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I really tried to like this game. Because I had to buy the client to try it, I forced myself to play this game on a few characters and tried out a good number of the game’s mechanics, power styles, and weapons styles.
What I found disappointed me. The game isn’t very good. For me, it isn’t good enough for me to waste my time; I’ll just take the client’s price as a loss and move on.
First, the control scheme stinks. The player is forced to use wasd to control the character’s movement (along with spacebar). The mouse controls facing. To activate your melee powers, you use the right and left mouse buttons.
“Special” powers and “healing potions” are used by mashing the number keys.
If you put your hands on the keyboard, you’ll find that this makes it fairly hard to control your character AND press those keys.
Also, the function keys bring up menus. Hit an F4, for instance, and you’ll be doomed to mash enter a few times and then grab the mouse to click an “x” before it goes away. You’ll be dead by then.
Second, all power sets appear to be pretty much the same in what they do. Quite a few of the powers simply suck and you wouldn’t really take them. I did find some use for some of them, but I had to *make* that use up.
Third, the content is the most linear I have ever seen in a game. I played 6 characters all from the 3 different bosses. However, each experience is exactly the same after level 6. Since the tutorial is unavoidable and takes you to level 3 AND is exactly the same in every case (as well as boring), that is a whole lot of linear.
Also, WHAT you do in those missions is also extremely limited. Press E and hold (the way you interact with something), break something, beat up someone, and carry something somewhere. That’s it.
In addition, killing mobs provides a useless amount of experience. (say less than 1/100th of a level) They provide insignificant drops that’re mostly trash loot.
In fact, the VENDORS provide better equipment for the most part than the scarce loot missions provide. (There just aren’t very many missions and you’ll get at MOST 1 piece per mission.)
Fourth, the costume system blows ass! How can they do that in a super-hero game? Good has already been done (CoX)! All they had to do was copy that success. But they didn’t. I have no idea why they didn’t do this, but your choices are extremely limited. I assumed that you could probably get drops later that would allow you to improve this and in some cases you can. But… they’re drops.
Fifth, the targeting system is wonky. You can use tab to lock in a target, but you will always target something; and some of those powers fling you a loooong way or have a long range. With powers that require you to click-click-click-click-hold a button (no, that is not an exaggeration), you will blast something off screen and be in another fight.
Another joy is when you are in the middle of a fight with a group of baddies bashing on you and you target a barrel. Yep, you begin beating that barrel as they’re whomping the crap out of you. Retarget? Reach up there and press that tab button. You’ll be cycling through every piece of trash on the planet before you reach the mobs you’re trying to bash.
Sixth, bugs bugs bugs. As I write this, the mail system for the entire game has been down for several DAYS waiting on a fix. Since you get rewards through this system, that impacts your game play. Not to mention, in order to get in on the PVP game chain at lower levels, you have to receive a chip via email to start that process.
Almost every feature in the game has bugs; from the missions (there is a chain-halting issue with a hospital mission where you cannot pick something up and therefore can’t finish the mission. This has apparently been broken for weeks?), to pets (your pets sometimes stop working or responding or go haywire and run off attacking other distant mobs), to instances (I’ve had mobs stuck in walls in probably 4 of the 12 instances I ran?), to the UI (try to remap those function keys. At some point, it will click through the OK menu and you’ll forcibly remap your right-click. You’ll have to work your way around the long way to get it back.); a lot in this game is buggy.
I’m sure bugs also impact the PVP realms, but I didn’t play them as much. There is a VERY long list of bugs on the website, but you’ll have to be a subscriber before you can see them. That should be a danger signal right there.
The seventh issue is all the miscellaneous stuff that didn’t fit in the other categories. A brief series of paragraphs below describe some additional concerns.
Your power choices are VERY limited. They might look slightly different, but the weapon-style you chose will be a much greater concern.
