Dirigible of Pain

So Lady Vandermore and I have been playing Champions Online for just about six months now, and both of us enjoy it for much the same reasons.

• We don’t always get to play for long stretches of time.
• We don’t always get to play every day.
• We like being able to finish things when we do play.

I must note, that neither of us have played many MMOs since the days of EQ and Guild Wars. I enjoyed EQ for a while until the grind got to me, and Guild Wars was fun for the two of us until we had explored all that we could and then also lost our copious free time we used to enjoy. We are not MMO’ers in the normal sense.

We got interested in Champions Online for two reasons:

1. We have both played the Champions RPG and Hero System, and we enjoy them both. Though taking days to create a character is long behind us, we have fond memories of it.
2. When we played the Halloween events, it was free!

Since we are waiting for Star Wars: Old Republic to come out, Lady Vandermore thought it would be fun to have Champions Online as a filler game until is came out. It served that purpose well, until we started running out of content. Then we started to get a little tired of it as we had less and less to explore and more and more repetition. We nearly quit except for one reason: our role playing guild.

While the game was still mostly fun, it wasn’t pay every month fun for us. Then Lady Vandermore found our guild. It’s a roleplaying guild as I have mentioned earlier, and since we had already made up characters in our own heads for the characters that we were playing online, joining a roleplaying guild just made sense.

It’s not quite what I miss from tabletop roleplaying, but in some cases it is superior to them. It allows for an evening of roleplaying with the visuals that we always had in our heads (though it’s a little limited on the special effects) and also ends when we need it to, ready to pick up again when we have the time to jump online again.

They’ve recently added some more content, and I’ve explored that as well. It’s been fun to do, but since I have maxed out my level I don’t feel the need to do the quests in the game. In fact, I feel that I should save them in the hopes that they will open up the level cap. So I have a bunch of content waiting for me if I ever get bored with the roleplaying, and hunting down my nemesis in game (the one part of Champions Online that I am still actively pursuing).

It’s been a fun game, and I see us playing it for a while yet. When Star Wars: Old Republic comes out though, I don’t know that it will stay on our list of games to play. Unless of course, the roleplaying is just that darn good. Plus, how can you go wrong with a master villain like Dr. Destroyer who obviously takes after myself. He has such good taste in helms.

Popularity: 71%

So I recently picked up Borderlands. I know, I know, it’s been out for some time now. I’ve been playing Champions Online with Lady Vandermore of late, and while I have wanted to play Borderlands, I didn’t have anyone consistent to play it with and I wanted to play it with a full four players.

So when the latest weekend sale on Steam came out with it for half off, I went on a crusade to find those people. I was able to get three others from one of my face shooting gaming groups to go in on the four pack with me. So all told, it was about $19 each to get the game. Not bad for a nearly new game to share with three friends.

So one of the Overlords, Kris, from The Secret Lair and KJToo.com, and I were the first to fire it up. He had already been playing in single player, since he evidently has faster internet speeds than I do for the Steam downloads. We both jumped into a multiplayer game proceeded along the mini tutorial with the Claptrap robot leading us into town. I was playing the Tank character, and he was playing the Siren, iirc. We had just gotten into town and hadn’t even met the first human NPC yet, when I needed to sign off and do some things in the physical world.

Overall, the experience though brief, was so far shaping up very well. Getting the hang of moving and shooting wasn’t hard since I have played FPSes before. The trick was getting used to the reduced accuracy since I was level 1 and my guns sucked. That would change as I played more.

Later that afternoon, the other two players were able to play and all four of us got together for some good face shooting. Shooting bandits, usually mutated, and skags, creatures that look sort of like dogs with bark for skin, is what you start out doing. We didn’t get very far during our first two sessions, still getting used to the game. Our most recent session has unlocked the vehicles for our use, and those of course for me have become my weapon of choice, running over various mutants and skags.

We’re still playing, and I look forward to our next session. I recommend getting it if you have some friends to play it with, though the leveling and quests can quickly get out of sync if you have a player or two keep playing their group character as a single player. Since the leader of the party is the only one who can select the quests, and if they have already done the quest they can’t do it again, if they out level you and finish quests you haven’t gotten then you are out of luck. That’s so far the only real down side of the game that I have seen. I’d be cool to have more of a free-form leveling mechanic, or at least the ability to redo older quests if you have a character who hasn’t done them in the group.

The game is definitely for me and fits the minorly multiplayer online role playing game niche that I always crave. This game and Left 4 Dead feels really good to me, but Borderlands also fills my need for computer role playing game with a leveling mechanic. If any of my perceptions change, I’ll be sure to let you all know in a future post.

Popularity: 96%