The Winter Event started again in Champions Online on December 5th, and interested Heroes will find a basic tree in the Renaissance Center. The transformation of Millennium City will continue on December 14th, then on December 24th you’ll find Santa and his presents under the fully decorated tree. The event conclude onDecember 30th at 7:00 AM PST.
Heroes will have to stop Black Harlequin from completing his evil plan of delivering thousands of deadly presents around Millennium City.
That right there is a Batplane, and it can be yours, along with several other permutations, coming soon to Champions Online. This week a new patch is rolling out that can bring you any method of vehicle, from the Batplane, to the Fantasticar bathtub, to the Spider-Car (okay not that, tragically, but still)! With a standard chasis and several permutations (with stats altered by the chasis), there's jets and hovertanks, but there's more planned down the line, like hoverbikes for the Star Wars fan.
PC Gamer has a nice gallery of images of the new jets available, because what else will you get?
Julian "Mirai" Williams
Perfect World Entertainment some time ago bought Cryptic Studios, which put them into a weird place with two games - Champions Online and Star Trek Online - having two separate microtransaction systems. So that's being fixed, replacing Cryptic Points with Zen, allowing both to be used interchangeably. Perfect World Entertainment has the full FAQ there, including explanation behind accepted payment and how Zen will be different from C-Points.
Apparently, some kind of fashion diva Gravita is the leading lady in the new Rampage mode for Champions Online. With her thoroughly unpractical outfit and her gravity manipulation powers, you have to contain her before she breaks out with 9 other heroes. More about Gravita and her ridiculous thigh-high boots are behind the jump!
Big group of stories today for Champions Online, starting with the departure of Rob Overmeyer, Executive Producer, going to other areas in Cryptic Studios. Instead, Brad Stokan will be taking over. Brad's arrival comes with huge teases of the next update, such as more alerts, more events, more specializations, and more mods.
If you're a comic book fan and an artist, this might be for you - Crytpic Studios is running a contest to design a villain. Only five can win the contest, but they will all make appearances in the game. While the grand prize is your baddie at the end of a 10-man raid Alert, four runner ups will be picked for future Alerts. They will likely be bosses, but most likely much less epic encounters. More behind the link!
Those of who you still play the superhero brawler hit from Cryptic have a whole new patch that went live over the weekend - the Alert update, the highly anticipated matchmaking queue to get your tights-and-capes on.
Along with the update came two new currencies. The first is Questionite, which you can net a chunk of daily through completing an Alert as well as several subquests and adventure packs, and can be sold or redeemed to get Power Skins or other top-tier gear. And, as previewed before, Recognition is a type of currency granted merely for playing, and can not be sold, but instead redeemed at vendors for Travel Powers and gear.
A new currency is in the process of being added to Champions Online, one that is gained passively just by playing - recognition.
The currency is used at unique in-game vendors at any time, and it hands out exclusive gear and costumes. The recognition you earn for fighting bad guys goes up with level, from beating up thugs and receiving renown by MCPD, to duking out supervillain slugfests and getting recognition by other champions.
More behind the jump, but this little addition should provide players with a lot more customization when it comes to their champions. The presence of yet another currency with its own exclusive rewards changes the game up substantially, and it's nice to see Cryptic going to town making their MMO more engaging.
If you wanted a fast way to get into the action, look no further - Champions Online has your back.
Currently in public beta testing, the Alert system is a queue that lets you get into superheroics faster than running around the city. The Alerts are broken into groups - there's Grab, which is kidnappings, robberies, and random demands, and usually just fall to escaping petty thieves and criminals trying to make a get away. Smash is a much more brawler style encounter, with a villain and his thugs just asking to get the pulp kicked out of them. And the last is Burst, which is like Smash but with some kind of environmental alteration - maybe it's radioactive waste, maybe it's a magic meteor from space, giving you either buffs or status ailments.
There's more on the site that's worth reading, including your arch nemesis making an appearance!
Seems like the folks over at Champions Online want to give players more customization options, as they've revealed in their new specialization system on the public test servers. This new specialization system will let players invest points into their "specialization tree," which grant special bonuses depending on what points the champion chooses to invest. In total, each "tier" of the specialization tree will only allow 10 specialization points, after which the player is forced to invest his or her points in the next tier of the tree.
This is a fantastic addition to Champion Online, as players have often complained that the game's feeling of progression tends to fall off around level 20 and above. Now, progression points allow players to look forward to specializing their champion even more at the higher levels, while also supporting different play styles in the general population.
You can read the full dev blog post on specializations on the Champions Online website.
