Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

I just spent the better part of two hours hunting down werewolves, undead heroes, and collecting Blood Moon themed loot, and I’ve barely touched all the new shiny things Champions Online’s first major update brings.  And sure enough the entire game is abuzz with talk about where to find this, or how to do that.  It’s not been since launch day that I’ve seen this much chatter going on in game, and it’s a sure sign of why developers spend time and resources on live events like these.  But that’s not what you’re reading this for, right?  You’re stuck at work, or perhaps your subscription has lapsed, and you’re wondering if Blood Moon is all it’s cracked up to be?  Let’s dig into the details.

I was stationed in Snake Gulch last time I logged out of Champions, so imagine my surprise when I logged in to find that dozens of players were running around as werewolves or Van Helsing look-a-likes, offing one another and having a grand old time.  The skies around the entire game are dark, and the Blood Moon has literally risen, setting a perfect tone for the event.  Now, minus the fact that my main character is already a werewolf-esque hero, I decided to help my brethren and join the side of the lycans in the PvP event called Bite!

This is pretty straightforward.  You talk to either the werewolf NPC or the hunter NPC (marked with appropriate icons on your map in Canada, the Desert, or Monster Island), and they’ll give you a talisman and a quest to kill 100 of the opposite side.  You’ll also be given a quest to kill 100 of the NPCs too.  You can switch sides at will by dropping or completing one side’s quests, and they can be repeated daily in order to work towards the perks the event offers.  All I know is it was a lot of fun to have the option to PvP against players in the open world.  Dozens of wolves and hunters running around looking for one another makes the zones come to life in a way that reminds me why City of Villains was such a fantastic expansion to Cryptic’s first game, City of Heroes.

After messing around for a while with this new feature, I decided to head to Millennium City to check out the 13 undead heroes and Takofanes himself.  What I was met with however was a bit of a letdown.  It seems the heroes spawn out of portals around the streets of the city, and once they’re taken down… they don’t respawn again for two hours.  This is going to make getting all 13 in order to unlock the new Celestial powers an exercise in patience, or possibly futility.  I did manage to knock off the hero called Amazing Grace though with the help of many of my fellow heroes.  So just 12 more to go.  As for Takofanes, the undead necromancer himself?  I did not yet see him roaming the streets of Millennium City, but apparently he had just been zooming around before I got there, and several hordes of players managed to take him down. 

Lastly, there were more than a few holiday-themed content updates in this patch that were more than welcome changes to the game.  The helicopter in Millennium City has been marked with a new icon, as have the auction house, the charity vendor, and the action figure vendor around the center of the city.  Every player who has already used their last free retcon got another with today’s patch, though I’ll be saving mine for when I get the Celestial set unlocked, personally.