Dev Discussion Episode 38: Patchwork Themyscira (open world)

Hey again!

We're really excited about our new episode, "Wonderverse!" We've been trying a bunch of new things in this episode, including adding new World Bosses.

I'll be monitoring this thread for any feedback on Patchwork Themyscira, whether it's the daily missions, weekly missions, or the World Bosses.

With regards to World Bosses, note that we're tracking participation and contribution in a new way behind the scenes, and granting slightly different tiers of rewards depending on whether you fully participated or participated some. Additionally, different rewards are granted based on whether players collectively succeeded in defeating the World Boss, or whether the World Boss was victorious. Finally, note that World Boss rewards take into consideration tangential activities in the area of the World Boss fight (for the most part), so even if you're not able to deal huge amounts of damage to the boss, you should hopefully be able to do enough things to earn a reward.

Please be aware that we're open to making improvements and tuning changes to make sure these new World Bosses are fun and rewarding, so please let us know if you have any feedback, or if you see anything that doesn't seem right.

Thanks for playing DCUO, and I hope you enjoy all of the new content!

I don't know wither people just too stubborn to keep dpsing instead of interacting with the teeth, or either way the timer is too fast for us to reach them, so we end up with army of adds when Hydra is at really low health. I attempted Hydra three times and failed all three with league mates and like forty other people. The adds are just too much. I don't know if intended, on test it wasn't a issue.

This is on EUPCPS by the way. There is a lot of lag too so will try again later when things calm down abit.

Hydra time limit is ridiculous. 20+ people whaling on it and it wasn’t even at 50%. And we have to defeat all the other bosses all over again to get another chance? Really?

With regards to World Bosses... seems like I'll just skip it and wait for the next DLC, interesting concept but a little too much waiting around for a group and such for my taste. Most open world stuff is a ghost town after one or two DLCs, I don't get it.

Looks nice though. Very pretty.

So..I think you guys might need more new hardware because the open world experience suffers from a lot of lag when a bunch of players congregate and attack the bosses. Speaking of open world lag, how does this continue to be a problem? I'm genuinely curious because this happens all the time in an open world setting.

Really, just scrap the whole open world boss thing and go back to the drawing board. It's just not working as implemented. The timers have to go, and the tedium of working through the bosses to get to the hydra isn't working either. I just love the idea but as it is right now just a hot mess

Well ON EU server we cant even get Hydra down to 60% just dont have the player base to do so!! we are 20+ and it just wont go down under 60% i been on it for over 18 try now game becoming so dead was looking forward to this content but im disepointed cant do any of this openworld bosses with out 30+ players and every one is spread out in phases.. and wont go in to one instans.. out all my year playing this game this wont do!.. nerf hydro and bosses or remove TIMER

Seriously, why add raidlike boss fights when every time you added openworld bounties you got complaints of lag? The "raid like bossfights" is just not fun, get in a phase full of people and they die in less than a minute or you get in a phase with only 20 people and you struggle to kill the bosses. After a week getting a group is going to be a pain because just like Bounties, everyone spams them day one and forget about the content the next week.

Please I love DCUO so go back to the style of 2 raids....Forget raid like boss fights, they do not work.

I enjoyed so far, however there are aspects I would like to see improved. Whenever we fail to complete the chain or kill a boss it becomes boring to have to wait so long for the chain to start specially on the hydra that may not show up and we end up having to wait 5 mins for the next boss.
I think there are some bosses lacking in mechanics like i previously mention on the other thread. From all the red text messages only Kali is a one shot, most people just completely ignore blocking to get more burn.
You guys also need to figure out a way to grant marks to support roles, while i get 6 marks solo tanking the entire room every single person is dpsing and getting more marks then me, very sad;(
The hydra boss is kind of impossible to do beat having in consideration its health, time and adds that generates.

Yeah, I’ll second what you’ve described. It has however been happening for forever. Atlantis had it, metal part 1 & 2, any world boss in general. Any large congregation & hud starts going out, frame rate is atrocious.....if this is the direction you guys want to take, I’d strongly suggest more hardware to sustain this direction. Also it’s just time in general for this hardware to be present in all episodes.

I'm seeing LFG scrolling like crazy and people standing around when you phase... forever.

Did not see that in the open world.

But in the Alert it went kind of freeky.
Here is video evidence... it starts about halfway through in Atlantis.

The farming for the alt currency is ridiculous for the amount you receive. The lag prevents you from getting top tier...cause you are STUCK in freaking animation...by the time you are out of animation, hydra is halfway burned! Cant click on ww to do lasso, cant hit circle on items that spawn.

This is what I was seeing most of the time when I was in a phase with multiple groups.

It's so beautiful on PC. Whatever you all did with the graphics, it's amazing!

Yeah from what i saw it's more likely to be client side, the UI starts to glitch out (health & power bar go vertical, players names start flashing, chat and tray start to glitch out but doesn't affect cooldowns like lag does it just affects it visually as if it had issues loading it), i disabled the UI to see if the issue persisted (later realized it was a bad idea cause i couldn't see my own health bar) and the game was smooth, as soon as i renabled the UI the glitches came back but attacks, dodges & blocks work as usual
it's just the UI elements that get weird (at least on my end, i'm on a PS4 pro not on PC), the more suff i turned off on the UI (like player titles, league names, power effects) the smoother it was.

I'm on EU PS and when fighting bosses my framerate drops significantly! It's more like playing a slideshow! It makes it almost impossible to get anything done. You can't react to big hits or even activate your powers because you literally can't even see what's happening!

You need to re-think the weekly bounties or something too, because having to beat all the bosses for both of them is a terrible idea! I'd rather have one of those awful 'kill 400+ enemies' bounties at this point! I haven't managed to beat Hydra yet, despite there being about 50+ people taking part in the fight! The first time round he didn't even appear, so we had to do all the bosses again, then hydra did appear, but we lost due to the sheer number of adds that spawned which only added to the already massive framerate issues. The 3rd time round we didn't even get to hydra. Too many people had dropped out by then and we failed at boss fight 4.

After an hour of trying, everyone gave up and suddenly the area was completely dead. No-one waiting for the bosses to spawn. On day 1.

This is only going to get worse as the weeks pass. With the Calculator Bot and Metahuman Experiment fights from the last episode, there was always a "mad dash" for about an hour after weekly reset to get them knocked out on multiple toons. The following couple of days were ok for finding groups, but if you tried doing them later in the week it could take hours to gather a crowd! So if getting 8 people together for Calculator Bot on a Monday is hard enough, how are we supposed to get 20+ people together for 5 succesive tough fights on a Monday?? We couldn't even do it an hour after the episode launched!!!!

We hit a problem where one of the adds fell into the fire pit and decided he wanted to stay there.
The final boss room would not open without clearing every last add so the group spent a while killing themselves to try to land next to him on a lower edge of the spinning ring.




Luckily we did not have to disband. One player had a Lazarus pit water artifact and was able to die next to the add and then pick himself up and kill it.

Please consider either letting the adds also be killed by fire or having them teleport back up to the upper ring in the room.

Sometimes when Athena spawns she does not appear on my screen. Same happened to my league mate, so I can't attack her therefore I cannot contribute to get my rewards. Same with Murk.