Free To Play, Every Day: DC Universe Online

Free-to-play games are gaining ground in recent years. The subscription fee is quickly becoming extinct it seems, and somehow, the "pay if you want special things" model is working better. Offering quality service and products to customers is sometimes enough to entice them to throw money at you I suppose, but I guess if the products in question are vanity items and XP boosts and whatnot, then that's good enough by itself. I tried the recently-converted DC Universe Online for a few reasons. For one, a superhero multiplayer online game isn't entirely new, and I had played a couple of them before (I might talk about them another time), so I was curious to see how this one held up. Second, playing as a superhero is really fun and awesome. Third, I love DC and all of their superheroes and villains, so an MMO about them all is just a comic nerd's dream come true. Granted I'm not much of a comic nerd, but I am a nerd nonetheless.

With that said, I'll call this kind of post "Free To Play, Every Day", where I attempt to play and give a casual overview of a free game. They'll probably be mostly MMO games, but I'm sure there are games out there that are also free besides them. Anyway, on to DCUO.

Opening Cinematic

The action seems to have started without us. Metropolis is in ruins, and several heroes are fighting to the death in front of our eyes. It's pretty awesome for what it is, and it explains the story very well. In the future, Lex Luthor and other DC villains have defeated Superman and pretty much the rest of the Justice League, but during the battle of heroes and villains (Did I mention this was awesome?), Brainiac invades and begins to delete the planet. Lex Luthor travels back in time to inform the still-alive heroes of the coming threat, releasing a bunch of robotic parasites into the atmosphere of earth, each containing powers of heroes from the future, to infect a ton of people to fight against Brainiac. Of course, you can choose yourself if you want to be a hero or a villain. It's a simple, yet entertaining story that makes sense and is bound to contain lots of conflict and action.

Character Creation

I enjoyed the character creation for the most part. Anything you choose is then animated by your avatar, which not only is helpful, but some of the visuals really stand out and make the powers and weapons look awesome in their own way. There are definitely a lot of options to choose from and a lot of possible combinations. Of course you choose your gender, your faction, your name, and your general character build, which ranges from short and childish to tall and muscular. Some other things you choose will affect your character in various ways:

• Template: Customize your hero from the ground up, or pick a pre-made template that models an existing DC hero or villain. All you'd have to do with a template is design the costume.
• Personality: From serious to comical, this determines the emotes and idle behavior of your character. This is purely aesthetic.
• Travel: Preferred choice of moving around quickly: Flight, Acrobatics, or Speed.
• Mentor: Depending on hero or villain, you pick a "mentor" falling under Tech, Bio, or Magic. The mentor you pick out of the 3 types determines your starting location after the tutorial and the general questing line your mentor sends you on.
• Power: Determines what role you can play in a group and your abilities in combat. Each power as a tree for damage and a tree for a specialized role (tank, healer, controller)
• Weapon: What you choose here will determine if your regular attacks are ranged or melee. Each weapon has both kinds of attacks, but some have more of one kind than others. I did mention this game has no auto-attack, right? Hack-n-slash is the game we're playing.

Lastly, you design your own costume, piece by piece. My only complaint here is the similarity in a lot of the parts. There are some parts that stand out, and a lot of them look amazing, but another lot of costume pieces are named relatively the same thing. You can pull a lot of combinations off, but a lot of others will look like you're wearing a superhero "clown suit". A lot of the hairstyles are rehashes of each other too, but with different facial hair or facial markings. This is fine I suppose, but I would have preferred separate options for my face rather than one long list of names. Overall though, the creation process is a little on the simple side, but deep enough to make yourself look different from everyone else, which is what really matters in the end.

 

User Interface

 

Fairly straightforward stuff here. Press numbers to shoot/slice/punch/whatever your abilities do, and Escape brings up your options menu, which also includes your trees and abilities. Health and magic bars are up in the top-left corner, and your target's bars are next to it. Chatbox in the lower left, and quest objectives in the lower right. You can't beat what's well known and works well. Not much else to see here.

 

 Gameplay

As far as the actual important part of a video game goes, it plays pretty solidly. For having no auto-attack, normally a staple in any MMORPG, it works out very well as a hack-n-slash game. The lock-on system can get a little weird when your character flies through a group of enemies to attack another on the other side of the room, but it generally works when you want to kill something specific quickly. The earlier levels are a little newbie-friendly with your magic and health regenerating fairly quickly, which is fine. A good amount of the quests allow you to turn them in on the go, which is a welcome feature. In some cases, they even cross with the opposing factions' quests, which can turn into some good low level PvP.

With the keyboard, the controls are alright. It's easy to turn on your travel power with the space bar, but it took me a good five minutes to find out that pressing F turns it off by default. Some of the other buttons are a little confusing too, while others are simple to find. I also tried playing with an Xbox 360 Controller, and it works surprisingly well. Flying around was easier than with the keyboard, and using abilities was simple and effective. The multiple menus were harder to access though, since all I had to do with the mouse and keyboard was press one key and then click the rest of the way, while with the controller the Left Stick was left in the dust. Both control schemes work fairly well, depending on your personal preference, and you can map them however you want.

Summary

I think the game deserves all the praise that it's receiving. To have gone from a tight subscription model to the "freemium" model since its release about a year ago and still be this profitable is rather impressive. Personally though, I'm not sure if I'll be spending money on it. For me the blame can be placed in multiple places. I'm not an all-out DC fan, but more than enough to want to play a superhero game online. Also, once the maximum level 30 is reached, there are 8-person instances and other quests to do that are level 30-exclusive, which several report can take about 15-16 hours in one sitting to get to. While there is plenty of content to find, including paid DLC if you are a Free or Premium player, I'm not sold on the Legendary subscription fee of $15 per month. You get all DLC and content for "free" plus maximum character slots and accessories, which is nice. However, I'm more along the lines of seeing the content rather than making my character look really cool. Besides, I could just purchase the DLC separately for $10 each.

It has pretty great controls that work well, and the gameplay is integrated even better with the hack-n-slash, no-auto-attack style. The interface is simple enough to understand, and the voice acting is pretty good. If you're a die-hard, all-or-nothing DC fan, then maybe the Legendary subscription is for you. Otherwise, my personal recommendation is to play for Free, spending whatever you want on what minor or major features you want as you go. Chances are that once you buy a few things you'll be eligible for Premium, which just gives you a few more worthwhile character slots and inventory space. It seems cheaper to me than the subscription as long as you don't go overboard with your wallet on your first outing.

Oh, and this game has the god damn Batman in it. That's more than enough reason to play. :)