With
a final lightning bolt of gamma-powered energy, you feel a sense
of utter victory as your hated nemesis falls before you. After so many
conflicts, your nemesis will pay the price for his misdeeds and spend
the rest of his life in jail. As the moments pass and you reflect upon
your many duels, you begin to wonder, what happens now? Well, what does
happen after you finally defeat your first nemesis in Champions Online?
What kind of rewards can you expect from their defeat and where do you
go from here? Plus, was the nemesis system worth using in Champions
Online? How were the missions? Was it fun? Well, no need to get your
spandex tights in a bunch, my friends, for we’ll examine the
aftermath of defeating your first nemesis and an overall evaluation of
the
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/co/guides/nemesisbasics">nemesis
system.
Rewards
First, let’s take a look at what rewards you’ll
have earned from defeating your first nemesis. By the time you put your
nemesis away, you should have around 300 nemesis tokens. These 300
tokens will buy you…not much, sad to say. Basically,
you’ll have two choices to spend your points on. Your first
choice is to buy some action figures. There are a large number of
action figures to choose from with costs of 25, 250, and 1000 nemesis
tokens. As some addicts have said, you can’t have too many
action figures! Your second choice is to buy an upgrade (offense,
defense, or utility). Sadly, you’ll only be able to buy one
as that the cost of an upgrade is either 250 tokens or 1000 tokens. The
250 token upgrades have roughly a bonus of 26 points spread across 2 or
3 stats and two 6.5 bonuses to defense (such as physical and energy).
There’s some more bad news though. All of the upgrades
require you to be level 40 to use them, so it’ll probably be
awhile before you’re able to take advantage of these upgrades.
On a smaller scale, you will have earned some perk points by defeating
the henchmen of your nemesis. You gain 10 perk points for defeating 10
henchmen, 25 perk points for defeating 100, and 50 perk points for
defeating 1000. As normal, you can use the perk points to buy action
figures or costume pieces.
What’s
Next?
After you defeat your first nemesis, what happens next? Well, that is
up to you. You can immediately create another nemesis if you wish, and
I would heartily recommend you do so. After creating your nemesis, make
sure you go talk to Defender, who is found in Renaissance Center.
You’re supposed to get an in-game email from him when you
create a new nemesis, but sometimes it takes awhile to pop up.
He’ll give you a mission. The only other option besides
creating a new nemesis
is to not create one. Personally, I think that
you should create one right away so you can start getting more nemesis
tokens. Plus, the nemesis system is the one thing that makes CO
different from other MMOGs, so not taking advantage of it is idiotic,
in my opinion.
However, don’t think that you’ll never see your
first nemesis again. They will make another appearance when you take
part in the newest lair, Nemesis Confrontation.
Impressions
My overall impression of the nemesis system is a positive one. There
are some things that could be improved, but I think the system is well
done. Let’s examine the pros and cons of the nemesis system.
First, having your own personal villain is a huge bonus.
You’ll be fighting a bad guy that no one else has. That being
said, there are only 3 archetypes (maniac, mastermind, and savage) to
choose from and that colors the missions that can pop up and their
dialogue. I had created a villain, Blood Dragon, who was the leader of
an order of oriental assassins. I figured he was smart, but ruthless,
so I chose mastermind. What I got was a version of a mad scientist
building death rays. Not really the same as my character concept.
However, I do understand that Cryptic has to do general archetypes to
cover the widest range of villains, so I’m not too upset with
that. They can’t have a thousand specific versions of the
mental makeup of a villain to please all the players. They’d
have to lock up a hundred developers in a room for months to get all
that done!
The second aspect of the nemesis system is the randomness. This is a
good and bad thing. You don’t know when the minions of your
nemesis will pop up and attack you. A lot of times, it’ll be
at a very bad time. I’ve had them show up while
I’ve been fighting Mega-Terak, which did not bode well for
me! These unexpected attacks add some spice to your leveling. Being
attacked by my nemesis’ minions always brought a smile to me
face, except for the Mega-Terak situation. However, this randomness is
also a detriment when you’re trying to get a drop for another
nemesis mission. After the first few missions, the time between mission
clues seems to be about six hours. I was leveling my main pretty fast,
and I was going crazy for mission clues as that I was a few levels
ahead of the missions. Besides, I’m not
the most patient person.
The missions for the nemesis arc are a mixed bag. There are some well
done instances, but a lot of the missions have you only fighting the
henchmen of your nemesis or some hired gun of a supervillain. I would
have preferred to have seen more of my nemesis during the various
missions. I wanted to fight him again and again, only to have him
escape at the last second. That would have fueled my desire to crush
him once and for all, and would have sweetened the final victory over
him at the end. I would recommend to Cryptic that they add some
missions in which your nemesis is featured more.
I must talk briefly about the final mission in the nemesis arc,
Deathray Demolition. Overall, this was a nicely done mission that was
broken down into various chapters.
style="font-weight: bold;">NOTE – SPOILERS
AHEAD. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to
read any spoilers. As I
stated before, my concept for my nemesis was not the rule-the-world mad
scientist type, but the volcano lair with the deathray in it was darn
cool. Basically, you have to destroy the generators to the deathray,
defeat some lava creatures (of course there are lava creatures living
inside the volcano!), free a couple of trapped heroes to help you, free
some scientists, and then overload the deathray. I have to admit that
the chatter from Rocket Hawk (the other hero is Lady Rocket Hawk) was
extremely funny. Basically, his character is the extremely arrogant
hero who is close to escaping or defeating some villain, just before
you free them or defeat the villain yourself. That being said, they are
extremely useful and their rockets that they shoot pack quite a punch!
After you destroy the deathray, you’ll fight your nemesis.
When he’s almost defeated, he’ll run away and
unleash a giant lava creature upon you. Now, there has been a bug where
a maniac nemesis will not activate the next cutscene, but according to
the official forums, that problem has just been fixed. You’ll
fight the lava creature until he frees himself from the control of your
nemesis, then you’ll fight your nemesis until he’s
almost defeated again. At that point, he’ll retake control of
the lava creature, and you’ll go back and forth between the
lava creature and your nemesis a few times. After that,
you’ll chase your nemesis through the tunnels until you reach
a chamber where the escape rocket is located. There, you’ll
have your final showdown. Overall, the mission was well done and had an
epic feel to it. While not fitting into my nemesis concept, I can live
with it. It was a fitting end of a long conflict between good (you) and
evil (your nemesis).
Once you have defeated your first nemesis, I would recommend you create
another right away. You’ll have an ok amount of nemesis
tokens, but you should probably hang onto them as that you
can’t use the upgrades until you hit level 40. Overall, the
nemesis system is the best feature of Champions Online. It could use
some tweaking in that your nemesis should show up more often and
perhaps some other awards (such as costume unlocks) would help. Having
something that I could use right away would have been nice as that it
does kind of suck realizing that there’s nothing worth buying
for at least 2+ levels. Having an item that I could use at my level
when I turned in the final mission would have been nice. However, all
those objections aside, I like the nemesis system in Champions Online a
great deal. It is the jewel in CO’s crown and well worth
playing.
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