Gonna play devil's advocate with you for a bit. Keep in mind I played during Beta, so maybe some of my comments refer to something that just wasn't working properly yet - I don't know.
The combat was one of the worst parts of the game for me. You have two attack buttons - left and right click. By using a combination of these two buttons, you pull off combos (like in Street Fighter). The problem is that most of the combos amount to the same thing anyway. I was dual pistols and I would say half of my combos wouldn't even work (trying to follow the tap, hold, whatever guide wasn't working). Targeting was annoying as all fuck. There was no targeting...just whatever you were facing when the auto target decides to kick in, that's what you're fighting. Also, despite there being different "powers" you can use, they apparently all essentially do the same thing, making them more of a different look than a different type of combat. The combat belongs in a single player Spider-man game on the console - not an MMO on the PC.
So, combat is real time and twitch based. I have heard many people say "It's not an MMORPG, it's a Action MMO". I agree. It is sort of like Spiderman or really more like Prototype or Wolverine Origins... as an MMO.
You have two ways that you can fight. Your weapons and your powers. You fight with both. Your weapon fighting is done with left (close attack) and right mouse buttons (ranged attacks). You unlock combos as you level that you use to fight. Think Wolverine Origins for xbox. Weapon attacks can be done by just spamming left or right but the good moves come from series of taps and holds. So like the standard lunge attack is usually tap then hold your LMB. Or tap LMB 5 times. Or tap RMB then Hold LMB. Each weapon style is different. Those examples were when I was more of a melee weapon. Honestly, It took me a while of practicing but I got pretty good. Then I got a really nice rifle and decided to respec rifle which was totally different. While was a lot more of Hold LMB then tap forward a couple times to do some cool rolling rifle shooting moves. Or tap back to shoot while rolling back. Each one is different but they all work really well. I do admit, it was frustrating to learn some of the combos as I think the combo instructions could be a little clearer. Chatting with some friends gave me some tips which gave me that AHA! moment. Now I love them. So that's your weapon attacks. Then you have powers which are very straight forward 1 - 6 attacks. These are always peppered in between your weapon attacks. Some are stuns, knock backs, buffs, heals, damage spells, all kinds of stuff. The coolest thing about the system to me is everyone creates two loadouts. One for your role mode (which is basically Tank, Healer or Controller) and one is you DPS loadout. You can switch this on the fly and you have a customized powerset and hotbar for each load out. I can switch between full my customized super healer mode to my wicked (still customized) damage mode simply by hitting T.
Those are just the basics though. You still have blocking (shift). Dodging or dodge rolling (Holding shift then tapping a direction to get out of the way of harm), breakouts (tapping shift to get out of roots and stuns) and Block breaking. (basically attacks that counter someone elses blocking".
OK targeting. Yeah. It's not a MMORPG targeting system. In my opinion there is good and bad to that. I was so used to WoW it was hard for me to get used to not being able to use my mouse to click a dude to target him. Basically targeting works like this. Your mouse controls what you you look at. It's in third person but there's still a reticle in the center of your screen. Everything is based on line of sight. If you reticle something like a bad guy you get a soft target. Tab then is used to lock that target. If you do not lock your target, and you just happen to look at a dude all the way across the room while still attacking, you will more than likely then start firing pew pew beams at that dude across the map, thus pulling him. You want to make sure you are aware whether or not you are locked on your target or not. If you're locked you can run around and look at what ever you want while attacking. It's very different but I'm very good at it now. It plays well with the action MMO thing. You can use Q to cycle through targets but I never use it. I look, lock, attack. I think you can turn off auto targeting but I don't recommend it. You get used to it and it's handy especially in heated busy battles. Sometimes I don't lock if I'm healing as I don't care what I'm hitting as long as I'm hitting something. If I'm DPSing, I use this focused attack style. I don't think it's worse than other games, it's just different. And it fits the game well.
I feel like this is pretty standard in "Superhero" MMOs now. I found the beginning to be VERY limited in choices, which was surprising. Yes, I did realize that as I looted gear, I could equip the appearance at anytime. By level 10, though, I still hadn't looted anything worth changing to. Games like Champions has the exact same Unlocks, only with a lot more choices from the beginning as well.
From what I've read CO has a much more elaborate database of choices. I haven't at all felt "robbed" of choices while making my guy and I like having to treadmill for more pieces to my costume. More to do I guess and more things to keep us from getting bored. It's sort of funny sometimes... for example my buddy has been trying his hardest to collect the "shielded robot boots" for his tank. He's been playing since launch and can't catch a break. They have a daily vault that you get to run through for prizes, styles and loot. That's a good way to open your choices for styles. Also they just opened the auction system which has everyone trading weapons, collectables and styles. It's kinda of a whole game unto itself.
