My thoughts on DCUO after a couple weeks of play..the good, bad, what it needs, and what needs to go

Originally I was just wandering around abit between mmo's to see what was out there. Eq2 was becoming tiresome, and after about 20 years playing the mud/mmo genre I wanted to see if there was anything genuinely new to experience. The prospect of playing a superhero(villain) was fascinating so I decided to give DCUO a whirl. After going through the entire main questlines (both hero and villain) and then instanced content for a couple weeks, these are the impressions I got.

The Good

• Movement/Flight Mechanics - Well done movement mechanics, especially flight. Smooth animations, no issues dropping below the world (yet)
• Base Mechanics and Decorator Mode - Well implemented, easy to use/place objects. Henchmen and package/tactical drops is a neat idea
• Quest Organization - I'd have to say this is pretty well done too. No issues with chaining from one quest to another, side quest npcs are intuitively placed near main quest objectives

The Bad

• Very Gear-Centric Progression - Now don't get me wrong, I believe that having an avenue of achievement through getting better 'gear' is in itself a good idea. It just can't be the only avenue. As far as content is concerned, there seems to be little else that matters in terms of what you can and cannot engage in, other than gear rating (CR). This is after both running some of the content myself, and reading a number of the gameplay threads in this section made by other players on the subject. This invariably leads to monotony, and once someone achieves a max or near-maximum CR per content they will simply leave (see Eq2).

• Static Worldspaces - With a creative license to make a world full of super powerful meta humans, of the size you made it, I must admit I was expecting a little more in terms of interactivity. Yes, you can attack nps. Yes, you can pick up many objects (including large vehicles). I liked the timed races too. But why is the rest of the city indestructible? I understand quest relevant objects and buildings being unbreakable, but everything else? Why the city wasn't made in a voxel base to allow for more tactical pvp/pve (not to mention making super strength much more relevant)? Missed an opportunity there, I think.

• Replay Badges - I'm not going to touch on this much as I'm sure you've heard plenty from your own player base on this subject by now. These should *not* be purchaseable. These should be an achievement reward attainable by everyone.

What This Needs

• Enhanced Teamwork & Cooperative Play Mechanics - Add synergy bonuses to people who play together in certain roles regularly which give boosts to their most relevant abilities. Add inter-power combos/chains for special non power-specific effects or an especially powerful version of a base ability which completes a chain (you have weapon mastery combos already, the logic is the same). If you add an incentive for people to group up, they will. Allow achievements to award power points as well as skill points. In conjunction with this, allow people to put more than 1 point into each power ability (including iconics) as a higher proficiency for it (do the same thing for skills). Let's say, arbitrarily, you can have up to 5 ranks in any particular power ability. This will allow for more diversification among players with the same power set. It should also help kill cookie cutter builds, and make inter-power combos more varied in potency.

