Overview
DC Universe Online, launching on PC and PS3, offers itself as the opportunity to be a superhero or supervillain in the DC world, fighting alongside and against the likes of Batman, Superman, Lex Luthor, The Joker, et al. Does it deliver?
To make it clear from the beginning, this is not an MMORPG but, rather, an MMOAG; Massively Multiplayer Online Action Game. Many of the standard MMORPG conventions are here-leveling, gaining new abilities as you level, quests and loot drops. The combat, which naturally makes up the vast majority of your game time, is a completely different animal however. The easiest comparison would be to console action games, such as God of War or Prototype. Click the mouse or controller button and you melee attack (I'll be using mouse terms from here on out as that's what I use but the game is completely playable on either a PS or XBox controller). Right click and you make a ranged attack. Various series of left clicks and right clicks activate different combos, all taking place at full action game speed as enemies (and you) get flung about, knocked down and get sent tumbling by explosions. The MMORPG 'whack-a-mole' bar does make an appearance as the means to fire off your various superpowers. It's limited to six powers on the bar, however, and once your character has gained more than six powers you'll need to pick and choose to set up your bar how you want it. Each character has a second 'stance', changing from the standard DPS stance into a tank stance, controller stance or healer stance, depending on their base power set. These stances each offer their own power bar that can be set up differently than the character's standard DPS bar. Most of these powers can be used repeatedly, as long as you have the energy to do so. Some of the more powerful ones, however, do have cool down timers, or require expenditure of "supercharge" energy which can only be gained, slowly, through non-superpowered attacks.
The game is primarily set in the two main DC cities, Metropolis and Gotham. Both cities are bound to make DC fans happy. Metropolis is bright, sunny and futuristic with gleaming skyscrapers and chirping birds. Gotham, on the other hand, is dark and brooding, misty and gothic. Many of the locations one would expect to find make an appearance. Centennial park with its giant memorial from the death of Superman (no worries, he got better), Arkham Asylum, Lexcorp Tower, S.T.A.R. Labs, Waynetech, etc. Gotham even features Crime Alley, a fresh bouquet of red roses lying under a flickering streetlight behind a theater. Heroes can retreat from the city to The Watchtower, the Justice League's massive space-station. Villains have the Hall of Doom in its underwater hiding place. The game world is bursting with obscure references for DC fans to pick up on, from the obvious major and minor characters standing around to the more obscure such as "Nora's Frozen Treats' in Gotham.
In addition to the cities the Alert missions (small group "dungeons" and high level raids) are set in other DC hotspots such as Smallville, Area 51, Oolong Island and even the Moon. The size of the DC Universe allows plenty of opportunity for locales, the initial game having barely scratched the surface of potential locations.
The level cap is 30 and is reachable in about 30 hours of play. The design concept is that the 1-30 play represents your character's "heroic journey" from a schlub with brand new powers to a full fledged hero/villain. Once you hit 30 you're part of the big leagues. Leveling is a pretty speedy process, designed to allow casual players the chance to get to the end game with relative ease.
The graphics are sleek and pretty, as one might expect. Animations are fluid and the draw-distance is generally pretty impressive. There is an impressive array of voice talent portraying the major characters, with Mark Hamill once more stepping in for the Joker, Gina Torres as Wonder Woman, Wil Wheaton as Robin, James Marsters as Lex Luthor, etc.
Character Creation
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| Crimson Queen and Nightwing take down Bane |
The design reason behind this has several aspects (apart from microtransaction dollar signs). One is the previously mentioned 'heroic journey'. An example cited was Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, starting his crimefighting career in a tactical vest and ski mask. Then he progressed from that to the Batsuit. If you look at the many, many variations of Batman's look over his history it plays right in to the concept of your character starting with a 'simple' version of how they will come to look by the time they've hit their full stride.
The other aspect is that in CoH/V and CO, once you've designed your character, that's pretty much it. Sure you can futz around with your costume later but you're still working with what you had at initial creation. In a game such as WoW, however, you have next to zero options at creation and part of the fun of character advancement is gaining new, cooler looking gear until, by top level, you look like a spiky armor plated death machine. DC's system aims for this same appeal, allowing you to make your character's look better and better as you progress in power.
Whether you find those design ideas compatible with what you want from a superhero game is entirely up to you. Even with the loot gained, a level 30 character has far fewer options for their look than DC's competitors have at initial creation. Will you be able to make a cool and unique looking character with DC's character creator? Yes. Will your character look cooler when they hit 30 with the new gear you've obtained? Yes. Will your character look exactly how you want them too? Probably not. Can you live with that? Up to you.