I played almost every choice in powers (I didn’t do fire for some reason) and most of the weapons styles (I didn’t do brawling) up to the midgame. (It only took a couple of hours at most for each one.) Sadly, almost all of your experience and reward comes from completing the mission, so there is no reason to hang around any given site.
You finish the mission and move on. This is kind of sad since the cities (Gotham and Metropolis) are fairly well done. They are interesting visually and the layout is actually engaging. If they did one thing right it’d be the city layout.
Some of the combat moves are useless. For instance, in several of the styles there is a hold that “builds up” to power through something. However, your basic click attack does more damage over time and produces the same effects. So, why?
While you can pick stuff up and bash a mob or throw something at it, EVERYONE can do this. And it is slow and it doesn’t do much damage and you can be interrupted fairly easily. So it really makes no sense. If it did, though, then no one would use powers or weapons at all. You’d be lurching about hurling bits of junk at each other.
So, with all this stuff being wrong is the game worth playing at all? Not unless you get the client for free. This is the ONLY game Sony has at the moment that requires you to buy the client. The reason for that is because they know that this game is the craptastic one of the bunch and you wouldn’t play it if you hadn’t been forced to put in some money for it up front.
I mean, it really is a very shallow kid’s game of click click click click click click hold adnauseum. FreeRealms, Sony’s kids targeted micro-transaction game is worlds deeper. Your powers are fairly superfluous outside of some healing or something else similar. You can decide to use them, but they aren’t necessary even at the midgame.
I guess, in conclusion, with everything wrong with this game (and I didn’t include it all), I’m upset at having spent the money on the client. Having played a large number of games before (I won’t bore you with them at the moment), even Ryl (which sucked badly) didn’t disappoint me as bad or as quickly.
I’d say this game is on par with Champions Online (in which I lasted an hour) and Star Trek Online (in which I laughingly quit after a day).
As a final (!) note, the game is also empty. You will rarely see other players, even during prime-time. The merged servers have never been above low when I’ve been playing. Also, you have to queue up for the PVP game and I’ve waited hours (yes, plural) and never had a game fill up enough to join. The usually played games (like 4v4 legends) take in-between 10 minutes and an hour to join.
I understand some people like/love/play this game, and that’s cool. However, I feel it is appropriate to at least get some kind of state-of-the-game stuff out there for others to see.
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8/20/11 2:07:40 PM#2
Looks like a review from someone who didnt really play the game. But lets go though your list.
1) You know.. you can completely costimize your keybindings, for me personally using my FPS keylay out worked rather well. -To be honoust Im amazed to run into a person who didnt figure out (most) games including DCUO alow you to customize keybindings. Yes powers and healing potions are on a mash the button principle, you know.. kinna like 99% of all games out there. Controlling your character is extremely easy to pick up for anyone with FPS experiance. Where using mouse and keyboard at the same time is kinna.. mandetory to be successfull.
I do agree the menu system isnt ideal, though even at release it wasnt a huge issue, most of the lag/delays have been resolved,
2) Power sets are very different for every Powertype (ice-fire etc etc), all having their own advantages, granted alot of the powers are designed based on a role, dps and tanking for instance, some powers are designed more or less to be a hybrid type of power. But yes some powers do suck, though this is mostly related to your playstyle AND weapon of choise.
3) Just like every game progress is somewhat linair, though every mentor has their own story lines, unavaileble to those who picked a different mentor, but yes, like.. every mmo out there most quests/missions are the same for everyone else. Except unlike too many mmos out there, most missions ARE faction restricted. Yes , in pretty much every mmo out there , missions are pick up X , deliver Y, kill Z, so yes you are right DCUO is no different then other mmo's. Though most missions have an actual story to back it up.
Vendors, with the expection of end game token gear is inverior to drops, the missions provide rather well as well as bosses at the end of mission zones always drop sometimes, but RNG=RNG, you wont always get the best gear for your power/role.
But you are right, this game isnt a xp grinding game, most xp comes from missions which enable you to lvl rather fast actually.