But yeah, to be fair CO and CoX had way more freedom in the initial character creation but I like how DCUO makes you work for it and lets you evolve the look of your dude as you go.
Ok, here's where I think we were playing two completely different games. I've never been so bored with the grind in my life. Every quest was EXACTLY the same. EXACTLY. There was absolutely no variation. Accept quest. Go to location. Kill 10 baddies. Go to next location. Collect 10 things from baddies. Go to third location. Kill 20 baddies. Go to instance. Kill more baddies until random Superhero X helps me defeat random Villain Y. Rinse and repeat until max level.
Seriously...that was the questing. It never varied from that. I had no idea what the stories were from quest chain to quest chain. I just knew there was a different bad guy at the end of them. The voice acting was RIDICULOUSLY AWFUL. AWFUL. It was the cheesiest stuff I've ever heard from a AAA game developer.
The only part of that entire process that I liked was the little cinematic once you beat the boss, but I had no idea how the cinematic tied into a story. It seemed more like a character analysis than the completion of a story arc. It certainly didn't seem to tie into the overall story (which has something to do with time travel and aliens, but even this I learned from the CGI trailers).
I dunno man. I think that was just your experience in beta while they were still making the game. That's not how it is at all. I did a really big variety of the standard missions which were a lot of the mission lines that were "do a few missions, do a big mission, then do a huge instance with a big boss at the end and then a really neat motion comic at the end of the series as a reward. A lot of those followed the same format but they were all totally different. Some had you running around poising citizens, others had you stealing things from cops, some had you helping channel demons into this plane, others had you turn into monkeys and fight other dudes, some had you helping with the green lantern war, others were helping hold the line at a huge war zone where Brainiac's forces were invading. I dunno dude they were all totally different for me, and there were lots of them. And they were totally totally different if you were in Metropolis vs Gotham. I rolled another guy just to go do a bunch of the missions in gotham because I wanted more. Then there were missions telling me to do some of the Legends and Arena PVP, other missions telling me to group with friends to do alerts... and other ones having me kill players on the other faction or bounties for super heroes. Yes the missions in their most boiled down to objectives were go here, kill those guys, rescue these guys, move these things from here to here, find x number of these thingies... but they were done in a way that didn't suck for me. I mean if we're comparing them to other MMOs it's *WAY* less repetitive than MxO missions or SWG's missions but yeah. Typical MMO sort of stuff. But worlds different than WoW. Although I've heard that with the new expansion, WoWs quests are fun again. A lot of the stories of the new WoW quests remind me of DCUO missions. I just think they did it in a way that was waaaay more fun for me? I dunno maybe this is just personal preference. I'll let you know when I run my next dude through level 30 so I can see if I hate it or not still. If I ever got tired of running around doing regular missions, I'd do exploration missions. If I didn't want to do that, I did a bunch of races for experience. Or I'd see if some friends wanted to do an Alert (mini 4 man raids for newbs). Seriously max level is achievable in like 35 to 40 hours of gameplay so it all flew by. I really think your experience in beta is not what is in the game now.
As for the stories, there's one major story arc that's driving the game. Then there's lots of mini stories. Most of them are character focused independent of the overall story arc. So you'll do a set of missions where you're working for the Joker, and he needs you to help him sabotage Bane because he's moving in on his action or something. And between the mission stories that you're given when you pick up and turn them in, to the voice work peppered through out the missions, to the collectibles and investiagtiony thingies you pick up while doing them, they all tell the story. Then at then end of a mission's story arc you get a motion comic. Some of them very related to the overall game story, some of them just spotlighting a hero or villain. All really cool though.
So yes, some of the story is connected but some is independent. All of which were pretty neat for me though.
Again, this feels like something that belongs in a single player Spider Man game on the console. It's just time killers to keep you jumping around the game. At least they are giving you a tangible reward for it, though, which is definitely the way achievements should be if they're going to be in a game.
Maybe it's because I've watched the movies more than I've read the comics, so I have more of a realistic, concrete vision of what the cities are supposed to look like instead of the cartoony version, but both cities had me very underwhelmed. I'm looking forward to Arkham City's Gotham, and though it is unfair to compare an MMO city to something like Arkham City, they are both trying to do Gotham, so there you have it.
I really like the down time stuff. The races are fun, collectibles and daily stuff you get to do all give you some filler while you're getting your friends together or just want to kill some time. It's enjoyable but it's just fluff. You don't have to do it. It doesn't take away from the game at all and it's there if you want to do it. You can totally ignore it if you want but lots of people are enjoying it.