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| As an example of a character's look evolving over time, here's Crimson Queen at level 30 |
Interface
The User Interface is another place that DCUO receives some criticism, at least from the PC crowd. Much of this is from dealing with the limited options presented by launching on the PS3. Even when scaled all the way down, interface screens take up pretty much all screen real estate when open and shut down other aspects of the interface. Want to tell your group the stats on that rare piece of loot you just got? Well, you open up the inventory and your chat box disappears. No click-drag for you! Discussing what mission to do next? Open your journal and again, your chat box is now gone, forcing you to constantly flip back and forth to have any meaningful communication. This is alleviated somewhat by the built in voice chat but if you're not using that, for whatever reason, it gets pretty tedious. Additionally, UI elements can not be moved around, the mini-map can't be zoomed in or out and my expectation is that Interface mods are unlikely to be allowed.
Addendum: See last paragraph of conclusion.
Content
And here comes hit number three. Content is king. The content that DCUO has is quite good. Mission arcs are generally comprised of four or five open-world missions, culminating in an instance that will have you teaming up with one of the major characters to go toe to toe with another major character. These instances are where the game shines. Rather than an instance Boss simply having umpteen million hit points requiring you to stand there and bash on him for half an hour while popping heals as necessary, all of the instance bosses are done "raid style", causing you to have to deal with scripted events and survive various stages of the fight. In a villain fight against Supergirl, for instance, I had to distract her from using consoles to free metahuman experiment subjects by setting their stasis tubes on fire. Once she hurried to their rescue with her frost breath I proceeded to jump in and destroy the console to prevent her from freeing them. If I failed to do this in time and allowed her to free metahumans then I had them to contend with as I continued trying to thwart her efforts.
The catch is that while the content is engaging and fun there isn't nearly enough of it. There's plenty to get you from 1-30 but once you've hit 30 with a character then you've seen the majority of the leveling content the game has to offer. There's even a fair amount of direct crossover, the same instances and missions being recycled for both sides. As a hero you do a series of quests against venom addicted thugs at Batman's behest, culminating in teaming up with Nightwing to take down Bane. As a villain, you'll get to do the exact same quests for The Joker, teaming up against Bane with Killer Croc at the end. Sure, the reasons are slightly different and, as a hero you might be defending the police against the street trash whereas a villain will be defending the street trash against the police but the mission play is fundamentally identical. Here, the speed with which you can reach 30 becomes a detriment as starting a new character will have you doing the same stuff pretty quickly after you did it the first time.
Once you hit level 30 the game changes and not necessarily for the better. Apart from the Alerts, 1-30 is entirely soloable. In fact, the game doesn't scale instances for a group so if you do team up then you will absolutely blow through the content. Once you get to 30, the solo content utterly and completely ends. End-gameplay currently consists of aimlessly cruising the cities, looking for collectibles while waiting for your instance queue to pop. There is certainly a decent variety of Alerts and Raids to do at level 30 but DC offers no innovation here. You do the missions to gain tokens which you save up to buy a piece of gear that will make you slightly better at doing the same missions over and over to collect more tokens for yet another piece of gear. It's the same formula we've seen in pretty much every other MMO, so, if it works for you, great. If not, however, it simply becomes a giant hamster wheel once you've done all of the end game content 2 or 3 times. SOE promises monthly updates and larger quarterly updates as well as the inevitable paid expansions. Will these content updates primarily be microtransaction gear or will there be a continual stream of new content added both for leveling and end-game? We'll see.
Addendum: See last paragraph of conclusion.
PvP
I haven't much to say here, as I've done very little of it. At the current stage of Beta, no one ever seems to sign up for the PvP arenas on the PvE server and the PvP server offers no reward for fighting other players other than the fun of doing so. At the moment PvP is faction based but entirely open other than that. My PvP server experience got old fairly quickly as there were a few level 30s lurking near the newbie mission areas, apparently for the sole purpose of preventing them from completing any of the missions. I did get to experience the fun of blasting one of them with a stun effect about 75 stories in the air and watching him fall into the distance but the novelty of respawning over and over paled rapidly and back to the PvE server I went.
In Conclusion...
Is the game fun? Yes, very much so. Combat is fast and furious, the missions are fun, the instances are interesting and the travel powers make moving around the city plenty entertaining. However, the console constraints are going to inevitably annoy the PC players, the content ultimately gets repetitive and if you're not interested in grouping at level 30 your only other option is to start another character to play through the same stuff all over again. It's fun interacting with and fighting against the DC characters as opposed to the CoH/V, CO generic hero/villain you've never heard of before. As it is, the game is definitely worth your initial purchase and the month of playtime that comes with it. What SOE has to offer with monthly updates is going to be the deciding factor in whether it's actually worth subscribing for a second or third month.
This is all, of course, impressions of the Beta and certainly some of the issues I've mentioned may be addressed before launch. There was a dev post today in the beta forums announcing that end-game solo content is on the way. Initially it's going to, sadly, take the form of repeating lower level content but the implication was that there would be fresh stuff added after launch. Additionally, there's a large patch coming today and, while the patch notes are not yet posted, it was mentioned that it contains a lot of UI improvements.
