After almost a month of not playing, I decided to fire up Champions Online again. While I find it to be a visually pleasant game, there are some things I find seriously lacking.
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| (lvl 30-35) would be nice. |
First off, I don't quite remember how I did it, but I somehow managed to skip the Crisis zones entirely. For those of you that don't know, the Crisis zones are lower level, scaled down versions of the Desert and Canada zones. Problem is, the game doesn't really make the difference apparent. You walk up to a helicoptor or jet and are given a choice between Crisis in Canada, or Canadian Wilderness. And having skipped over the Crisis entirely, I found this a bit confusing about which one I should go to and why. A simple indication of appropriate level range for the zone in the selection menu would help with this.
Now call me spoiled, but LOTRO has gotten me used to having a large quest log with 40+ slots. This gives me the freedom to explore a few different zones without worrying about the annoying "Quest Log Full" message popping up. CO limits you to 15, and I'm always filling it up. I think it's all the years I played WoW that trained me to be cautious about dropping a quest because I can't quite remember if the quest I'm dropping is in the middle of a chain. As a result, I have like 3-4 quests in each area that I'm afraid to drop when I run out of room. I think an indicator or warning that a quest is part of a chain would be a nice addition, along with a larger amount of quest slots.
While I'm still talking about quests, another thing I find extremely annoying is that the quest tracker in CO doesn't adapt to the current zone. Here, I'm on Monster Island and the quest tracker is wasting my screen space showing quests in the Canadian Wilderness. See how the Monster Island quests don't even show up on the tracker!
The only way to make the quests relevant to the zone move to the top of the list is to manually make them priority, which also makes that large arrow appear over the player. While that arrow may be needed for the impatient crowd, it may not be everyone's cup of tea. And while that one quest went to the top, the other Monster Island quests are still nowhere to be found.
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| Just press this button and: |
A good solution to this mess would be to have an intelligent quest tracker like the one in LOTRO. With the press of a button, the tracker organizes the quests based on their proximity to the player.
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| Poof! Quests organized by proximity. |
The player can further toggle which quests should be shown on the tracker by selecting an icon next to it in the quest log. Notice how the quests with a ring next to them are the quests shown in the tracker.
That's all for now!
