Episode frequency - time for a change? (Discussion)

Agree to disagree

You mind sharing your thoughts about this thread?

I only fell asleep at my keyboard, while completing that content, the one time

oh.my.

Are you suggesting Spytle's account of OC's reception wasn't entirely honest or was embellished? Or just pointing out he [was honest but] spilled the tea to entertain the crowd?

Progression content has always been better, Having to regear multiple times a year in a MMO is never ideal. Make longer content Once every 6 months or a year so with some updates in between. Having players spam bounties over and over for hours upon end isn't content. Majority of players voiced the structure that was liked the most and it was Origin Crisis

I dont think they should change the episode frequency but i do think that the current way we progress and get best in slot gear in episodees should 100% be adjusted and yes Origin crisis all the way which had the best gear at that time drop in the Raids not from the vendor some of the time traveler pieces only dropped in Paradox so it was pretty much impossible to be fully geared that quickly since the difficulty was (as it should be) high,which led to players having more time spent in the game to gear up and it had more longevity and replaybility due to this.

Sadly these days we are able to do Elite raids day one when they release and on top of that with previous episode gear i hope this will get adjusted aswell.

Um, no.

People voted for Origin Crisis because Batman was in it.

I'm personally fine with the frequency right now....I'd even be open to a slight increase of time between DLC's to be honest.

I'd be open to some future DLCs having the "Open World Boss" Bonanzas, like Wonderverse and LoSH as well - just to break up the monotony.

But the TIME BETWEEN these DLCs - whatever format they come in - helps ME, personally, to maintain 4 end-game toons.

I've personally learned to LIVE with glitches in games. While they can be tiresome and irksome they are a part of Human Error.

One of the GREATEST games of all time - Fallout 3 - was worked on for MANY, MANY YEARS before release and STILL had a few glitches when it dropped....game would just lock up and stop working some times. Thankfully this was not often but it made you SAVE your game quite often.



Of course, Devs should strive to have content glitch free - and be ready to respond to issues with content once it's dropped.

But they are only human.

My ONLY ask going forward is that WHATEVER the frequency they use - whether it's 4, 5 or even 6 months - just PLEASE keep the Elite Duos and Alerts....and I'd even love to see an elite Solo.

I get what you are trying to accomplish but the bigger issue with DCUO content offerings is that there's simply not enough per DLC from both a standpoint of keeping players occupied to storytelling. Let me give you an example:

In World of Flashpoint we get the following content:
1 new zone
2 Normal/Elite Raids (with one Elite Raid escalating difficulty up to 5 levels)
1 Normal/Elite Alert
1 Normal/Elite Duo
2 Weekly Solos (counting Doomsday as a weekly solo since you can get the mission as a solo player)
4 Daily Solos

Realistically that's 10 different things to accomplish per week, sans Replay Badges (which means not counting Elite and Normal as different pieces of content). For daily accomplishments to do we have 6 missions (4 Solos, 1 Normal/Elite Duo and 1 Normal/Elite Alert) and these are the same things over and over and over until the next Seasonal or DLC comes out.

Prior to that we had Long Live the Legion which gave us very similar offerings:
1 new zone
1 Normal/Elite Raid
1 Normal/Elite Alert
4 Daily Solos
5 Weekly Solos (as above, counting Validus and the 3 Legionnaires as weekly solos)

Realistically that's 11 different things to accomplish per week, sans Replay Badges. For daily accomplishments we have 5 missions.

That gives us 21 new things to do since November 2020 (not counting Seasonals as they are temporary, recurring content) with 11 of these being daily, repeating missions.

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Meanwhile, at Elder Scrolls Online... In November 2020 they released the Markarth DLC which contained:

11 Main mission lines
9 Side mission lines
7 Daily missions
2 large new zones
2 new dungeons
1 new raid
2 new player house designs


In January 2021 they released the Blackwood Expansion

7 Main mission lines
27 Side mission lines
12 Daily missions
1 large new zone
9 Public Dungeons (fairly soloable)
2 Group Dungeon (4-man)
1 Raid
3 new player house designs
Companion system (NPCs that adventure with you, you can build faction with them to eventually unlock quests)



In March 2021 they released the Flames of Ambition DLC which contained:

2 new dungeons (4-player dungeons)
Major revamp to Champion Points (think of them as Skill Points which can unlock all sorts of different stat bonuses as well as power changes, like providing a shield to group members, etc).

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So in the same timeframe ESO released 28 new main missions, 36 side missions, 19 dailies, 3 large new zones (each zone is approximately the size of the original Metropolis or Gotham zones), 15 dungeons (which could be viewed as dailies, both solo and 4-man), 5 new player house designs, 2 new raids a new NPC companion system and a revamping of their extended player stats system. That's 64 new things missions to do as well as 19 dailies as well as tons of repeatable dungeons and other open world areas to explore and engage in.

Just comparing dailies we see a large discrepancy (+8 for ESO) and this doesn't even begin to touch on the extras like Crafting, Shards, finding Gates, etc.

