Sony Online Entertainment is intent on tackling the MMO – one of the largest elephants in the console gaming room, but they’ve enlisted Superman and his meta-human friends to do the heavy lifting. DC Universe Online is currently in what SOE’s Studio Creative Director Chris Cao called a "pre-alpha build," but the elements they’ve implemented so far show a lot of promise.
The build at Comic Con 2008 that we played was set on a three-square block radius in Metropolis, though SOE’s Matt Slagle said the team hopes to incorporate other large-scale approximations of famous DC locales such as Gotham City. The team will almost certainly be adding in each location’s respective landmarks, though we didn’t come across any familiar buildings or areas in this build.
Of course, players can hope to see, or even fight along side their favorite DC super heroes in the game as well, but they won’t be putting their on their tights. While the Caped Crusader and other actual meta-humans will show up from time to time, usually in specific missions, gamers will rely on the game’s character creation set to determine what type of hero (or villain) they’ll play as. It’s easy to lament this decision at first – who doesn’t want to play as the Green Lantern or Wonder Woman? The truth is that an MMO wouldn’t really work if everyone was able to pick the same character. It’s up to the player to make a name for him or herself. Those who don’t want to design a character from scratch should be able to pick from a stable of pre-designed characters, though.
Unlike most MMOs, Universe is heavy on the action, and the game ultimately may resonate better with console gamers because of this. We took the part of a speedster character with ice powers and ventured into the game. Braniac hatched some sort of plan that made the citizens of Metropolis violent and unreasonable, so it’s up to you to knock them unconscious and remove the virus that’s causing the problem. Not exactly the most diplomatic solution, but hey! It’s a living.
The game actually feels a lot like Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance in terms of combat, which is a good thing. Holding R2 brings up an ability prompt with a designation for each face button. Pressing Triangle froze our foes into an ice-block that we could either pummel or throw across the level. Another button created giant spiked ice balls that appeared on the character’s hands and increased melee damage. Holding L2 blocks, something players should take note of since these citizens are surprisingly strong and your fledgling super hero is fairly weak. There are also abilities that run in the background, like autoblocking or stat boosts, but we were unable to mess around with those.
After freezing and punching an enemy into oblivion you have to remove the virus by holding Circle while a meter times out. The quickness of this element adds an unobtrusive and necessary wrinkle to your objective – you’re actually trying to save people instead of stopping once you’ve beaten the life out of them. Of course, if you’re attacked while trying to save them the meter restarts so it pays to be mindful of your surroundings.
Since the character we were playing as was a "speedster," we were able to run extremely fast by clicking in the left stick. When in this mode we were also able to run over anything. You can run up the sides of buildings, over cars... any surface becomes scalable when this ability is activated. Pressing X activated an even faster run, resulting in some blinding speed. Cao said it’s useful for when you want to get across the city quickly. Characters who fly do so by clicking in the stick, so there are several different abilities for players to tie to that function.
The preview build had several super villains in the map, something we discovered when we happened to discover Superman and Lex Luthor trading blows. You could choose to help Supes, but you could also choose to ignore the fight and do your own thing. The build we played had five other people on the same server, and we saw several of those players giving Metropolis’ hero a hand with taking Bizarro down.
While the game map was limited on the X-axis (remember, three-square blocks), the Y-axis was not. Buildings are completely scalable, much like in the Treyarch’s Spider-Man games. As mentioned earlier, our character was able to run right up the side of a building, where we started ripping ventilation equipment off the roof and throwing it across the rooftops.
The game currently has no release date, and the team is unsure how many players they’re going to try and run the game with at once. They are also trying to cross the PS3 and PC online modes, but nothing has been set in stone yet. The game ran with a slight amount of lag, but a lot less than we would have expected for a pre-alpha build. The pieces that are in place right now are fun already, so it’s a good bet that DC Universe Online will be a blast to play when it’s finished, regardless of its ability to climb and conquer the console MMO mountain.
