Thread: Champions online

Anyone done some reading into this game?
It looks pretty awesome. I played the dice and paper champions/hero system and it is VERY open ended. The rule book is a text book, you can make any oddball set of powers you want. As a long time fan of city of heroes, Champions online looks very solid. Its got all the good things in CoH and all the things I suggested on their forums seems to have some how made it to champions. The game offers a much more dynamic character editor than CoH. The editor goes so deep to customize power colors and there has been talk about customizing shapes of powers as well. And if any of you have played CoH you know that it is possible to be defeated by the character editor. I have not made it past picking the color/pattern of my spandex before. Well most of my time is in the character editor.
At any rate, Champions online talks of a game mechanic where you build up power with your attacks and then spend the power on some awesome super move. And causes you to think tactically about your power usage.
And here is another thing, THERE ARE NO CLASSES! Thats right no classes! You are not a 'tank' a 'mage'or a 'healer' you are a hero and every hero is unique in their power sets and career paths that YOU pick. They say they have a system to balance the powers, I am interested in how they will implement this. This is how CoH was originally designed and I see that Cryptic Studios is working to keep that original dream alive.
Another big thing is the item system. You can toggle the visibility of any item. sort of like the 'show my helm' in most fantasy games, but this goes for all items you pick up. you design your costume and if thats all you want to look like you never have to wear rag-tag pieces of armor that don't match. Or maybe you just pick up some awesome looking gloves and they look good with your costume so you show them off.

There has been a lot of talk about the counter on their main page
http://www.champions-online.com/frontpage
I am not sure what it is for but a friend of mine made an observation that the background art is concept art for startrek online. I am not sure if the items are related but its worth looking into.

Champions online will own. Cryptic ftw. :4