The Crisis on Infinite MMOs! – A DC Universe Online Review

I’m…NOT Batman!

Super hero MMOs have a hard playing field to break onto. City of Heroes, the benchmark super hero MMO, was incredibly popular, boasting a very dedicated fanbase and positive word of mouth for years. It had excellent character creation for its time, a wide variety of powers and even a modular UI that a lot of MMOs could stand to look back at and emulate instead of letting modders do the work for them. A lot of the most popular MMOs, dating back to Everquest and Asheron’s Call, stay in the fantasy genre (though they flirt with scifi elements, such as WoW’s dimension traveling goats). So when an MMO wants to place itself in a less fantastical setting, it has a harder time removing itself from the Second Life stigma.

DCUO does this by setting itself so firmly in DC Comics that when you load up the game for the first time it’s a little hard that tell you haven’t just loaded Arkham Asylum by mistake.

The DC Universe

My favorite part of DCUO by far is how deeply immersed in the comic book setting this game is. Being able to use the licensed property really increases the breadth and scope of the game. Excepting my love of Batman, I’ve always read more Marvel than DC, but this game really reignited my love of some of DC’s characters, especially some of the lesser known, non-big name people. You’re constantly dealing with characters like Etrigan, Dr. Fate and Eclipso, characters you probably either have no familiarity with or the barest recollection of. DCUO really gives face time to some older and awesome characters often overshadowed by Batman or Superman.

Brother Eye. And if you know who that is, you should probably play this game.

Visual character creation for PCs is pretty bad without sliders, only a very few faces, and most of the emphasis placed on clothing that you can get easily in game anyway. NPCs, on the other hand, look amazing – they look like they should, right out of the pages of the comics. The voice acting in most cases is pretty great as well; for superheroes, Oracle narrates a lot of your quests whereas Calculator (FANTASTIC) does for villains. Returning for Batman and The Joker are Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, who make the absolute best voice actors for these roles, reaching back to the Batman the Animated Series many of us grew up on. A few characters, however, are terrible; Catwoman’s overly breathy “I’MMMMHHHH CAAAAATWOMAAANNN” is absolutely horrific and the generic male questgiver makes me want to reach through my monitor and pull out his tongue.

It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s xXSupaManXx69!

Leveling isn’t too bad in DCUO. To start with, the level cap is only 30, which means the usually painstaking leveling process goes by very quickly. The quests are the usual ‘beat up X bad guys’ and ‘collect X macguffins,’ but there’s no running back to a questgiver to turn anything in, which is nice. There’s a pretty common flow – ding a level, unlock a few quests. Go talk to NPC, kick off questline plot. Go to first area, kill X guys, get X items, find one or two middling quests. Complete these (everything is done over transmissions or comm devices, so you’re rarely running back to a quest giver), get XP, gear and money, head to next area, wash, rinse, repeat about three times. After the last quest area, there’s usually a short instance with one to three bosses to cap off the plotline. Once that’s finished, there’s a neat ‘motions comics’ style end movie featuring the hero or villain you’ve dealt with during the quest and a final nice piece of loot. It’s a fun, very streamlined way to level and the plots are usually at least fairly interesting.

Gameplay itself is very weird. The first and most jarring thing is that you don’t have a free mouse – the mouse is used for movement and/or camera motion. Abilities can only be activated via hotkeys, not clicking, and clicking itself plays a vitally important part of gameplay as it activates your weapon damage attacks in an adventure-game style feel. I find myself extremely annoyed by not having a free mouse; other MMOs let you hover over abilities to read their text, drag and drop skills and click to select targets, so not being able to do these things is very jarring and occasionally frustrating.

On the other hand, the click-heavy combat is fun, relying so much on weaving attacking with using your powers wisely instead of just constantly hitting hotkeys and having your character autoattack with their weapon. I will admit, though each weapon (of which there are quite a few) has its own unique click combos, I almost always end up just using right click over and over for melee attacks and left click, left click, hold for ranged instead of memorizing combos. To be fair, this might also be because I’m lazy. There’s also break-out mechanic that lets you defend from boss super moves or bust out of snares. Break Out is defaulted to Shift, which I find a little harder to hit. While the idea of Break Out is cool, it proves awkward in gameplay due to actual character movement – it’s difficult to move with a lot of twitch as the characters are slightly sluggish.

Free to Play….ish

DCUO has three levels of ‘memberships.’

Sorry, Batwoman. If I play a villain, I get to hear Mark Hamill’s Joker, and that’s all I really care about.

Free: You pay for nothing. You can still do any content you want as much as you want and being entirely a free player doesn’t hinder your experience. The ONLY annoying thing about being entirely free to play is that you are limited to having $1500 in currency. The money you accrue over 15k is put into ‘escrow’ which unlocks when you up your subscriber level. If you cancel your higher level and go back to free to play, they don’t take away your money, though, which is really nice. Money also hasn’t seemed that important at all; the level cap vendor gear is purchased by tokens dropping in end-game raiding and everything else is reasonably priced.

Premium: After you’ve spent just $5 on anything out of the ‘Marketplace,’ you’re automatically upgraded to a premium membership. This pretty much just makes the game more convenient – some more character slots, $2k money cap, some more inventory slots. Easily worth it.

Legendary: Subscriber. I was recently gifted a 3 month subscription while it was on sale (ongoing until February 12th) for $30. Legendary is okay, the biggest difference being is I can now freely exchange mail with other players, use the auction house system and there’s no limit on my cash. There’s some minor differences – you don’t need to buy keys to open lockboxes and you get even more character slots, that kind of thing. I doubt I would pay $15 a month for Legendary, maybe $5 if I was playing the game regularly.

Having played all 3 levels of gameplay, I can safely say I would have absolutely no problem casually playing this game entirely as a free player (or shelling out $5 one time and going Premium). The only thing that really tempted me to spend money were lockbox keys because I hate not knowing WHAT’S IN THE BOX, cool looking weapons skins and the unlocks for new character creation powers like Captain America-style shield combat or a Green Lantern power ring. Legendary has some nice perks but I doubt I would have bought it for myself unless I was actually interested in pursuing raiding or heavy PvP.

DCUO’s subscriber system is one of the best I’ve seen for free to play MMOs so far. It doesn’t penalize you for being a free player but the rewards for paying money are interesting enough to make you want to spend some cash. Things you can buy aren’t JUST cosmetic but they also don’t hinder your game play if you don’t want to buy.

Don’t take my word for it, take Gorilla Grodd’s

Though not entirely parting from the now-common MMO “have powers on action bar, hit button” style of combat, with its adventure-game click weapon attacks, DCUO has just enough of an unique combat system to be intriguing. Though the character creation is hella lacking, once made character animations are fluid and the cityscapes you play in (primarily a very large Gotham City and Metropolis) are surprisingly gorgeous. Movement isn’t as responsive as I prefer, but having built in travel methods (Superman-style flight, The Flash-style superspeed or Spider-manlike acrobatics) helps make it better – flying around in combat is really fun.

Sometimes DCUO feels more like an adventure/action game than a MMO, right down to flight races which involve flying through circles just like Superman 64. I think this is a fun feel for the game and though I wouldn’t want to do anything that takes real twitch, like srs-mode PvP, it makes leveling up and normal instances (some of which are ‘duos,’ done by two people, which I think is BRILLIANT) really fun and far less grindy.

By far the best part of Dc Universe Online is the comic aesthetic and storylines. It’s a good MMO if you like MMOs. But it’s a great game if you love comic books.