The city scape stuff is personal preference I guess. I really liked the city sprawl in MxO and I REALLY enjoy it in DCUO. DCUO's is just better though. Every single tiny piece of art is approved and vetoed by Jim Lee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lee and he is very. very. awesome. Personally I love Gotham more than metropolis but metro is still pretty epic. Sometimes I just stop in the city and look around and get boggled at how much time it must have taken to do it. They had 130 people and 5 years in making this game and it shows.
There aren't just two cities though... here are all of the locations:
Gotham City
Metropolis
Gateway City
Atlantis
Blüdhaven
Justice League Watchtower
Legion of Doom Headquarters
Oolong Island
Smallville
Area 51
Gorilla Island
Stryker's Island
Ace Chemical
Arkham Asylum
Khandaq
The Batcave
Each of them are totally different and ridiculously complex and detailed in my opinion.
I don't think the bounties were working when I was playing. The PvP matches were very strange, with everyone playing the exact same character. I'm still not a fan of instanced PvP matches...I'm hoping SWTOR changes my mind on some of that. The open PvP (I beta tested in a PvP server) is hard for me to judge, because half of my combos weren't working...so I basically just got ganked by high level guys a couple of times.
The bounties work great. Good fun and a really good way to level if you don't want to do missions. The instanced PvP you're talking about is the Legends PvP. Where you get to fight as some of the headliners. In the very beginning and in beta everyone could basically only be Harley Quinn or Robin. As you progress you can unlock other dudes. But that's just Legends. There's Arena and Open World. Open World is where it's at but that's just personal preference. I don't like canned set at matched PvP.
The raids were very disappointing to me. It seemed the same as questing, only on a larger scale. Kill 100 baddies. Kill mini-boss. Kill 100 more baddies. Kill boss. There just wasn't anything to connect me to my tasks. Teamwork seemed nonexistent.
Sorta... yeah. The solo, duo and 4 man stuff has instances that you did while leveling turned on hard mode or crazy hard mode. But there are more mobs, harder mobs, more bosses, much harder bosses and waaaay better loot and rewards. Some stuff is the same or similar to what you did while leveling and some stuff is 100% new and unlocked only at end game. Teamwork becomes more and more crucial the harder the endgame content. The Hard Mode Alerts and Raids require people to know their roles and work together or you'll wipe. If one person is slacking or sucks at their job you'll wipe. It's fun and frustrating.
Admittedly the endgame will prolly get pretty grindy for some. At the first level of end game, you do the same 6 solo challenge modes and 5 or 6 duos each day (you can only do each once a day). There are some other daily missions that you can do daily as well. You do them for loot at "marks". The marks are used to be cashed in to buy your epic gear. There are several different levels of marks and gear and you progress through the end game to get all of the highest levels of gear from the highest level 8 man raids. I'm no where near that. I'm in the middle of the road end game and there is more than I can do in a day. I assume if you have no job and no life you would get sick of doing it all every day but I'm not at that level yet. There aren't as many high end 8 man raids but they take a ridiculously long time to complete and are extremely difficult. Most people might only be able to do a few of those a week. It's all very fun for me so far.
I can't say anything about the endgame, as I never got that far. My impression of the game was that it was trying to take a single-player generic console super hero game and convince people to pay monthly for it. The UI was meant for console, not PC. The combat was meant for console, not PC. Maybe it's a decent console game...I don't know...but I can't fathom paying monthly for the PC version.
Anyway, that's my opinion on it, but you've been playing longer than I have and who's to fault you if you like it. Many of the same problems I had with DCUO I also have with Champions. I just feel Champions was made for the PC and therefore has a much better UI and combat system. Plus it's free. And THAT is the real selling point...lol.
I think it's worth the money especially if they keep rolling out content updates like they did for Feb. They added holiday content as well as a new DUO and a new 8 man raid. If they keep that stuff up it's totally worth it. Every thing they have said as well as some insider info says their intention is to make sure they get new content to the players every single month if at all possible. Even if they only do 4 or 5 a year I think it's worth it. It's only $10 a month and I'm digging it. It wasn't a console game ported to PC at all. They designed it so you can play with a controller and I know a lot of guys on the PC who love playing it with a controller. I like the KB and mouse but yeah... it has some elements that were designed to be accessible from controller or PC. It's not horrible at all. It is different though. I personally hate the chat system, and some elements of the UI but it's not game breaking at all. It was just refreshed in the last update and they're working on it every patch. It's my biggest complaint with the game but again not a deal breaker.
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