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DC Universe Online: Content Update 2 Roundtable Discussion Pt. 2
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In a recent roundtable with DC Universe Online Game Director Chris Cao, MMORPG.com Community Manager Mike Bitton got all the skinny on Update 2. Update 2 is focused on introducing another 'iconic' character into DCUO. This time Two Face and to a lesser extent, The Penguin, will make their collective debut. Check out what else Mike found out about Update 2 in part 2 of the Roundtable Discussion and then let us know what you think.
When DC Universe launched in January, the team was already hard at work on the game’s first update, so its contents were more or less settled on. Update 2 offered the team their first opportunity to react to the situation on the ground in the live game as well as player feedback, and one of the first things they realized is that four man content is king in DC Universe Online. Chris explained that while eight man content is well and good, four man content has gotten the most mileage (due to the coordination involved and weekly timer), and so they intend to add more (in addition to new raids and such). Update 2 serves to wrap up a lot of the stuff they had planned for launch (such as the Batcave), and going forward they want to focus much more on adding much more four man content.
Read more of Mike Bitton's DCUO: Content Update 2 Roundtable Discussion Pt. 2.
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Comments
Maintaining the focus on instances and gear grind. Awesome.
SOE promised monthly updates to justify the subscription price. Are they now just figuring out that creating updates is "complex"? One would have thought they would have known that going in, given SOE's resume, and would have considered it before they started making promises.
STO started putting out content at a pretty quick pace as well right after release. Of course, both games suffered from a stunning lack of content at launch, so needed to publish more in short order just to survive.
The content in the first update was a drop in the bucket compared to what DCUO needs. It also did not add systems that would start to address the shocking lack of depth the game has.
Whatever happened to Secret Identities?
Why did they choose to make the open world so meaningless at endgame?
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
seriously.... wtg Chris. SOE promised us monthly updates & you guys want a pat on the back because you've kinda sorta managed to make that happen by the skin of your teeth? gtfo, SOE is trash. Not even fit to run a hotdog stand, let alone an mmo company....
Soo... I still think they have done a good job getting things out and running. Anyone with half a brain would have known that the "one month sharp" between each update was marketing and realiser thet monthly as in around 20-40 days per expansion would be a more realistic thing and that bugs and can cause delays...
Then again... maybe some people are just looking for a fault.
This have been a good conversation
Haven't played the game but I kinda figured the only way they were going to make monthly updates happen was having them already developed (Say 10 of them) and patching them while working on successive future patches (after the "ten" months. Yes, eventually it would have caught up to them but people would have forgiven a change in model 18 months from now rather than 2-3 months in.
But that would have been the logical approach.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
If you by logicalmean... putting all your eggs in one basket and still having to go back and balance/tweak/balance all the pre-developed expansions any way... Then sir/madam you are spot on.
If not i am sad to say you missed the mark
This have been a good conversation
More endgame raid grind I have zero interest in. :I
"they focus on the quality of their powersets as opposed to the quality." Freudian slip? XD
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Well that is the melody of the themepark MMO....
This have been a good conversation
I often forget that content, once developed, can't be tweaked/bug-fixed. Redo entirely or GTFO, right?
Edit: And they're the onesthat made the absurd content update promise. In my mind, having a basic idea of how much goes into the creation of new content, having a load pre-made would be the only logical way to ensure you can meet the self-imposed task.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Which is exactly why, for a company who has produced so many MMOs, would ever make such a promise in the first place. It just doesn't make sense to me.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
this game sux. too bad because graphics and the combat system are fantastic.
Bah, more raid content and that seems to be the focus. Been waiting to get back into this but .... I like the road to 30 more than the endgame raid stuff. PvP has been a lot more fun in the open world area's on the road to 30 as well than the endgame PvP.
Was a great deal of fun and I really enjoyed the game, it was definitely worth the initial buy and a few months extra but sadly it's not looking like it's going to be worth continuing to sub for me.
To bad DCUO didn't have the GW2 approach with dynamic content. Would have fit in with the Super hero/villain setting rather well.
Luther is sending in forces to try and capture Doomsday, Hero's attempt to stop them.... hero's and villains fail to secure Doomsday within a certain period of time..... Doomsday breaks free..... hero and villains fail to subdue doomsday after he breaks free.... Doomsday rampages in the city.... Hero's are called in to stop him and get him back into a secure facility, villains are called in to subdue him and bring him to Lex.
Something like that would have rocked.
No instead we get raids, lots and lots of raids. Very static and repetetive raids.
