It’s nearly been a month since the launch of DC Universe Online, and as the last of the free thirty days of play time begin to dry up, we look back at how the game has been been received, how it has changed, and what lies ahead.
If you are someone who has been sitting on the fence for the past four or so weeks, wondering whether to take the plunge, you will find that casting a glance at Metacritic and Gamerankings won’t help you make the decision. Though most reviews have been honing in at around the 70% mark, the overall reception has been somewhat scattered. At one end of the spectrum you have the critics who curse upon DCUO for its sluggish interface and failure to cater towards the PS3 playerbase directly. However, at the other end are reviewers, including myself, who saw past the minor and mostly cosmetic issues, to actually “finish” the game and get a clearer sense of the big picture.
That’s not to say that anyone is right; DC Universe Online is a completely unique experience to the home console and though it may enlighten some, it can just as easily ward away others, which makes the task of passing judgment an incredibly tough one. The best advice I can give is to actually take the time to read through some of the reviews on the web (including TSA’s feature-length analysis) and not just glance over the scores.
As mentioned before, when DCUO went live for the PlayStation 3, a plethora of issues were uncovered, including the awkward interface and crippling bugs. Sure, it was a mess, and sometimes unplayable, though as MMOs of the past have proven, there is no such thing as an easy landing, no matter how many beta stages the game goes through. Needless to say, the majority of these problems have been fixed; the menus are speedier and easy to navigate, with the frame-rate having improved radically. It’s still far from perfect, and Sony Online Entertainment have acknowledged this, vowing that future updates will refine the interface, making it more streamlined for console players.
When it was announced that DC Universe Online would be tagged with a monthly subscription fee of £9.99, many were in doubt that it would ever find a foothold, especially among the PS3 community. However in its debut week the game managed to break into the sales charts, and since release, it has been reported that there is almost an equal number of PC and PlayStation 3 players.
Though it looks to have been a success, there is always the looming question of whether people will eject themselves from the streets of Gotham and Metropolis as soon as their free trial is over; after all it only takes around a couple of weeks to hit the max level.
To draw the crowd back in, SOE have announced that there will be monthly content updates and seasonal events, with a new Catwoman episode and Valentine’s instance becoming available later this month. There is also a limited time offer to bag 90 days of play time for £19.99, though this could have a dual meaning: Sony could be treating its playerbase, but cynics would argue that the MMO is already in a state of decline.
hazelam
for me the problem was once you hit thirty everything suddenly get ludicrously hard all of a sudden.
i tried duos and alerts that give you the mark of allegience and whatever the other ones were called, and the group had our arses handed to us.
actually we survived the smallville alert, with a few deaths here and there, but we couldn’t protect the devices from the doomdays so we never got part the first part of the alert.
tried a raid once, but there were two people in there when i got there, and then after five minutes or so they left, then being the only one left, so did i.
i’ll be keeping my copy though, i’ll give the game another try every few months or so, hopefully they’ll have community features in the game that aren’t a total pain in the arse to use, i have a usb keyboard, they need to stop that on screen keyboard coming up if i use that, because then i don’t need it, and some sort of LFG/LFM interface would do wonders for the game.
i’d say there’s still work that needs doing to bring the game up to scratch, especially on ps3.
mind you i don’t have a lot of experience with mmos at launch, the only one i played from launch was coh, and that had already been running in the us for nearly a year before the eu launch, so that’s not really a fair comparison wih dcuo.
Jim H [Teabags]
Without a league to lean back on, it will be hard finding reliable groups for the endgame. However, SOE are working on some new features to improve the interface which should have a knock-on effect for community features, too.
Kevling
What server are you guys on? I don’t know anyone with the game (the friends I played with on the beta haven’t bought it yet), and would rather team up with people I “know” rather than the great unwashed… ;)
I posted a thread in the forum, but was surprised to not get a single response from anyone actually playing. [sad face]