DC Universe Online #dcuo

We’ve been searching for something a bit different to play as a couple of late, we’ve done plenty of Guild Wars 2 since last Summer and Wakfu runs terribly on my husband’s computer despite attempts at fixing it. At some point while away the idea of returning properly to DC Universe Online occurred to one of us, we’d tried the game briefly a long while ago, although I couldn’t remember when. I presumed it was before this blog since I have no posts about playing this super hero MMORPG.

According to the minimal achievements page of my original character, he was created on or just before the first of January 2012 – so he doesn’t predate the blog (which started in February 2011), but equally he doesn’t seem to have been played for much more than a week. We decided to create new characters anyway as these original characters had received auto rename suffixes and were so low-level that it didn’t really matter to us to start from scratch.

Influenced by The Secret World perhaps, I swapped from playing Sorcery/Staff to giving Sorcery/Rifle a go this time around. Having a combo of a super power and a weapon to select your overall combat skills does remind me somewhat of playing TSW, actually. I chose to be a healer/dps character and my husband went for a tank/dps Fire/bow character.

We went with aesthetics over any build guides or “most OP” comment threads – it’s highly unlikely we’ll even bother with group content in the game let alone anything near end-game. Perhaps it’s a superhero game thing, but DCUO has an excellent wardrobe system (called ‘style’). Like Rift or EQ2, you can freely mix and match previous armour styles to create or maintain a look. This is achievable anywhere, and almost anytime (outside combat I guess?) – no attempts to use this as a money sink or cash-shop inducement.

All MMO’s need to adopt a simple wardrobe system like this

Thusfar we’ve played a few zones of Metropolis through following a now familiar pattern building up through minor threats and clean-up operations to a showdown with some minor villain. The overall plot is building on the intro video nicely. It feels very ‘super-hero’ in story-telling tone and graphical style – I’m no expert, but we have avidly watched many of the major film releases and some of the more recent TV series.

The ‘comic art’ cut-scenes are a welcome touch

The game is heaving with players as well, many have pretty darned-awful names mind, but you can’t knock the game for being a ghost town. That means competition for mission updates out in the open zones, although the game seems quite supportive of casually helping others – mission objectives update if you get more than one or two hits on an opponent. Opponents and clickable objectives spawn very fast though, so we’ve not had to wait around camping a spawn point as yet.

Mission base entrances seem to attract a gathering

The game auto hides the UI to take screenshots so you can’t see the mass of character names in the above screenshot. The UI is of the action-MMO style with cursor locked to mouse. Unusually there isn’t an obvious ‘mouse mode’ toggle key, unlike in say Tera or BDO, so interacting with UI elements can be unfamiliar or irksome – how do I switch chat if I can’t mouse over to click between tabs? Clearly it’s a console-oriented UI design rather than a mouse+keyboard one. It works well enough and some shortcuts are actually good UI features – like pressing Enter to quickly confirm certain choice. Other minor features are less friendly to keyboard players, such as the awful F4 menu system for adding friends to a party. Why the game hasn’t added an obvious way to interact with other players by pointing at their character and holding a button escapes me, it’s is such a standard thing for action-MMOs.

The other major aspect of the game that we’re learning is the role of movement in gameplay and combat. Unlike almost every other MMORPG that we’ve played, our selected movement power (we both chose flight) impacts both how we get around the game world and how we fight. Fighting in a 3D environment is a rarity in most MMORPGs, so it takes some getting used to when your character can fight from above or below enemies.

Surveying the zone

The auto-aiming system helps and hinders in equal measure, as the game will often switch to a target you consider less priority: we just need to get used to locking targets more (it is in the tutorial after all). Fighting opponents that are flying around above you is something that feels different from most games, and for my character with dual ranged skills it feels natural to do so. I guess we would have benefited from more time spent underwater in GW2 as it would have prepared us for this.

So far, it’s a fun game to play, especially duo. It’s also very different thematically to anything else we play, so I think more superhero adventures await!