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How they'll keep you playing. (Adressing content and DCUO's not so hidden grind.)
WhiteLantern
Member RarePosts: 3,319
This is not a rant. It is simply my thoughts about the content in DCUO.
There are people out there wondering why they would pay a sub for a game in which they can hit max level in as little as one week. Although, those saying that there is less-than-or-comparable-content to CO at launch are full of ****, the levling curve is really quick but you won't see all of the content. You can level all the way to max without leaving Gotham or Metropolis if you so choose (personally, I like a change of scenery so I traverse the two as I see fit). As of right now, the devs have NO intention of changing the leveling curve from beta to launch. In my opinion they should tweak it, but as it stands right now, you have a reason to reroll because there will be content that you missed in your first playthrough.
The SOE devs have stated that they don't want the leveling curve to be a grind; however, they have no problem making the endgame grindy much like other games. At this point, you've likely seen the endgame armor sets in the videos. (I have screenshots of them all but haven't figured out how to get them here) These armor sets cost money and tokens from the endgame content (PvP matches, DUOS, Alerts and Raids). There was a long discussion recently on the forum about the cost of said items. As of the current build, each piece of each set would take a casual player (as defined as someone who plays 2 hours a day or so) one week to buy. Each. Piece. Doing nothing but group content. Personally, I'm semi-fine with this, even though each set has around 9 or 11 pieces. There was a big cryout in the forums to have this adjusted lower, but it's not known whether or not that will happen.
Solo players will soon have their own armor sets to earn as well. This has so far only been promised by the devs, but what they are offering shouldn't be too hard to pull off. They are going to have special daily missions to go back to the low level instances (hopefully tweaked up in level) to perfom tasks. Also, the wanted poster quests will be made repeatable and they will be easier for players to jump in and out of while soloing.
I hope this answers some questions you may have. Feel free to ask more, there are several of us here who can help out.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Comments
Not all the sets cost both coins and pvp cash but yea it will still take you awhile to get them since each raid gives dif coins same for pvp and duos.
Absolutely, there is no way that CO had more content than DCU at launch not even taking into account the fact that DC has the two factions right from the start. I can remember scraping together every quest I could find in CO, often burning through quests a few levels higher than myself because I couldn't find anything else. There is no such shortage in DCU. The two claims going around that CO has more content and that CO and DCU are the same in any way other than flavor are just false.
Well, the thing is, you get feats for running other mentors missions, even the starting missions like Scarecrow, and Grod. I'm the type of guy who likes a single character that plays well, and I want to complete 100% of the content (for their respection faction) with that character. That means, yeah, you may see a level 20 trying to team with a level 4 to get into the scarecrow mission so he gets the feat.
Going through every last mission, doing all the side missions, getting all the investigations (even the inventory investigations which seem to have a ton of bugs right now) would most probably take a couple months. This game is a collectors dream. I'm not much of a collector, but the skill points really motivate me. I have 27 skill points at level 20. Thats doesn't just happen over night, and this is on a character I haven't even begun to PvP in the arenas with yet.
So I think many players would continue to play so they can complete everything. I also find the combat extremely fun. To me, the combat system gives me the same feeling I get from playing a First Person Shooter. I constantly come back to FPS games just for the fun of playing them, and I feel the PvP in this game will have me doing the same.
Maybe thats just me. I will most likely come back daily until the combat finally feels stale or theres no villains left to fight. (yeah, I'm a hero)
Curious...
Can someone please explain all the "content" DCUO will offer? I'm not suggesting it's not fun, but if it's just randomly generated crap quests, I guess I'd prefer to know. I guess I'm wondering if it's like Spiderman or that last Superman game where there was ALWAYS some "situation" going on...but it was nothing more than randomly generated fluff quests (chase down robbers, get purse back, deal with aliens) with no substance.
No quests are randomly generated like CoX. You have 3 mentors each with their own line of quests. Those quests do not change.. if you go back and do them later, they will stay exactly the same.
Likewise with alerts. Say you do the Gorilla Island alert, you can run that multiple times and that will never change. The only random things you'll find are when you are running along and see some random person who needs your help, but those aren't quests, they are 2 second side *problems* that you can literally fix with a couple punches and the activation of a clicky.
The major quest lines and alerts are the actual meat of the PvE game. This of course gets compounded on when you play on a PvP server, or if you flag yourself on a PvE server.
You also forgot the random people to save from under cars and other stuff as well as the occasional thug and sabotage stuff that happens on the roof tops.
