Pumping Irony

Warning: Spoilers contained within!

Cryptic’s Champions Online team launched their first Comic Series yesterday, which will be weekly episodic installments of story-based content similar to what the Star Trek Online has been doing for their Featured Episodes.

Series 1 is entitled Aftershock, and Issue #1 is Dead Air, and is apparently a follow-up of sorts to the Serpent’s Lantern Adventure Pack, which I have not played yet. The Comic Series is scalable for any character at least level 11, and also scales based on number of people in your team.

The official teaser for Dead Air reads:

Something has gone horribly wrong in North Africa. Camp Lantern, the UNTIL base created to sift through the wreckage of the Temple of Nama, has gone dark. All attempts to contact the camp have failed. Scouts sent into the area have not reported back. It’s up to the heroes to investigate the ruins of the camp and determine what became of the garrison.

I played Aftershock using my main (freeform) hero, Drayvin, who is level 19. He begins by speaking to UNTIL Liason Bradley who is next to Defender in the Renaissance Center (Ren Cen) of Millenium City, who tells us to head to the UNTIL building where we hop a transport to Africa. A cut-scene shows the transport landing near an UNTIL camp that has been decimated. UNTIL soldiers lie dead all over and everything in the camp is destroyed. We’re told over a hundred soldiers were stationed here, yet less than a dozen bodies are found. We search the camp for clues as to what caused the destruction and hopefully the whereabouts of the other UNTIL soldiers.

While searching for clues, suddenly mortars begin raining down on the camp! This makes getting a few of the clues interesting while you try to stay out of the mortar’s target area (there’s also a blast radius outside the target reticule where you can still be damaged and knocked down). VIPER has sent mortar teams to take out the UNTIL camp — and you! — so we have to locate the mortar teams and their spotters.

After searching the humid jungle for all the VIPER mortar and spotter teams surrounding the camp, Drayvin heads to Camp Lantern to eliminate the final VIPER teams. Another cut-scene shows Golden Nest Leader ordering his men to seal a door. We don’t know why or what is inside, but they seal some of their own men inside as well, so it can’t be good!

There are four teams of VIPER henchmen, then the team that includes Golden Nest Leader, who is a villain, and finally an enforcer-level mini-boss Draysha in the center of the fort. Draysha is placed far enough away from the other groups that I thought I could just fight him. Nope! He called the other VIPER teams still in the fort for assistance and they readily handed Drayvin his ass on a silver platter. Next time we came back, we circled the fort and eliminated all the VIPER teams before engaging Draysha.

After defeating Draysha, we’re supposed to close the fort’s gate. Captain Urqhart provides us with a security code to override the fort’s defense system so we head to each corner of the fort to turn on the turret defense systems before VIPER Air Cavalry units arrive. I wouldn’t say this sequence is a “tower defense” mini-game per se but we can choose to leave the turrets on automatic where they will target any enemy nearby and fire away, or we can assume manual control and set a single target for all turrets to fire on. In manual mode, once an enemy is defeated the turrets will not select another target on their own. One bonus to manual mode is we can have the turrets enter repair mode whereas in automatic they will never repair themselves. There are a total of 12 VIPER Air Cav teams (3 or 4 per team) and all are villain-level so this entire sequence can get tricky at times. I’ve done it three times now, it went silky-smooth once, another time there were a handful of touch-and-go moments, and the third time the VIPER Air Cav teams destroyed a couple turrets so I had multiple groups converging on Drayvin and the remaining turrets. That was a helluva fight and Drayvin suffered several defeats. After eliminating the VIPER Air Cavalry, another cut-scene shows armored vehicles approaching the fort with Ripper — apparently a popular villain from the Champions IP? — leading the charge.

Love the UNTIL soldier bound to Ripper’s vehicle! This looks like Big Trouble for Drayvin but Captain Urqhart sends in a fighter jet who bombs Ripper’s location. Ripper himself survives, albeit heavily damaged, but all his VIPER reinforcements were killed in the blasts. Ripper runs to the fort and beats down the gate Drayvin closed earlier and challenges us to battle! Ripper is a legendary-level boss so he’s no pushover. He has several very strong attacks and I spent so much time blocking and recovering from a few defeats that the NPC’s (Captain Urqhart sends in some UNTIL Air Cav teams to assist us) ended up doing more damage than Drayvin. The “problem” with this is that in Champions Online the loot is distributed to whomever does the most damage (that’s the easy way of saying it, anyway; there’s more to it than just that) so in this case, since the NPC’s did more damage (and this was true all three times I played through Dead Air) Drayvin did not get the boss’ loot drop. This is apparently an issue anytime there’s an encounter where the heroes also have NPC support and something the developers are still working on a solution for.

After defeating Ripper, Captain Urqhart lands his transport and congratulates Drayvin then a final cut-scene begins, centered on the communications terminal behind us, which is next to the door that Golden Nest Leader sealed earlier. UNTIL’s Major Fuloni Okonkwo calls for help; she and 20 of her men are trapped in the basement. We hear the sound of gunfire and screams. Major Okonkwo says they’re being attacked by their own men!

With that cliffhanger, Dead Air comes to an end — to be continued in Issue 2!

I also posted the full Issue 1 in screenshot format as a Picasa gallery if you want scenes of the story in the order they occur, including some cut-scenes.

All in all, I really enjoyed Dead Air. I’d never been to that zone since I haven’t played the Serpent’s Lantern Adventure Pack yet, so that alone was a cool experience. Some of the fights were challenging and I enjoyed searching for clues at the beginning (probably because I’m also engrossed with L.A. Noire at the moment) and the Issue did manage to exude a feeling of tenseness. There are a few glitches with the cut-scenes still. On the first play-through where Ripper drives up, his vehicle was not rendered so he’s just floating in mid-air and the UNTIL soldier was tied to nothing, which really confused me until my second play-through where that part went fine. Both second and third play-through only the final cut-scene glitched where once Major Okonkwo begins talking, the communications terminal disappeared. And of course, the NPC’s “stealing” the boss loot was disappointing and was the main reason I played it three times, thinking it was a glitch until I finally learned it is an ongoing problem in the game with NPC’s helping players during boss fights. But just like I love Star Trek Online‘s Feature Episodes, I enjoyed this first Comic Series as well. It’s not often we get full-blown story-oriented game play in MMOs but for all their other faults, Cryptic’s games are able to pull off story content in a way nearly on par with single- or multi-player games and eliminating a good deal of the “MMO tedium” we see even in Lord of the Rings Online‘s Epic Book stories with hours of traveling and mundane tasks separating the few bits of story.

Sign me up for Issue 2 and beyond!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Champions Online, MMO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.