Experience Points: Champions Online – Part 4: Costume Creator

This entry is part 4 of 9 in the series Experience Points

Something universally agreed upon in regards to Champions Online is just how good the costume creator is. While you cannot exactly make anything you want, most concepts translate very well into the game. The creator sports around 3000 regular pieces, another 400 gold pieces, dozens of C-Store sets and a lot of unlockables. Cosmetic items are often worth much more than most items that affect actual gameplay or stats.

It is not without its limitations, though. As with anything that’s good, the more time you spend with it, the more obvious the flaws become. A lot of pieces can’t be used in conjuction with others, like long gloves with sleeves, beast heads with headwear and stuff like that. This can be frustrating at times but, despite that, it’s one of the best character creators I’ve seen in gaming.

Obviously, there’s little point in me explaining how well costume creator works. Instead, I’m gonna show you.

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CO player Melkathi has done a mighty fine job of making a costume creator tutorial and you should watch it before delving deeper into the article, if only to get an idea of what the actual process looks like.

To prove my previous claim of most concepts translating well into the game, I decided to use They Fight Crime! as my inspiration:

He’s a notorious guitar-strumming vampire hunter on the run. She’s a time-travelling punk safe cracker who dreams of becoming Elvis. They fight crime!

Easy enough, right?

And I’m sure others would have done a much better job than me (especially on the vampire hunter).

However, it doesn’t stop there. Both of these characters have fairly normal proportions. What about making Mighty Glaciers?

Or small characters…

This is something that I love about Champions Online. You can always make a truly unique character without “gear” getting in the way of appearance.

I think you get the idea by now. The costume creator is a big part of the game, hence why there are so many player-run contests with various prizes (either in-game money, vanity pets or costume pieces). It really depends on who’s running the contest, but most of them are divided into categories like Best Dark Hero, Best Classic Hero and so on.

There are even GM-run contests, most of them just for fun. There was one with a pretty neat prize, though. Cryptic was looking for a hero best suited to fight a giant monster in an urban setting. The winner, Duratok, became a sidekick device in the C-Store:

My character totally should have won instead!

Thank you, Geisha-Deconstruct and Nocens for providing some nice screenshots!

Part 1: Past and Present

Part 2: Gold and Silver

Part 3: C-Store

Part 4: Costume Creator

Part 5: Nemesis System

Part 6: Adventure Packs

Part 7: Endgame

Part 8: PvP

Part 9: Community and Communication

Experience Points is where we get to talk a bit more in-depth on games we are much more knowledgeable of through extensive playing. It’s not as much of a review as it’s our experience with the game in question

Experience Points

By Miodrag Kovačević