Editor's note: I'm still pretty darn worn out from the frenetic pace of New York Comic-Con this past weekend. My entire body hurts. Expect a good amount of post-con reporting over the next few days as I sift through my notes, photos, and edit together a few videos which will hopefully be fairly rad. For now, though, let's just start off with something easy, the first massively multiplayer online game to officially license characters and scenarios from one of the biggest pop-culture publishers in the world...oh lord, what am I doing?
One of the biggest crowd-pleaser games at New York Comic-Con was Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. The massively multiplayer online action title was set up for anyone to play using either keyboard and mouse or or the Playstation DualShock3 and there was a panel discussion about the game featuring several members of Sony's design team along with human-style-guide Jim Lee and story and scenario writers Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Those names should sound very familiar to you if you're read any superhero comics in the past twenty years or so.
That they referred to it as an MMO action game rather than an MMO RPG is very telling in what we saw from the presentation and our play sessions. It plays just like all the other open-world action brawlers, only you're playing with other people to either cooperate or compete in objectives which are continuously sent to you from the game's servers (cleverly disguised in Hero mode as Oracle from Batman and Justice League). Run, jump, smash, repeat, no arcane spell casting. Super powers and otherwise special skills are relegated to a line of icons at the bottom of the HUD and activated (on the DualShock) by holding down the left or right trigger and pressing the button that corresponded with the power you wanted to use - circle, square, triangle or X. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but no more so than any other 3D action game.
A couple of interesting points raised during the Q&A session:
- Right now, the developers are able to play PS3 co-op and versus with PC on the same network but are unsure if this will be possible in the final retail copy. They'd love it if everyone could play together. "It would be better if everyone just had a PS3."
- The disc release will only be "the first part" of the game as there will be seasonal downloadable updates with new stories and objectives that should keep the game up to date with the comics. Apparently this game is a new full-time job for Jim, Geoff and Marv.
- Regarding the customization options on building your own heroes/villains, one audience member asked "Am I gonna see billions of other ice guys who look just like me?" This question was met with a resounding "No!"
- When asked how failure/death would be handled and if, like in other MMOs, players would be need to worry about corpse runs, Jim Lee joked "You'll have to wait a year so we can relaunch you." Seriously, though, heroes and villains don't die in DCUO, they just get "knocked out." After a few seconds you will be given the option to get back up, just with slightly reduced health and energy.
- All of the environments will be unique and instantly discernible (no confusing Gotham City with STAR Labs).
- Pedestrians are affected by your character's Threat level. Throwing a bus will upset them, regardless of whether you're a villain or hero, but just walking down the street, villains have a higher Threat level. In the slums, though, villains fit in just fine and heroes stick out. No need to worry about protecting civilians from collateral damage as the NPCs of DCUO "will be amazingly agile."
There's still a good amount of development time to go on this game, and Sony's not rushing it out to meet a deadline. That said, the demo we played was definitely a good start. It played very similar to another Con crowd pleaser, Activision's Prototype, only without all the zombies and mass destruction. The real competition, of course, if the likes of Champions Online, who are at the distinct disadvantage of not having Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and company in their game. No subscription plan has been decided on yet, or even whether there will be one on the PS3 version, but this may just wind up being the first MMO that I will play until it ruins my life. The controls are very action-gamer-friendly and the prospect of teaming up with friends as our own heroes or villains within the DC Universe is a tantalizing one indeed.
Related articles:
DC Universe and the Console MMO Conundrum
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Batman Can't Even Land A Punch On Superman In A Video Game
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