"You think this "A" stands for France?" Captain America
Yeah, the first time I saw a random thug trying to rob an armored car, I was like "huh?". I took out the cop and the robber thanked me and took off with the car. Little things are big. You can also mug a mugger. Food chain FTW.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
The early 30's spring to mind for CO, there was a level or two where there was simply no content at launch, there were also other points where it was very sparse and barely enough to get you through. Endgame had nothing.
To the OP. As long as the activities that you need to do to get end game gear are fun then to me its not a grind. If i feel forced to log in and participate in something i don't want to then i feel its a grind and usually get bored. While i can see it eventually getting repetative just like any game hopefully thats not for a couple of months at least.
As a GW player, I can understand the moaning and whining about being able to reach the level cap quickly. It seems many people are incapable of disconnecting the end of leveling from the end of the game. Two different things entirely.
However, the end-game grindiness described, does sound pretty lame. Why put in more fun content when you can create treadmills out of what you already have and force players to run them until they're nauseous? The price is sure right.
Interesting but also devastating my interest. I always had ZERO interest in special armour, esp. raid grinding or the like. So for me it feels... bad. Really, really bad. If my char can't progress and all I can do is get different armor (armor I found quite ugly), then what? It seems quite strange and tbh. appalling to me.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Yes, but keep in mind that you don't have to have the look of the armor if you don't like it. As for an armor-progression endgame.....seems like we're stuck with that for the time being. Remember, the game's fundamental mechanic is to get you to max level quickly and have you doing "heroic" things there, i.e. group instances.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
It is still beta and a few months before launch! Things can change!
Am I correct in assuming that all this content scales to your skill level??? If I can hit cap in a week or less, how does some petty purse stealing thief have a chance against me? Do they just get more health or do they actually change the scenarios? Are there enough BIG missions to keep me playing past 30 days?
Like I said, the main thing the devs want you doing at endgame is the group content. There will still be lower level missions that you won't have completed as well. For solo content at endgame, the devs have stated that they will have "level-appropriate" versions of the low-level instances that you can run daily to complete some type of new mission. (not currently in beta).
The purse snatching stuff is just fluff for a "living world feel". They are all level 1.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
I think that the quests in DCUO are better then many games. Most quests are part of a story arc. Typically this machine in the police station sends you on a tour of an area in the city. When you get their there are things going on at the location and you get some quests. Normally the quests tie together and are a story. The quests are pretty varied and show some creativity. There are quite a few that involve some sort of interaction with items or environmentals. One somewhat unique variation is picking things up and carrying them places.
There are also story quests with your mentor. These are great and usually end up with you fighting some master villian at the end of the quest chain. The villian fights tend to all have some scripting and are again very creative, giving the villian an interesting story and an interesting final super fight.
Comparing this game to CO of COH in my opinion is weak because this game is far more polished and a better experience all around.
I also read on the beta forums that the developers are planning to do monthly content updates featuring new stories and events. I'm pretty excited.
The first alert I did had me killing enemies, breaking machines, converting enemies into followers, collecting crystals to activate a teleporter and ultimately fighting a scripted boss fight that was completely epic. All in all the alert was kinda like a public quest but in a private instance. It was a very good experience.
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Ethion
it's not as bad as hes making it out to be the pvp suit does take alot of coins though but the others aren't as bad you can run raids and duos to get coins for them. PVP suit is like 80 coins and up depending on teir the others are 30-55 1 suit may take a caouple weeks if you run a bunch of raids and dos everyday pvp suit will take a few months so be prepared + the can always collect the nutral suits from all the other mentors for fun and the new rep sets.
Months? Try weeks... released by Jan 15!typical quests like any other mmo
there are quests where you fight along side a super hero/villain , but its typical in a go here, kill x amount of mobs, collect x amount of items from killed mobs and turn in
You also forgot the random people to save from under cars and other stuff as well as the occasional thug and sabotage stuff that happens on the roof tops.
that is extremely unsubstantial in any kind of long term game play, its weak and it still gets classified with the typical quests like any other MMO (not that I really see much of a way for there to be non typical quests)
yes you get a quest theme park ride, with a side quest found near by that co-exists with the main quest in the area
edit:: the little push a person off a roof or kill a mugger person is not a quest, or anything that adds to someone looking for story, its a means to do a action that has little meaning if any at all in some situations (though comedic pushing a crying girl off a building)
furthermore, some quests on each side (hero and villain) are exactly the same ... and even though it makes sense as heros would want to stop villains and vise verse, its dull gameplay for replayability
this is especially annoying in the starter tutorial quest you can not skip
and this also goes for what people these days call balance, each side is absolutely the same in terms of what skills and powers you can obtain, which i find annoying/boring and a lack of care from the devs
(a lot of people played DAOC for so long because each realm was a new experience in class/and leveling)
Actually, I think those quest mechanics are substantial. There aren't any other mmos where you can swoop in, pick up a citizen in distress and physically carry them to safety. Same for the pick up objects quests like throwing bombs into the ocean before they explode. It's technically still an "x of y" quest but it fricken rocks!First off a definition of quest....