4) Custumes are amasing, there hardly are games out there at all that alows you even a fraction of customization to apperance of gear. There are litterly thousands of different options per slot, not only that even the collours can be altered, granted there are only 3 collour slots availeble.
5) While I agee the targeting system isnt ideal, tab targetting works fine.. most of the time, not only that actual target locking isnt required in most cases, you can use the crosshair works prefectly fine. So yes you are right, the combat of this game is more or less a hybrid betwine FPS and the more traditional mmo, mostly FPS based though. Just like in the comics and movies superheroes mostly use more down to earth kind of fighting and only use their special powers to enhance that. Just look at superman, mostly involved in fist fights, hardly using special powers like his laser eyes or freeze breath.
6) Bugs, yes just like very mmo out there this game has bugs, that said, this game probebly IS one of least bug infested games out there, heck even WoW isnt doing this well after all these years. Most bugs arent even worth calling an minor inconveniance. But if you want to pull strings.. gues the bug card works. Sure bugs do make an impact on pvp, just like every other mmo out there, then again most of them in dcuo arent even worth mentioning.
7) yes Skills from powers are limited, just like in every other mmo, atleast in dcuo they bothered to make skills look different, unlike (most) mmos where every melee attack looks identical, and IF you are lucky using ranged attack X or spell Y having a different collour.
Yes weaponskill points arent that hard to get, you get them from lvling as well as achievement(wait what? achievements actually do something in this game???) And you are right leveling in this game is fairly fast. But if you considering getting a weapon skill after only couple of hours fast.. I wouldnt recommend WoW, people managed to make 80-85 under 4 hours played.
The rest of your rant isnt worth reacting to, you sound like just another basher for the sake of bashing, so this isnt your kind of game, which is fine, you are garanteed to run into that no matter what you try. Some games just arent your thing. That and.. I still highly doubt you actually DID try the game, if you did I highly doubt you actually DID get past lvl 6. Heck the gear on the hide-out vendors was barely worth getting after getting out of the tutorial. |
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8/20/11 4:36:27 PM#3
Originally posted by Paithan Did you really make this statement? COH has 10 times more customization and Champoins Online has sooooooo much more customization that you can literally spend hours in character design. As far as some of things you said, I do agree that a person who has played other FPS games on a computer, that it is easy to customize and get a hang of the game, but the games is broken badly and not just on the PC. The hospital quest is broken on the PC and the PS 3 and, if you play on the PS 3, this game is almost completely unplayable. I have been playing DC Universe since beta and I own it on both systems, but I can no longer accept the state that the game is in now. I might return after the Fight for the Light DLC, but right now the game is bleeding players faster than The LA Dodger Stadium. |
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8/20/11 10:55:15 PM#4
I'd like to add that a Logitech F310 (I think around $20 and looks exactly like a PS3 controller) changes this game GREATLY. It's still awkward to do some things if you're used to the traditional PC mmo, but I love combat with a controller (Note: You have to "calibrate" the joystick from the startup box where you login, not the game itself, or else you'll have mixed up X and Y axis). I even saw a bundle deal at Target recently where you get a discount on DCO if you buy the controller, though not much of a discount from what I vaguely remember. That being said, I played at launch and just tried the game again since I'm in flux on where to go in an mmo right now. I'm really trying to like this game but sadly the character creation, lack of people, and difficult way to socialize is just killing it for me. I mean, only 3 colors for everything you wear??? In my humble opinion it's hard to create a character that isn't either a bad looking knock off of one of the popular DC characters or something just stupid, like a 1980's Mad Max over-spiked bad guy (No offense to the over-spiked people out there). I haven't experienced the bugs but I would almost expect them to be there after my total frustration with trying to use aspects of the UI. I'm a DC fanboy but ugh this last year or so has been rough... at least we have the Batman movies.
*Edited to add note about calibrating joystick |
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