on twitter @shainkirby )
