Plot: DC Universe Online is set in the present day, but the opening cinematic sequence takes place in a gritty, war-torn future depicting a final battle between the world’s greatest heroes and villains.
This battle takes place in the ruins of Metropolis, and features the deaths of several well-known DC Comics characters. The battle culminates with the death of Superman at the hands of Lex Luthor, leaving him and the Joker as the survivors. Luthor stands back to proclaim his victory, only to see Brainiac’s warfleet fill the skies.
The scene then shifts to the present-day Watchtower, where the future Luthor is telling the story to the present-day Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Luthor explains that the deadly final war between the heroes and villains was triggered by the subtle manipulations of Brainiac, who had been slowly downloading their powers over time. With the planet’s most powerful beings dead, Brainiac intended to use the pirated data to create an army of metahumans under his control, facilitating his conquest of Earth. As the only survivor of the war, Luthor could do nothing to resist Brainiac’s subjugation of the planet.
Luthor explains that he was able survive in secret, and eventually steal the stolen data and energy from Brainiac’s mothership in the form of “exobytes”, nanobot-sized devices that can bond to a living host and give them their own superpowers. After finally designing a time machine or hijacking one from Brainiac’s technology, Lex Luthor has traveled into his past to release the exobytes into the atmosphere of present-day Earth. The heroes are outraged, but Luthor explains that because he has done this, soon thousands of new metahumans will be created from ordinary humans (becoming the characters that players design and play with). He implores the Justice League to find and train these new metahumans, because Brainiac is coming, and the Earth must be ready to succeed where it was once doomed to fail.
Impressions: Let me start off by saying that I’ve never played an MMO before this one. There, that should make the rest of this a bit easier to digest as I explain my blossoming career as a vigilante. I’ve played this game a few times in the past and each experience I walked away disappointed with what was presented to me. I thought the graphics were weak, the art direction not at all similar to Jim Lee’s art style, (no matter how much they insisted), and I thought it just was not intuitive enough to be a fun experience. Allow me to eat those words as I’ve been playing the retail release of this game for almost a month now and have a much better grasp of the simple but intricate beauty that lies in this online world.
Now the first thing I was greeted to when loading the game was a beautiful cinematic that introduced me to the storyline that explains why the DC Universe needs more heroes. After watching the cinematic you’re introduced to a series of screens that will begin to get ingrained in your mind: Loading screens. They were kind enough to include beautiful art by Jim Lee to help ease the pain but they are common and will be something you will have to get used to. I happened to be a lucky first timer to have to download an update upon first attempt that took somewhere between 30-40 minutes to complete and unceremoniously, and disappointingly, ended my first late night play session with the game as I decided to let it finish overnight and try fresh the following day.
The following day I began working on creating my alter ego. anOne is his name (not pictured), don’t forget it. The tools to create a hero weren’t as in depth as I would have liked as there are few options for characters and their power sets to mimic when designing your own character. I walked into this with the idea of becoming or mimicking the power of Green Lantern. Not only was there no “green power ring” option when selecting powers, there were no power rings or anything similar whatsoever. I could get a staff, raging fists, or shoot intense beams of energies from my forearms but I could not directly get a hold of a power ring.
After creating my character and heading off into the world of super heroics I soon realized that my problem was my lack of ability. I had powers, but they were weak and annoying. For the most part I was under the impression that I only would have access to 2 attacks as the whole interface was completely daunting and unintuitive.
And then everything clicked. Wandering around Gotham will allow you to witness plenty of mayhem and misgivings in action, and you can choose to participate in order to elevate your level of strength. 3HRS of doing this and I discovered that I also had missions given directly to me from my mentor Batman and that the clunky UI was actually the key to my frustration. Everything just started making sense as I navigated from mission to mission and actually found my way to Justice League headquarters, not to mention subsequently saving the Titans.
As you get stronger you get stronger, meaning you have more abilities then what you start out with and more powers begin introducing themselves into the mix. I wasn’t a fan of my characters powers to start but as they increased I began to understand and adopt their charm and potential. I may not have a power ring, but I might be equally as important to Gotham and Metropolis as a Green Lantern and with appearances by both the Green Lantern Corps, and Sinestro Corps, I can’t help but hold out hope that my wish may one day be fulfilled.
There are few things for me to find to complain about with this game as I became more acclimated with the MMO. The art style, the action, and even the music have grown on me over time as well as the voice acting and sound effects. I may even join a super hero group. I played this game on the PS3 which comes with a daunting $14.99 subscription rate in addition to the $59.99 cost of the disc. Insanely fun game with insanely steep pricing, but I suggest you purchase if you are a fan of MMO’s and/or the superhero genre in general.
This post will be updated periodically due to the ever changing nature of MMO’s.