• Worldspace Random Events & Threat Level - Quest areas and nps excluded, you seem to have vast stretches of city in both Metropolis and Gotham that are just 'there'. They don't really serve any purpose. It kind of reminds me of the GTA series in some places. You already have the diamond heist pvp event. What I'm suggesting here is very similar in premise...but in this case you would be applying a random element to it. Each non quest-essential building would have a random chance of having an activatable event associated with it. It basically becomes a "priority target". There would be different types of priority targets. Some would be science labs, some tech factories, some banks, or a specialty of something else. There would also be different degrees of priority. The higher the priority, the more difficult the encounter, if engaged, would be (of course, higher risk will equate to higher reward). A supervillain or team of supervillains in a league could get together and decide maybe they need more tech to augment their gear in some way, let's say. They can just pull up the city map, and identify the Tech priority targets. They decide how good of a team they can put together, and pick a target of doable priority. They move to the site, zone-in, and go through a short instance. If they're successful (this first part is the easiest), they would zone out with whatever they took and receive a base worldspace threat level/rating. As the next part of the event, they would start to encounter waves of increasingly difficult law enforcement targets who try to stop them from getting away (first street police, then detectives, then SWAT, then Sci-Police, then STAR battlesuits). As they eliminate these targets their threat level will gradually increase. Once it becomes high enough an alert or notice will appear (either on the map or near where the bounty posters at the police stations are) with event info (names of supervillains involved, priority target type, reward, CR requirements, etc). If a group of superheroes meets the CR requirements (this would be based on the CRs of the villains involved, so that we don't have 4 superheros with 120 CR avg. running after 4 villains with 70 CR, for example), they could 'accept' the bounty and go engage the villains in pvp. If they successfully beat all the villains involved and return the stolen whatever it is to the turn-in npc they get the reward (marks etc). If they fail or no one shows up to contest the villains, the villains get a smaller reward (marks etc) in addition to getting to keep their raid spoils. You can even spice things up and involve the Justice League by adding an emergency signal to the com unit (where we sometimes get quest related dialogue through). If a superhero team in this situation drops below a certain health percentage and is about to get beat, they could use the emergency signal to call the Justice League (or supervillains the Legion of Doom). When they do they will get a base chance of a response. Most times they will get an 'all units currently engaged' response (a fail). But if they succeed a member of the JL(LoD) shows up and engages (Superman, Luthor, WW, Circe, etc). You could do all kinds of things with this but I think this post is already too long as it is. Use your imagination. In short, give players content they can engage on THEIR terms vs. making them run the same instances endlessly.

• Grapple System - In a combat system with a good variety of weapons, this is the only conspicuous hole. Holds, throws, even wrestling moves with impact damage would be very cool, not to mention of tactical use

• Instanced Raids or Worldspace Incursion Events by Iconic DC universal threats - I know Brainiac is the primary antagonist here, but I'd like to see other universal threats make their presence known too. Personalities from the more well known comic book arcs like Darkseid, Antimonitor, Superboy Prime, Mongol, Nekkron, Amazo, Crime Syndicate, etc

Continuation...

What Needs to Go

• CR Requirements on *all* instances - It serves no purpose, won't make anyone a better player over the long run, and it isn't fun. If people want to try harder content than what they're used to (and get better 'gear' as a result), let them. If a group wants to carry their undergeared friend through higher tier content, let them. If a league wants to do the same with one of their lower members to get them more prepared for top tier raids as a lead member...let them. Also, remove mentor locks on instances. The only locks should be good/evil. You're taking nothing away from anyone else in removing these restrictions. Don't restrict members (especially the paying ones) from content. Like I said, speaking from experience, it's pointless and will only get you on the player's bad side.

• Buyable Replay Badges - I touched on this earlier. No one in this business wants to be known as Pay to Win. So let's try to set a good example, shall we?

• Content so difficult as to require one specific lineup - Challenging content is fine, content that requires a league to leave their preferred teammates behind is not fine. Granted, at the end of the day you have to walk a fine line between challenge and convenience. But at the end of the day it's enjoying the experience that is most important. And experiences are always best when in good company.

All in all, I think by being a Superhero/Supervillain mmo DCUO had a lot going for it that other games in the genre simply didn't and were capable of doing things many of them couldn't. When someone comes in wanting to play DCUO, I'm willing to bet (most cases) they want to roleplay a Superhero like the ones they read about in comics or saw on TV growing up to do something cool (instead of running through the same warehouse, beating up the same bad guy, taking his contraband, and then snoozing the rest of the day, every day). Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
It's pretty fun in spots, but when you run out of quests to do or buddies to do them with, things really drop off. At that point the classic, oldschool mmo tropes of grind money, grind gear, watch scoreboard, repeat...take over. We (and I think I speak for most of us), don't need something else repetitive or monotonous to do in our lives. We're already surrounded by it most of the time, at home, at work, at school, etc. We get tired of it, it makes us cynical. I'd also go as far as suggest this contributes to much of the 'toxic community' I keep reading about around here. But in all I don't think DCUO's community is noticeably better or worse than most of the ones I've been a part of. That being said almost all of them have the same root problem. We're here to get away from it all, to be someone else and have fun...instead of counting money or watching a scoreboard.
Still, it's good enough that I'll probably hang around and join a league soon. Good company should help minimize the time I've got nothing to do (except grind). And when there's nothing to do, you'll find me asleep in the corner of that warehouse with contraband in tow...dreaming of Power Girl.