A quest in role playing games—including massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and their text based predecessors Multi-User Dungeons—is a task that a player-controlled character or group of characters may complete in order to gain a reward.
I'm not sure what people expect a quest to be... every game has some form of grind or some form of x of y type quest there is really no way around it unless perhaps you guys want a questless game? Lol how fun and revloutionary that would be.
Stop judging what the quest is and just say is it fun or not? I don't care if the quest tells me go pick up 24 sticks off the ground if they make it FUN then thats what matters.
I wasn't lucky enough to get into beta but from videos varied opinions a lot of people seem to have been let down by their own crazy expectations. They want a game with the amount of players of WoW the good old days of memories of SWG and EQ all without any grind and a quest based game system that doesn't have quests they would also like it to be free 2 play plz oh yes it needs better graphics 2.
If I had gotten dime every time someone said THIS the last years, I would be rich like Scrooge McDuck.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
That's what scares me. This game is still nearly unplayable on keyboard and mouse, the game does NOT feel "more polished than CoX and CO" as some fanboi claimed. It has a lot of rough edges, it's still incredibly unstable, the PC controls simply do not work as described, you're frequently given quests but not told where to go to begin them or how to get there. The minimap, which provides your only directional info because the needlessly complex mulipage "map" system simply can't be used when you're in a dangerous area because it takes too long to find anything you're looking for, frequently loses its compass and is filled with symbols that don't seem to mean anything. Someone in this thread claimed he likes travelling from Metro to Gotham for a "change of scenery"? Well kudos to him, because after 19 levels and getting killed literally every five minutes, I still cannot figure out how to leave Metropolis. This game suffers from an extreme lack of information, and what little info there is is often wrong. Even after changing the control combos for several attacks in the last patch, the combo diagrams in the Powers window ARE STILL WRONG. Spacebar is supposed to make you jump, a commonality to nearly every MMO, but roughly half the time you start flying instead of jumping, and spacebar won't CANCEL the unwanted flight.
At no point do I feel like I'm in control of my character's movements, and at no point to I have any idea where the current questline is going or where I should be developmentally.
SOE's insistence that collecting gear in a super hero game makes up for an extremely limited character creator is just the tip of an iceberg of backwards thinking. I really couldn't give less of a crap about randomly receiving odd pieces of other costumes that have nothing to do with my character (why should I want to look Demonic or Atlantean or like a Fourth World character if that isn't what my character is about, and what earthly good is it to get individual pieces of various sets that do not coordinate or resemble each other?). The "argument" that you can turn them off visually doesn't excuse the fact that it all makes no sense, it's just arbitrary and abstract.
The graphics look better than CO, but the animations are just simply bizarre. Have they never seen a human in motion? Women do not run with their knees shoulder-width apart. People do not jump by splaying their feet outwards and bringing their knees up to their shoulders. People don't suddenly take the stance of a Old West gunslinger about to draw when they stop running. Give me CoX's ant-stomping gait over this any day.
The floating camera, although supposedly fixed by today's patch, hasn't been changed since beta started. You need Dramamine to watch this crap going on. The camera bobs and weaves in random, nonsensical ways all over the battlefield, while you can't see what's attacking you. If you run down the street and come to a stop, the camera continues to float on past you for another half block before returning at a snail's pace to a view that has your character in it. Meanwhile, whatever was chasing you has now caught up to you and is killing you, and you can't do a darn thing about it because the camera is half a block away and you can't even see your character.
The game is a mess IMO, and those of you claiming otherwise are flying with blinders on. There is too much wrong with this game to be considered ready for release as is. SOE are out of their minds.
I agree the game needs more polish before they release it but i'd say no matter what they do you aren't going to like it.
Parts of the game are solid but it still needs another couple months minimum before its ready imo.
Different areas for different levels. I would say think of a more persistent version of Arkham Asylum with tons more boss fights and level progression as opposed to WoW.
MMO players (myself included) have a tendency to compare one MMO to another and I don't thnk this one will actually work that way. The game plays like Global Agenda with 100 times more content and astronomically higher production value.