Champions Online E3 Preview

[GameBanshee News]

The folks at UGO Games Blog are busy churning out more previews from the show floor of E3, and this time they've turned their attention to Cryptic's Champions Online.

The little bit of gameplay we got to see was set in the Southwestern Desert, a large, persistent game zone. More specifically, our heroes – a black-haired psychic with a pink, lightsaber-like energy sword and an armor-wearing techie who probably went to hero school with Iron Man – found themselves in Snake Gulch, a murderous Western-themed amusement park filled with hostile gunslinging robots. The heroes’ goal was to take out ASCII Oakley, which they were able to do once the proper number of baddies were defeated.

Each “neighborhood” in a zone is marked by its own unique character, complete with what our Cryptic reps referred to as “enemy shticks.” These are small nuances which help make an area feel authentic. In Snake Gulch for example, pistol-wielding enemies shoot from their hip like proper gunslingers while lasso-wielding robots happily rope in offending heroes. Downed enemies also drop a variety of boosts, of the health, damage and endurance (which effects power usage) variety, among others.