I had almost forgotten about the Champions Online F2P launch today. My MMO fire has all but died out in the wake of my Minecraft discovery and the joys of playing jungle Nasus in League of Legends. I was browsing the Minecraft subreddit, though, and found a post that reminded me of the release. I jumped on Steam to sign up for the new service and download the client.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to download the client from Steam. All you get is an executable file that then downloads the necessary files. I pulled the executable from the official website and started my download. Minutes later, my internet connection was all but crippled, but I was only pulling files from Cryptic at 16 kB/s. Yes, 16.

I’ll probably queue the client to download overnight, but that doesn’t make my day one experience any better. The free-to-play model is based on the idea that your user experience is good enough that people will want to pay for more content. So far, I’m not feeling great about Champions.

I’m glad to see Cryptic adding in-game events so early. Holidays and other festivals were some of my favorite world events in WoW, aside from the really events surrounding expansions. The announcement page for Blood Moon has some interesting warnings – don’t get bit by werewolves or die to zombies or you become part of the horde. I wonder if that’s only temporary or if it’s a permanent change to your hero.

The new content also adds the celestial powerset, which can be used to damage enemies or heal and buff allies depending which way you go.

All in all, I’d say it sounds cool, but I haven’t played the game. Have any of you? Is it worth buying?