A rather disjointed nights play in COH land last night. For some reason the servers were down for an emergency patch for the start of the evening, probably something to do with the earlier announcement about AE Farms and banning exploits.

Anyway, as the Champions Online beta was open last night I hopped on there for a bit annnddd…..

yuck, OK I started the client in “lowered graphics” mode as I didn’t want to upgrade my drivers last night, but the graphics looked muddy and amateurish.

The character designer was plain confusing, but after muddling through I started the intro mish.

I found problems with the controls, the way that the right and left keys “strafed” sideways rather than turning (for which you have to use the mouse), and also I kept accidentally changing my camera position because I was using the mouse much more than in CoH.

This is probably as it is intended to run on an XBOX as well as a PC.

The UI was cludgy and cartoony – in a bad way, plus most of the screen widgets took up WAAY to much screen space and were rather intrusive.

On the plus side the launcher is good as it downloads and unpacks in parallel (CoH could really do with that), and the fact you can give feedback on the dev arc’s which would be good too.

Mind you this looks very much like work in progress, and I wouldn’t pay money for it (yet)

When you look at he CoH forums, all the p**d off PvPers or kidults who have just had their AE Farms nerfed by the devs seem to be holding out CO as some sort of nirvana. I think they may be sadly disappointed.

As soon as CoH came back online logged on with some relief, and too little used toons ran out Misunderstand (Mind/Emp Troller) and Baron Samedi (Dark/Dark Def).

They only managed one mission, and even then they didn’t finish it, It was CoT and Pumicities, which meant lots of Spectral Followers debuffing every thing in sight, and lots of face planting by our intrepid duo.

Eventually, they had got to to the end only to come across 2 bosses, at which point we gave up…and MisU logged off

Just as BS was finishing a mish to ding 12, Power Jenny popped up apologising for play Champions Online while waiting for CoH to come back online.

Oh well, not a bad evening.