I’ve come to accept and even embrace my gamer ADD. I used to feel guilty about jumping from title to title but y’know, games are for fun. I don’t join guilds so I’m not letting anyone down by skipping out to some other game, so if I’m happy, that’s kind of all that matters.
I’m also easily swayed. At my core, I’d rather love a game than hate a game and I’d rather love a game company than hate it, too. I don’t think I’m that unusual in these preferences, though I think the people who love to hate a game or a company are a lot louder and more vocal online, so it can seem like gamers all hate games and the people who make them.
So this was a tough weekend for me when it came to willpower. SOE was holding its Fan Faire and live streaming some video from it, and Trion did a video feed of the housing in their new expansion. Both events had me wanting to play Rift and SOE games. I always enjoy these videos more for what they tell me about the teams making the games than what they tell me about the games themselves.
To make a long story short, I pre-purchased the Rift expansion and the Planetside 2 starter pack over the weekend. But neither of those are launched yet and I was feeling the itch to try something new, so I finally fired up DC Universe Online, which is set to get a housing expansion pack sometime in the next few months.
Obviously DCUO isn’t a new game and it isn’t even new to me. I played the beta a bit and at some point in launch because when I fired the game up I was surprised to find a couple of characters. I rolled fresh though.
At the time I was downstairs on the couch (Angela and I were watching the livestream from Fan Faire on the living room TV) so DCUO’s controller friendliness was a real point in its favor. I first started it on Saturday and by the time I’d created a character I’d pretty much had enough. Something about the character creation process bugs me; I mean the actual UI and interface of it. It may be that there are just too many choices for the speed that the UI renders. Anyway, I found character creation to be a chore.
But I went back today and played for a few hours, getting my new telekinesis dude to level 6 or 7, and it was quite enjoyable. I still don’t think I’d pay $15/month to play it, but with it being “free” I might dabble in it for a while, and I’m considering buying some of the expansions (they’re $10 or the equivalent in Station Cash and I happen to have a bunch of Station Cash). It just really feels like a ‘lite’game in a lot of ways, and that’s not always a bad thing. Some of the voice acting is real hokey and the character models tend to be pretty low-res, I suppose to keep the speed of the game up. But it’s still a fun comic book superhero world and I just kind of enjoyed zooming around Metropolis and Gotham, beating up on bad guys and tossing them around like rag dolls.
There’s a Halloween event going on and I did that once. I had no clue what I was doing but we didn’t die and the NPC was defeated. You get candy corn for your trouble that you can then spend in a vending machine to get loot. I only got 2 candy corn though so I just saved it.
If you’ve never tried DCUO and have any interest in super heroes, it’s definitely worth the time to download and check out. It starts really slow; like I said, character creation is long and kind of tedious (or can be) and then there’s a pretty long tutorial section that somehow still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But once you get past that and start flying around the city doing stuff it gets more interesting. As you get a few levels under your belt you find more options opening up and it isn’t quite as directed as the first few levels are.
Aside from the Halloween Event it’s been solo friendly so far, too, and the Event auto-grouped me so I didn’t have to talk to anyone; a big plus when you’re kicked back on the couch playing with a controller and the keyboard is on the other end of the coffee table. 🙂 Yeah, I’m that lazy…