I saw p2w in there regarding replay badges. Make sure you look twice before crossing the road because the YouTube Fa nboys will be on the hunt for you now. My opinion? They aren't really p2w since there are no leaderboards and the only thing you're beating is your wallet or the NPC. It used to be worse when replay badges could be used for PvP matches to obtain PvP gear. Think I geared up in less than a day through 4 tiers back in the day. Cost a 'penny' though. Thankfully they removed that but at around the same time they also broke PvP and they haven't fixed it since.

thanks for the insight. A couple of weeks of playtime is a ton.

Removing the cr restrictions on content would put us right back to prior gu36 where you could power lvl players to endgame, this resulted in a giant influx of bad players particularly dps.

However everything else you stated is spot on

Sorry, but my eyes hurt now.

Good thing you haven't been playing for nearly 4 years now......the post would be too long to read.

Valid points and ideas and basically everything he's said here from just a few weeks has been said en masse for years here.
That says a metric ton about how visible the game strengths and weaknesses are/

i agree. if someone who played only a few weeks can already see the problems with this game..that's not good.

I'm telling you right now Marvel is looking at DCUO and is looking at how to do it other and can probably back it up with the billions it made from their movies along with disney...(Not that crappy Marvel game they tried to release). One day there will be an Marvel Online game and if they do a better version of this game which shouldn't be too hard since all you have to do is take all the good from this game none of the bad and look at what people want from this game and put it in yours. I thnik there will be a Marvel Online and please hope its that the Hero Squad mess they tried too. Lol...

The thing is though most MMO allows you to travel to areas where you will simply die but with the right group you can get the right gear and the next thing you know you are in end game with better gear. DCUO stopped that with Gates and Gotham Waste Land. I walked into Gotham at CR 78ish with a league mate that was CR 106 I think. if you were grouped up you could get in. I needed one piece of 80 gear to get me to CR 80 to run the solo content. I got it and I moved up my CR.

Back than players were taking in game money for Gate Walkins. No worst than resetting raids today. I think the cost than was 250K.

DCUO is still evolving as a MMO. It is different as it does not have to follow anyone other than DC direction. It is unique in its game play that you can fly, run fast or zip between buildings. I forgot I was not flying in ESO and ops...fell off a cliff and died. LOL...

Let me know when such a title comes out on console. Until then, there's only DCUO for your SUPER HERO MMO needs, and other games if it's just an MMO fix you want.

I hope to see this pipe dream come true...they are taking forever to come out with a true MMO that can rival DCUO or CO.

Welcome to dcuo

Oh boy, you didn't do PVP did you?

Dcuo should really hit big with the crafting systems, like for instance since exobytes are the main reason we got our powers.

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback on your time playing dcuo, many of your points showed insight far beyond the short time you have played, which is good and sad to see at the same time.

Unfortunately, many of your points fall on deaf ears as far as DGC goes as words like dynamic, deep, and challenging no longer seem hold much weight in the new casual dcuo world.

His read tho, how long did that take to type out =)?

Good* read - mobile phone etc

Pay to win has nothing to do with leaderboards. It's about paying real money to advance your character. Replays don't directly do that, but close enough. You could debate on it not truly being p2w, but not because no leaderboard.

I logged on to express my deep interest in your open world PvE/PvP mash up idea. I think something like that could really breath some new life into this game.

I've been playing around on ESO and it's just not as fun for me. However, it is new and there is A LOT to do. DCUO has just been too quiet to hold my attention. I hope it gets it back with the new episode system.

I never said the implementation in DCUO was pay to win. In my opinion, it's totally not. If there were leaderboards then of course the players that reset and ran the content all day for a few days will have better times due to better gear. They aren't included in the game so this isn't the case. You can buy a reset from another player if you're a subscriber or have a friend unlock it for you so there are methods that are easily obtainable through other methods.