In early November, DC Universe Online migrated from a subscription model ($15 per month) to a free to play model. Having not played a MMO since retiring from World of Warcraft, I was fearful of jumping back onto the MMO ship but being a sucker for Super Heroes I ended up caving.
Playing The Game
DC Universe Online, is set in the DC Universe home to such heroes as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (not to be confused with the Marvel Universe where most of the current movies are based). The game commences with the creation and customisation of your character. You can choose between being a Hero or being a Villain and you also choose a mentor for the Hero side it’s either Batman, Superman or Wonder Woman and for the Villain side it’s either the Joker, Lex Luthor or Circe (yes, I had no idea who Circe was). You can then deck yourself out in a large array of different styles from head and face gear through to coats, gloves and boots with hundreds of styles to choose from and the full customisation of colours, you could very easily spend a few hours designing how your character will look. For example, I created a character here to look like Jubilee.
What's this Baby Cuddles again?
I decided to start out as a Villain with Joker as my mentor. Once you’re in the game, your mentor will show you the ropes and guide you on a quest chain. Being a fan of comics, the quest chain had quite an engaging storyline which culminated in a final showdown against the Gotham City Police Department and Huntress. Fortunately, I had Catwoman with me to lend a hand (each of the mentors have a different starting quest chain). The game continues in similar fashion as you complete quests for other famous DC Villains, such as Two-Face and Gorilla Grodd. Interacting with the game environment felt similar to the modern Grand Theft Auto series, especially being a villain where I was throwing cars around and pushing civilians off buildings. The combat system is similar to other Action RPGs (or Hack and Slash), where you would conduct attacks and if an enemy got in the way then they will get hit. You could also chain different attacks together to create combos which was kind of neat. Being an MMO, there were a lot of the standard features including Alerts (4-player instances) and Raids, PvP battles, Leagues (similar to Guilds). I won’t go into much detail about these aspects.
Game Analysis
What Worked
Overall, I was very indifferent about the game, however there were a few mechanics and ideas which I thought worked very well.
- Engaging stories for quest chains and single player instances. Not something that you’d expect to enjoy in a MMO, but I found the quest chains which always culminated in kicking the arse of a DC Hero (or Villain if you rolled a Hero) to be satisfying. I’m not sure if this would have been quite as entertaining if it didn’t have the DC licence behind it (e.g. would I care enough to do the bidding of miscellaneous evil clown rather than doing the Joker’s bidding). But overall, the concept of completing a long quest chain with a single player instance where you beat up a final boss was a great concept and I actually enjoyed leveling. (for the record, I hated leveling in World of Warcraft which is why I had only 1 max level toon)
- Boss fights weren’t over-designed. This might be subjective to whoever’s playing (and may also not have been an explicit design intent), but I found that a lot of the fights weren’t over-designed in that it allowed you to exhibit some kind of flexibility in trying to overcome the bosses. It wasn’t 100% necessary to have a tank, controller, healer and DPS in your party. The game was flexible enough to allow players to improvise to beat boss fights. I’m not sure if this was also due to the lack of documented theory and addons for the game, but it reminded me much of vanilla World of Warcraft before the game became over tuned and over designed.
- Feat points gave skill points. Feats (also known as achievements and trophies) have been a welcome addition to games which provided extra challenges for players to do which were outside the main objectives of the game. What was great about DCU Online was that your achievement points contributed to your skill points. These skill points provided improved abilities to use your weapons or perform combos, or provided extra moves based on your movement (either flight, super speed or acrobatics).
In the top right corner, you can see that every 100 feat points, you get 1 skill point.
Skill points are used to generate weapons combos.
What Didn’t Work
The game had a few large deficiencies which is what might limit the growth of the player base.
- Constantly fighting with the social interface. One of the biggest drawcards to an MMO is the social aspect. One of the things that kept me playing World of Warcraft for so long was meeting strangers who eventually became great friends. Unfortunately, the design of both the game and the user interface didn’t encourage a lot of social interaction. Although I loved the quest chains and the single player instances, most of the game was played alone. It felt like an engaging single player game rather than multi-player game. However, it didn’t stop there. The chat interface was also extremely challenging to work with. It really felt like you were fighting with the game to send a message or participate in chat. There was also no way to find what level other players were which made it difficult to find people to assist in the few group missions. I also found that without crafting, there was a limited requirement for trading, selling items or using the auction house. The “free-to-play” elements that Sony blocked, seemed to discourage social interaction (with escrow and limited chat capabilities). Overall, it seemed like the game was designed as a single player experience with the MMO parts added on as an afterthought.
- The length of the game was short. Even if the game was a standard RPG, it was quite short. Playing a few hours per night, and then one day on the weekend I was able to reach the maximum level (30) and be somewhat geared from running single player instances and duos. In comparison to World of Warcraft, I felt lost for things to do once I reached the maximum level. Because it was so quick, the second week I ended up just levelling an alternative toon (after which I got bored and quit).
- The roles weren’t taught. As with other MMOs, there are different roles that players can play within a group. In this game, there was Tank, Healer, Controller and Damage. For most of the game, you stick to a Damage role and even in the Alerts (4 player instances) more often than not everyone just sticks to the damage role and you get through ok. But when it got to completing harder alerts at the end of the game, the roles became much more important and unless you’ve played an MMO before it would be difficult for a newbie to know what to do. I guess this iterates the fact that the game seemed to be designed for a single player experience.
Final Comments
The game was an entertaining single player experience, but once we “finished” there didn’t seem to be much incentive to want to continue. The incentive (especially for WoW) came from the social aspect which was poorly implemented and gimped by the “free to play”. Encouraging the social aspects would probably increase the chance that players will pay for stuff (or pay for a subscription). Paying for stuff such as iconic styles (gear that’s worn by existing heroes like Superman’s Cape), because this is something that I’m sure collectors would pay for. On top of that the game was buggy and glitched often, something which was frustrating.