MOGS

DC Universe Online – Hack n Slash fun

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has launched their latest MMORPG this week, but if your looking for puny goblins or really annoying pygmys waiting to be slaughtered for daily quests, your definitely in the wrong universe.

DC Universe Online is set in, you guess it, the DC Universe. These are some iconic figures we are talking about here. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern.. and.. well… honestly I never really got sucked into comics, but there’s a ton of other important looking people standing around giving me stuff to do, and lets face it.. if your friends with Superman you got something going for you.

First Impressions

At first it reminded me a little bit of Champions Online, just re-flavored and smoothed out by a better development team. The graphics are pretty awesome when you stop to look at the scenery, some of the texturing and shadow work are amazing and there is a lot of little details.

Players will choose a mentor for their character (such as Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman for heroes and Lex Luthor, The Joker, or Circe for villains). Their starting location, principal quest rewards and mob loot will be influenced by that decision. The starting zones are either Metropolis or Gotham City, for both heroes and villains. Heroes get access to the Justice League Watchtower, while villains can enter the Legion of Doom headquarters. Other zones can be reached by teleporters from the two faction headquarters.

Character Creation

The character creation options in DC Universe Online are more limited than say City of Heroes or Champions Online, and the game uses a more traditional equipment system – so as you level up you will get new armor and accessories which will alter how your character looks. This is something that most regular MMO players are used to, but the thing that sets it apart from some of the other Armour systems is you can “lock” appereance items so no matter what item you equip you can maintain a certain overall theme for your character with little effort. This is one of those things I wish Blizzard would wake up to, my rogue wants to raid in his vanilla High Warlord set rocking glaives.

Overall as far as Character Creation goes, there are enough options available to keep everyone from looking like Batman, but compared to games like COH/COC where you can customize everything down to your spell effect colors, DC:UO could use some patch updates as far as character creation options go.

I’m not going to get into much about the class creation, because to be honest there’s so many options and specs and talents and spells it just makes my brain hurt. Essentially you can mix and max pretty much any power from the DC universe or comics in general and create a copy of your favorite hero or create for yourself the hero you always hoped you would be.

You can see my first character below, Kungfu, a duel sword wielding acrobatic ice ninja. I tend to enjoy melee characters so the duel swords was a no brainer, and the ice line of talents is awesome for tanking and has some good abilities for locking opponents down in PVP. There are so many different options though I’m sure as long as my interest is held in this game I will be rerolling alt’s to find the powerset the fits my playstyle perfectly. Right now there just isn’t enough information available so there is a lot of guess work.

Interface

The interface is built with console players in mind, but is slightly easier to navigate on a keyboard because of direct shortcuts. On the controller simple tasks like checking the map or activating missions requires navigating menus on a directional pad. Otherwise as a whole the interface felt a little clunky, much like the combat I wouldn’t say it was “bad”, it just feels like something is off.

Movement

Maneuvering is well controlled, but with a few flaws. Flying sometimes feels tight and you may get disoriented while flying inside small buildings. Superspeed is great when you’re running straight but poses some difficulties in tight areas. You may be turning a corner at one minute to find yourself halfway up a wall and turned around the next. Acrobatics is the other movement type in DC Universe and controls virtually without any problems but isn’t quiet as fast when navigating the city as the other two and has a small drawback in pvp combat against flying opponents. All three control rather well with a controller and only present an issue when moving fast through tight areas.

Combat

The problem for me, and personally it’s going to be the “deal breaker” if I can’t get used to it, is the combat. The basic combat should be familiar to MMO players. You have a range of abilities, some of which have cast timers, and some of which have cooldowns. Some abilities can be blocked, some can break blocks, and some can be interrupted. In low-level PVE you can get away with simple casting and a bit of blocking and movement, but I can imagine that you’ll need to make use of roles, and be more judicious with the block/stun/blockbreaking abilities at higher levels. The combo system feels a little cumbersome on the PC – remembering (and correctly performing) mouse click/click and hold combinations is annoying compared to pressing certain keys in a certain order.

For example, my Duel Sword Wielding Frost Ninja (sorry I just like saying that), has a attack called Ultra Flurry. They could have called this thing “Whirlwind of Death” and no one would argue. The problem is that in order to perform this attack, you have to click your left mouse button exactly 9 times, and then hold the button on that 9th click. If you accidentally click 10 times, you perform a completely different attack. So unless your a Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter god, or at least have an xbox controller you can plugin, you might find the combat system to be a little frustrating at first. It’s all about chaining attacks together, blocking, and interrupting blocks.

To try and make playing DC Universe Online a little easier I hooked my computer up to our monstrous 56″ Display, plugged in a wireless XBOX controller, and went to work. Personally it made playing the game a lot more fun. The square and triangle button are your primary close and ranged attacks, then abilities and consumables are assigned to the four buttons when you’re holding either the R2 or L2 buttons, effectively giving you 8 slots to assign. Attack combos begin very basic but can be upgraded to different combination’s of square and triangle as well as holding the buttons for different effects. That said, it never feels too much like an action game. Damage is still listed as “damage per second” and combat always comes down to how fast you can wail on the attack buttons, just like other MMOs. This all leads to a system that boggles expectations. Don’t go in expecting Batman: Arkham Asylum combat controls, but don’t expect standard PC MMO controls either.

Overall

Overall I think it’s a fun, casual game. It’s not going to affect the warcraft core player base, but I think a part of the warcraft community that is tired of the elitist attitude and hardcore mentality that has been taken to the extreme might find DC Universe Online to be a nice change of pace. It’s not going to be for everyone and it does have some issues that need to be worked out in order to make gameplay as smooth and polished as we have come to expect. I’m still not sure if it was worth the $50 bucks or whatever, we will have to see what the current “endgame” content looks like. However, if there is one thing that gives me hope in this game, it’s what my future tank set looks like: