Champions Online - Preview @ Gamespy

A hands on preview of Champions Online at IGN takes a look at character creation, Dr. Destroyer and the creation of an arch nemisis.

I cut my tour of the tutorial short to jump into one of Champions' group-based instances -- the end of a midlevel story arc in which your team of supers puts an end to Millennium City arch-villain Dr. Destroyer's mech lab. Design Director Bill Roper (who you may remember from his career at Blizzard and his own well-intentioned-yet-doomed excursion into the MMO space with 2007's Hellgate: London) and a team of developers rallied around my juiced-up Dr. Gadget -- no relation to the animated inspector -- for a five-man storming of the bad doctor's facility. A succession of location-based quests (including an interesting cooperative puzzle mission that saw us successively shutting down each wing of a robot-manufacturing machine) gave way to an all-out battle with Dr. Destroyer and one of his gigantic automatons. As in City of Heroes, drawn-out boss are chaotic, a color-wheel of ray guns and fireballs exploding across the screen until someone's life bar is empty.