I know about the whole "Wally to Barry conversion" thing that happened near the end of the game's development, but it seems that a couple of things have been left have done with it. Particularly with the Flash villains. The Flash of the game seems to be clearly defined as Barry everywhere that he appears (with the belt, the cowl wings, the blue eyes, etc.), but the Reverse Flash seems to oscillate between 'Zoom' and 'Professor Zoom'. Should I take this to mean that both villains are in the game doing different things in this mini version of the DCU, or was this just an oversight when doing the conversion? They all seem to have the appearance of Zolomon, but have Eobard's characterization. Something similar seems to be going on with the Rogues in this game. A couple of places refer to this Mirror Master as Evan McCulloch (Wally's MM) as opposed to Sam Scudder (Barry's MM). Captain Boomerang in the HoD looks a lot like Owen Mercer while the bounty seems to be meant to be Digger Harkness. Are both versions of these two characters meant to be present here? These are small and pretty much non-issues in the big picture of the game, but the part of my brain that holds on to lore keeps getting poked every time I notice these things
A.) Fifteen nerd points. B.) I think if you want a 'hypothetical' explanation for it that assuages your mental faculties (that isn't just 'developer oversight') : Consider that the primary introduction of the Flash and all related villains on the ground floor of the Central City content are adjunct immediately to the 'Nexus of Reality' concept, specifically introduced as 'Time Paradox' induction forces, but directly associated almost immediately thereafter with the Nexus of Reality and associated 'stuff' - specifically, both the Origin Crisis operations (Brothers in Arms and Family Affairs) Start in Central City Center around the Paradox forces manifest as a result of time travel Specifically reference alternate reality manifestation as a direct consequence of the aforementioned time travel Since the Flash is, to be frank, the most likely hero to act in direct response to any sort of incursion occurring as a result of villain attempts to alter the historical timeline, it makes quite a bit of sense that his personal timeline (at least for game purposes) would have become very muddied as a result. Many of the villains are identical for Barry and Wally, the sole exception being the person behind the villainous persona and the direct connection involved : it makes a certain amount of sense that, since they are already directly involved with the Flash, they would also be pretty much directly attached to whatever manifestations of altered reality that occurred afterwards as a result. Basically, since they're at ground zero, some of them may have gotten temporally displaced into an alternate timeline as a result of that proximity to the place where the largest occurrences of reality divergence were occurring, and as a secondary result - because let's face it, you wake up in a weird place and see that The Flash (a.k.a. 'The Man Most Solely Responsible For The Annoyances In Your Life') is still around, well, you're going to take him into account in your activities first and bother figuring out who he actually is second, thereby paving the way for the direct involvement of this jumbled melange of villains afterwards.
Op, If you make a search here at the forums, you'll find that when Rage powers was released there were a lot of players having difficulties making up DC Comics stories with the story line used in DCUO and created a lot of threads and posts here at the forums about it. At that moment Spytle and Mepps clearly stated that even thou this is DC Universe Online, it is it's own universe and in many things will not make sense with the stories already published by DC in the Comics. That includes but are not restricted to names, character origins, powers associations and justifications, and so on and on. So don't stress out about the small details because DCUO it's his own multiverse. My 2 cents.
Other forms of media besides the comics (but sometimes even the comics) have always had a hard time with characterization of characters that have multiple people holding the same hero/villain name, mostly is due because sometimes one of them is more well-know than others, sometimes is because they don't want the hassle of explaining certain transitions. Usually happens to characters that have died and someone else took on the mantle The inconsistencies with Flash-related content has always been a problem in media, but it's safe to assume that the main Flash in the game is Barry and Zoom is Eobard for the sake of keeping things grounded, and also because Kid Flash is in the game and he is Wally and not Bart Thing is, since Barry came back in what 2008/9 or something? they kind-of had to re-do the Flash-verse, and a lot of traits that were established when Wally was the main Flash continued on when Barry took over again, such as when Eobard came back to life he had the crazed personality that Hunter had, and since Hunter wasn't Zoom anymore they kind of brushed him off and let the revived Eobard be more of a mixture of both. Same happened with Barry, in a way. The "fun nice guy" personality is much more a Wally thing, but they had to incorporate that on Barry to make Barry interesting and likable, because Original Barry was as bland as a cardboard. Lots of retcons in the 90-00's caused a lot of confusion in other media in terms of which characterization to use on their content, especially when the content isn't a direct adaption of a story (I.e most DC-Related games (such as DCUO), the cartoons and live action movies) Unless its one of DC's animated movies it's unlikely that characterization will be specific because those are usually the only ones directly based off real arcs in comics, like Under the Red Hood or Flashpoint. Media will often use the more popular versions of the characters for their content, even if its not consistent with the lore, just for the sake of representation But anyway This pretty much sums it up
