The game's look has come a long way in the last year.
In other words, the basic interface and controls in Champions operate and feel like those in most MMOs you may have played. One interesting aspect that reminded me of my very brief experience with Cryptic's last comic book-themed MMO, City of Heroes, was an auto-attack ability (in this case, a basic ice blast) bound to the first ability slot. Toggling this ability on would make my character attack the targeted enemy repeatedly, which in turn filled up a special meter below my character's health bar. Once that meter was full, it activated some of my stronger and snazzier powers mapped further down the ability bar.
What I saw of the PVP setup in Champions was fully consensual. You activate it by hitting the PVP icon on your interface, which pops up a browser that searches and lists all the currently open PVP matches. Then you hop into one of those--which seem to be instanced, since you get a loading screen and are then transported to an arena separate from the game world--and start laying it down against other players. A Cryptic rep told me some of these PVP matches would tie into quest storylines and requirements, though you're also free to just jump in and start blasting characters on the other faction to relieve stress if you want.
The company also released a wealth of new media showing off Champions' PVP aspect; take a look at this trailer for a better idea of how this stuff is going to work.
ps. this game is looking the best it has looked yet.
Not to start any war here, but APB's characters and art-style is miles ahead, at least to me.
Artisticaly, this game looks soooooo much like CoH. Which isn't surprising since it's the same developer but you'd think they'd try to differenciate themselves from that OTHER super hero MMO.
I guess it just lacks a serious tone. I mean come on... A superhero shooting arrows? This isn't the 1960s.
Global Agenda looks pretty awesome as well.
I also wonder how they're going to police copycats who can't come up with original heroes...
Thing is, HOW can a company sue another company for the latter's having tools that make these sorts of things possible? It reminds me of Little Big Planet getting all kinds of guff for its user-generated content.
It's a bit BS to me. I guess the legal justification is that if you have a toolset which allows a person to create an umpteenth Mario clone, you are somehow culpable for allowing the copyrighted results of this toolset to be put out there for everyone to download, as you're getting money for this service. Supposedly they think that someone would buy Little Big Planet just because some random dude made a Gradius level (which was epic, by the way).
I guess with superhero makers it's a bit different, because someone apparently DID subscribe to a game like CoH just so they could make some lame Wolverine knock-off, so CoH is profiting from someone's obsession with a property that CoH doesn't have the rights to.
Still, feels like the same thing as suing a paint program to me. I think people who design these creative tools need to get a bigger backbone (and a bigger legal fund) or they're always going to be run over in these legal gray areas, which could stifle the more creative stuff, even when it's protected speech (in the States), like satire.