That's just the content angle. This extra content allows for a LOT more and deeper storytelling. Each Main mission line tells a longer and deeper story than we get with an entire DCUO DLC. By example, with World of Flashpoint we don't really get a deep backstory in the game as to how this world came about. Flash makes a brief mention of causing it during the Alert but that's about it. For those not familiar with the comic storyline they are left wondering what Zoom was talking about at the end of the Alert.

This isn't a knock on the writer(s), it's a knock on DCUO DLCs not having enough content to tell the full story. We should have at least had a queable solo or duo where the Flash brings us back with him as he attempts to save his mother, then when that mission ends it automatically places you in Flashpoint Gotham.

From the EG7 prospectus we learned what many had postulated: that DCUO is the financial mule pulling Daybreak's fiscal wagon. This continues with EG7 as DCUO seems to be generating the most profits (at least from to the last data I read) out of all of its games. That's a long-winded way of saying DCUO should be able to afford more devs to create more content per DLC (or even just making emote packages and new power skins to sell on the Store to generate even more revenue to hire more devs for DLC content). (DCUO also has the problem of running on Unreal 3, which can be more time intensive in content creation while ESO is running on their own built-from-scratch engine)

Moving to even less content per year (even if it's more bug-free, which I think was your point) would be completely contrary to gaining/retaining players.

Did eso Reuse maps and bosses and openworld maps when they did the raid/dungeon instances etc content? If its all new then this kinda proofs further how big the difference is between eso and dcuo especially since dcuo reuses bosses,maps,instances (not for all content but for some) of these things in episodes and still falls that much behind eso content and storytelling wise as you described

Also its kinda a shock to me how (imo) little love this beatiful game gets from the guys up there that control this (i dont mean the devs). Whenever i think about dc i feel sad to see this game like this, i hope the owners will step it up..

I used to play ESO but i prefer dc by a mile but imo its not getting the investment it deservers (lack of devs/ressources).

I can't answer your question about ESO but Mag probably will. I would add this is part of why some of us have been pushing for a graphics engine update. The antiquated engine is partially what prevents DCUO from putting out more content and faster. Especially with the upcoming U5 iterating environments will be exponentially faster than on 3. ESO likely has an advantage because it's not held back by such a difficult to develop for engine/platform.

But do we really neeeed elite content, when if they only make one version we can get better content

It’s easy to compare the 2 because they are both MMOs but one thing that people keep ignoring is that dcuo isn’t a standalone game. They involve iconic characters from the dc comics. The reason eso and other MMOs have more missions is because they have a main quest line on top of the daily/weekly missions. Dcuo has the daily/weekly missions but no main story quest. IMO I view dcuo episodes as sitcoms while other MMOs dlcs as full series. Other MMOs have more liberty with how to drive a story. Dcuo can’t do that. They can have a partial story and hope the it get approved. But what if they decide to add a huge story arc to the game? Like if they had 1 large scale story that took over an entire year with dlcs uncovering parts of the story arc? It would be awesome yes. But what if they don’t get approval for how it ends because WB don’t like how it ends? What if they have a huge story lined up but they don’t get approval for the start of a new year? Earlier dlcs seemed to be more structured with an actual story while newer dlcs are more random.

It would be great if dcuo actually did more with the story. Gave us one large scale series of dlcs revolves around each other (yes I know AF1-3 and the other dlcs) but without a break I’m between. And by break I mean no random dlc in between the story dlc. And at the end of the year we get the final big battle that the arc was leading to. We get a full main quest line with dlc missions mixed in. And actual cutscenes like we had back in the day actually reading the arc as it unfolds. It would be awesome. But that would mean dcuo getting more approval from WB and an actual writer to lay out the arc in a way that makes sense. And asking them for such a large change will probably mean it won’t happen

Yes we do.

We're also ignoring the artefact system. Of course it really depends on the content design, but if the boss is vulnerable throughout and you can bypass mechanics then having no elite version will just alienate the veteran/elite community even more. Then we just get 5-15 minute raids again with no substance. We even have players going into inventory and swapping artifacts mid-rotation mid-boss fight now, if that is happening then content isn't engaging enough.

The other side of the argument is would content get better by removing the elite version? This is TBD. Either way removing elite content from the game would drive a considerable side of the community away.

My two cents personally is remove event versions of instanced content (keep open world as event though) and then focus on normal/elite for the other content. As someone else mentioned, when next episode launches we lose the event versions anyway from the one before. Work that just gets discarded when a new episode launches. Elite still stays around and players can always revisit those elite raids later for feats they couldn't get before for whatever reason, or to get rare drops.

Event instanced content is unnecessary extra work for the devs working on it knowing that a few months later those versions of the content won't be around anymore.

No we don't, but if we didn't have elite content then the difficulty of normal content would need to be ramped up to provide a meaningful challenge in order to not alienate the elite community, doing that of course then alienates the more casual playerbase and you'll have 9001BPM up in the forums tearing up a storm.

There needs to be some sort of distinction between difficulty levels to please the widest range of players possibly and what LQ said.