Last night a friend sent me a 10-day pass to DCUO so I downloaded and played it briefly this morning. After what seemed like a 15 minute introduction movie, and several other movies, I struggled through the character creation process. I found it to be somewhat unforgiving. When it came to the selection of custom powers/uniform or copy a DC character, I clicked Luthor out of randomness, then the others. For some reason, DCUO really wanted me to be Luthor, as my “Superman” model was still green and purple and bald. It took about 10 minutes to undo the changes, and then the first item I looted overwrote what I was wearing. Lego Universe has this same thing, which is very annoying. Why even give me the option to select custom boots, gloves, chest, etc, if it will be overwritten by any gear I wear? In any case, I made it through the very long intro (which did a good job of explaining the controls), and found I really hated the permanent mouselook model it apparently is on. If there’s a way to turn this off, it’s not in the Control menu, so please let me know.
I just barely made it out of the intro scenes when I had to log out, but one thing stuck with me, probably because it was constantly on the screen – why does Luthor’s “bad eye” keep switching? In the “current time” he has a lens covering an injured right eye, and in the “bleak future” he has no left eye at all, and a healthy right eye. Art error?
Also, I found it slighty humorous that DCUO’s entire story is based on the “time traveler trying to prevent apocalyptic future” story theme, which of course is the basis for the Defiant faction in Rift (and any number of sci-fi stories).
In your menu is a kind of a wardrobe tab where you can ‘lock’ or change pieces of your visual costume (while still getting the stat benefits of whatever gear you’re wearing).
I only played beta and there, at least, they didn’t make this at all clear. Sounds like release is no better about that.
The character creator is highly unintuitive. It was even worse in beta. It’s actually very flexible once you get the hang of it, but that took me several hours and two botched characters.
The mouse-look is always on by design. Chris Cao mentioned that in a recent interview. It seems to be akin to the FFXIV logic of not giving PC players and advantage over Console players, although since DCUO is played on separate servers this seems a tad more than overprotective.
That said, I found the controls extremely easy to get used to. I was very comfortable with them before the end of the tutorial and by my second play session I loved the system. It makes the action fighting really, really easy.
I am an extremely inexperienced action gamer. I’ve not played any action games since the 1980s and I didn’t play many then. All I’ve played for more than ten years is MMOs. And yet I was easily able to solo not just the outfdoor quest content to the then level cap of 20 during beta, but I soloed all the instances and frequently completed them first time with the achievements for not dieing and/or not using any healing potions. I’ve also found PvP to be both easier, clearer and more fun than in any other game I’ve played.
Basically, I found the whole game very, very straightforward to play and, character creator aside, very intuitive. From comments I’ve seen in chat, not everyone gets along with it so well, so why I just fell into sync with it so easily, given that it is so far from my normal comfort zone, I can’t really explain.
I haven’t played enough of the main game to say one way or the other one it, but like I wrote, the tutorial clearly explained all the controls I needed. I only went to the control menu to find out how to get rid of the mouselook function. That’s a plus.
The mouselook is probably annoying for me because I like to click buttons with the mouse sometimes. I know that is slow, but it’s my playstyle. No biggie I guess, but just not a personal fit.
The combat style you chose may have had something to do with how easy you found it to pick up on combat. My husband had a far easier time managing his combos (two-handed weapon) than I did in my combat style of brawling (after the first tier of powers, I was unable to execute any further combos without my hand locking up, and click-click-clicking was no better).
Since we are the kind of dorks who run RP-themed and similarly-styled characters, I didn’t want to re-roll and thus the charm of DCUO wore off on me quickly. One’s mileage will vary widely, I imagine.
When you say hand locking up, do you mean your actual real physical hand ‘locked up’ while attempting to use the keyboard? Because if thats the case I wouldn’t blame the game, I’d go see your doctor…
I mean my hand got sore and tired from being held tense in the same position all the time. I was physically locking it in the way I was playing.
Guild Wars has the same oddness with starting clothes: during character creation you pick a colour for each item of clothing, and within the first couple of hours you’ll swap out every item of starter clothes for a “better” item in drab grey. In Guild Wars’ defense, you’re picking from a fixed menu of 8 starter colours for each of your 5 items, so it’s not like investing a lot of time in your “look”.
But it always feels odd that one starts colourful, then wears grey for the next 20 levels until you get your level 20 armour, at which point it is finally worth dying because *this* armour won’t deprecate in a few levels.
Oz, try using a controller. The combat is designed from the ground up to be played with a controller, and you’ll feel it at every corner.
Actually, this game is the most fun if you forget anything you’ve learned about how to control a PC MMO, and approach it as a completely new game.
Randomessa, you can switch to another weapon after reaching level 9, no need to reroll.
Finally, your initial style choices in character creation yre pretty limited, but you can aquire many more style choices in the game. You have complete freedom over your style choice, it’s detached from your item stats. You can also change your color scheme at any time.
I played it a bit last night and you are right – it would be great with a controller. I have one for the PC but it’s honestly in storage as I never play games with that ability/that way. Assuming I can find the box, I may give it a try.
I realize I could change weapons, but I was playing the weapon I chose for RP reasons. I *wanted* to play that weapon; to change the weapon would be to change my character.
Edit: we objected to the idea of having to buy controllers to play our PC game; just our personal choice, though.
So I guess you haven’t played an MMO before?
Haha yes the time-traveler going back in time to save an apocolyptic future has been totally done time and again. Star Trek and Terminator come to mind, and right now Rift and DCUO. That just means its a solid story base… it’ll be used time and time again, I’m sure.
When I first saw that I was immediately struck with “Oh no, not that horrible story template again”.
The “time-traveler going back in time…” thing has got to be one of the most ridiculous, asinine, senseless and impossible tropes in the history of cliches.
Forgetting about the laws of physics, space, and time; all of the stories that do it make such a botch of it that even the potential for a good show (or whatever) is ruined by the sheer logic failure.*
*Exceptions include various 80s cinema such as Back to the Future and Terminator.
I personally have enjoyed the game quite a bit. The combat and voice-overs are my favorite things about this game.