DC Universe Online’s 10th DLC addition, Amazon Fury Part 1, recently went live for all players and we had a chance to get a personal tour of the new content by DCUO senior creative director Jens Andersen.
As the first part of a new trilogy of DLC packs, Amazon Fury Part I kicks off a story arc involving Themyscira, home to the Amazons and Wonder Woman. The original game’s storyline involved Brainiac’s plot to digitize the multiverse, leading to his attacks on Earth’s centers of technology, metahumans, and magic. Earth’s center of magic is Themyscira, and Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, didn’t take too kindly to Brainiac’s incursion.
As part of this new story arc, Hippolyta seeks to exact vengeance on Brainiac by attacking his center of operations in Gotham City and she’s basically thrown the mortal world under the bus along with him, blaming mortals in part for Brainiac’s successes. Themyscira isn’t united behind Hippolyta’s plan and that’s where DCUO’s hero and villain players come in. Heroes will band together with Wonder Woman and her rebellion against Hippolyta while villains will join with Wonder Woman’s sister, Circe, who supports her mother’s plan.
Amazon Fury Part I’s overworld content takes place in a separate phase of Gotham City that is under siege by Hippolyta’s forces. Brainiac’s base of operations in South Gotham is contained by a gigantic magical shield, while the rest of Gotham City is essentially a massive battleground between forces loyal to Hippolyta and Wonder Woman’s rebels.
Players can pick up three of nine total (the three available to you each day are randomized) daily quests in this area from various Amazon characters. Jens was particularly proud of the variety of experiences players will be able to partake in as part of these new quests as well as the interactions players will be able to have with notable characters from Greek mythology, such as satyrs, harpies, cockatrices, and phoenixes.
SOE likes to focus its DLC packs on specific experience types. Some DLC packs are focused more on small group or solo content, while other DLC packs emphasize the larger group activities. Amazon Fury Part I’s content is geared more towards the former, coming in with two solo instances, two Duos, and a four player Alert.
Iconic Visions are DLC10’s solo instances. While playing through this content, players will actually play as either Wonder Woman or Circe (depending on which Vision they’re playing) and this will give players the opportunity to see the backstory of the civil war through the eyes of each side’s standard bearers. Jens also made note of the fact these Iconic Visions are a great way for players who primarily play PvE to experience what it’s like to play as some of DCUO’s most iconic characters. Typically, these experiences are generally reserved for the game’s Legends PvP mode.
The Duos take place in Themyscira’s docks and involve either supplying or disrupting the supply lines of Hippolyta’s invisible armada. Jens showed off one of the Duos for us and this is also where he gave us a demo of one of DLC10’s biggest features: Weapon Mastery.
Prior to Weapon Mastery, players could animation cancel or ‘clip’ as Jens calls it to maximize damage output, but this has been a bit controversial with some players who dislike having to disrupt the visual flow of combat to maximize damage. For SOE, Weapon Mastery kills two birds with one stone. Weapon Mastery allows players who have wanted to create multi-weapon characters to do so by using the system to combo from one weapon into another as long as they invest the 20+ points required to do so and pick up the associated cross-weapon combos. In doing so, this also offers players who dislike clipping an opportunity to maximize DPS output without having to rely on clipping.
For even more advanced play, clipping can be combined with Weapon Mastery to mitigate one of clipping’s major drawbacks: extreme power consumption. Since weapon combos build power, it’s possible to use weapon mastery to keep DPS pumping while building up power for your next rotation of clipped powers.
Oh, and did we mention that Weapon Mastery is actually a free addition to DCUO with the launch of DLC10? Initially, SOE intended to keep Weapon Mastery as part of the paid DLC package, but ultimately decided that Weapon Mastery was such an integral addition to combat that they would make it available to everyone regardless of whether or not they purchased Amazon Fury Part I.
Wrapping our tour up, Jens gave us a small peek at DLC10’s four man Alert. The Alert features a neat capture point mechanic where players will need to capture three flags in connected areas to progress, but captures must be done quickly or the enemy forces will recapture their territory. This means players must either group and quickly capture points or split up and attempt to take points separately. Once past this area, there are two sub bosses and a final boss that players must defeat in order to complete the Alert. The two sub-bosses are randomly selected from a pool of possible bosses and players are able to make decisions upon beating each of the sub-bosses that determine which character(s) they will face as their final boss encounter, adding a nice layer of replayability to the content.
Amazon Fury Part I is now available free to Members or for $9.99 for non-Members.
Michael Bitton / Michael began his career at the WarCry Network in 2005 as the site manager for several different WarCry fansite portals. In 2008, Michael worked for the startup magazine Massive Gamer as a columnist and online news editor. In June of 2009, Michael joined MMORPG.com as the site's Community Manager. Follow him on Twitter @eMikeB
