DC Universe Online

Depends on how it looks. CoH is a tough act to follow.

 

Must say the trailers look bad ass! IMHO the setting of the dc comics will help make this better than CoH.

 

The trailers with the real Heroes look great. Then I see the shots of the players in the same old CoH style made in your basement outfits and its just a downer. They really need to come up with a way you can play as the real deal in these games.

 

Marvel was supposed to allow that, but they dropped out and it became Champions. I wasn't a fan of Champions. It was forced grouping from level 3 on up. I hate grouping. Forced grouping is just an unnatural act.

Here is my impression of grouping in an MMORPG

Spam "Level 17, LFG" for 30 minutes.

Get in a group and you will be 15% above or below the level of the group.

"We have to wait for Doug/Dave/XXXkillaNinjaaXX/Hoard-Killa before we can start"

30 minutes later, while you are bored, find out that you can't make that jump between the statues.

10 minutes later missing player shows and says they can only play for 15 minutes.

Enter dungeon/spaceport/nuclear reactor you've never heard of. Missing player goes Leroy Jenkins on party, laughs and logs off. Rest of party "I can't believe he did that AGAIN!"

Drop and start spamming again.

See friend log in and out immediately as they are pulling something off of their main to put on their new crafting mule.

Give up, go solo. Die.

Go to retrieve body. Die.

Go to retrieve body naked. Die.

Go to retrieve body, everything is dead around you, collect your stuff.

See the group that wiped out whatever was killing you ask to join, "GTF out noob" blocked.

Log out.

2 hours later, log in and start the entire process over again.

I miss anything?

 

Classic...

 

I've had the beta for a month or two now. Never got far into it and only played a handful of times. It didn't grab right off the bat very well when I first started. Tried again last night and was pretty suprised at how much better it was. Its much smoother, faster early progresson, better quest transisions, etc. I'd say its definitely ready for launch next week and could very well be a winner for a while.

Its better than CoH, has a few of the same tendancies but its still quite better. Leaps and bounds better than that Champions Online crap was. If you liked CoH worth getting a trial at least.

 

I have been in the beta for awhile too but this game strikes me as too much of a console style game then anything else. I mean each move is a matter of Lclick, Lclick, Rclick...or Lclick, Lclcik(hold)....It was a refreshing change at first from all the other games I have been in but it doesn't really have lasting appeal to me. It would be more of a time filler type of game that I would play from time to time when there is nothing else to do.

As for the powers Sentrosi...you select them either based on a preconfigured set of Superman, Batman, etc. Determines what type of powers you will have and also whether you fly or have super speed or acrobatics as your movement type...you can customize these powers by choosing Custom...but there isn't a whole lot of diversity in it to me.

All in all it's fun to play but isn't something that I could play for too long.

 

I'll have to see how it plays at higher levels. There is a good bit of diversity though with multiple power skill trees and separate weapon and movement skill trees. Also from reading the descriptions the powers have different effects depending on situation and group. The grouping is one aspect I have not tried at all and appears could be a big part of the game. It also seems to have a developed pvp system. I tried the pvp server also and the few pvp fights where it was a few vs a few were nice but most of the time I just got ganked by someone 15+ levels higher than me that camped my quest area which kind of sucked.

It definitely is a little console'ish with the lack of mouse control on the main screen which I found annoying and kept looking for a activate mouse button that doesn't exist so I quickly learned the hot keys. I guess the PS3 players will be on the same servers. If I do get it I'll have to think about which one to get as I did play FFXI using a PS2 controller on my PC originally and I really liked it. I learned to fly through the menus throwing button mashes so fast like an old school fighter it was pretty cool.

The combo system might get old and annoying but I am not sure what else they can do with a mouse and kb for fast action mmo at this point. Its either sit back and hit auto attack, hit activated combos, or use pre-set combos. The day we get something with full control combat like DOA combat in an MMO I will be rejoicing.

 

I don't know how long it'll last but I decided to pick this up just to get a break from WoW and do something different. They had a pretty smooth launch day. Made about 6 characters on various pvp\pve servers. This was always my favorite part of CoH. Their character creator is not as good as CoH or Champions but you can still do some cool stuff.

One thing the pvp is really in your face and often becomes a battle of who has more people in an area. Makes questing a real challenge.