SOE always falls back on raid content, becuase they are talentless hacks who haven't a clue on how to make anything other than a raid or die game.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Why does practically every MMO spend so much time & resources on Raid content in patches ?
Where do people spend the bulk of their gaming time ? in open world areas. So focus on increasing or enahncing those Instead of wasting resources building Raid areas that are generally capped at 1 visit per week IF you can get a group together to get in there & get somewhere which leads to the inevitable standing around waiting for a raid to begin, a raid to progress, loot to be handed out, boss fight discussions to be had & Class X who is leaving has to be replaced.
I am a longtime Raider in a variety of games but I think wasting so much resources on Raiding which is generally a hardcore pursuit is stupid when more gamers than ever fit the casual gaming mould and raiding and casual gamer do not really go together.
One thing WAR did right was Public Quests you could join on the fly and it did them very well, this is the type of content that should be a focus, not raiding IMHO.
TTTHHHHIIIISSSSS!!!!!!!!!!
Use the open world SOE! This game has a ton of potential!
SOE really overpromised and underdesigned on DCUO. For a game with a short levelling curve, a substantial endgame is required; instead, the endgame relies on a large amount of recycled content and repeatable raids.
Apart from the PS3 / PC development issues, I wonder if the use of voice overs helps to substanitally bottleneck content development. After all, SOE can't just develop some missions and drop them in - they need to get actors in to voice the content as well. And since they've used such recognisable voices for certain characters, they have to either avoid using their big guns, which leads to content featuring less appealing characters, or pay bigger dollars and hope that Mark Hamill can find time to do the Joker voice some time in the next 30 days.
(Obviously content will be developed in an overlapping process, but the VO can't be recorded too early just in case the script is changed following scope revisions.)
This update is cool, and the pvp exploits are a much much needed fix. I couldn't really care less about raid content. This is still one of the best mmos to come out in the past 8 years. 90% percent of subscription based mmos have failed to keep me subscribed past the initail 30 days to make me pay the now ubiquitous 14.95 a month sub fee.
That being said, I have cancelled my account after 45 day, which saddens me.
The main reason is due to empty servers. I play on what is (supposedly) the most populated server, Death and Glory. Arena queues used to be almost instant, MAYBE taking 5 minutes to pop not even 3 weeks ago. Lately, I can queue and sit there for 15-20 minutes. In the meantime I'm flying around looking for a fight, or at least some lowbies to gank and the city is just empty. When I finally get into a match, I'm up against a pre-made of exploiters. God only knows how many people who were digging the pvp quit because of exploiters.
I used to do pre-mades with my guildmates and other guilds, but it's no fun when you sit in the queue for 20 minutes before every battle, only to have the battle last 5 minutes. Most of my guildies have dissapeared and my my friends list is pretty much offline all the time.
The duos are fun, as are the hard mode alerts. But....the queue system for alerts is just fucked. Constantly geting thrown into the same alert with one afk guy and running to the exit just sucks. Then it comes down to standing in the watchtower (or wherever the villains stand around in) spamming "healer lfg HMs pst" every 5 minutes. And since there is no global lfg group chanel, you can't go dick around in the city while you try to find a proper group.
Hopefully the exploits and queue problems are getting fixed. with the upcoming update I hope we can invite an outside party into an alert/arena if we are missing members, or kick someone.
But after all that bitching, can I still say this is one of the most fun mmos ever made? I can, because it is.
I have no hard feelings towards this game like so many others seem to do. I more than got my $65 worth of entertainment, and I even made a few friends along the way that I hope to be getting drunk with and playing games with in the foreseeable future.
What will bring me back to DC:
Server merges. I hate hate hate empty servers in mmos.
Lower subscription cost. Why must every pay to play mmo be 14.95?? Charge me 5 bucks a month and I'll subscribe forever and I will never complain...because it's a measley 5 dollars. You will make way more money that way. $15 is an odd price point to be an industry standard, and it kills mmos.
*edited for drinks
This is what happens when you get bussiness men handling games rather than gamers. Maybe 10 years from now they'll leave the mmo industry in ruin and someone will revive it. The same goes for games in general. Im tired of all this BS making the same stuff over and over.
that kind of thing worked well for EQ.. but at the time there wasnt anything else available.. so... their misconception wasnt contested to any degree.. however.. the world has moved on a long long way since EQ.. and what worked for them once.. doesnt work anymore.. at least not for very long.. they just havent realised why yet.. in an industry where evolution is everything.. SOE is a dinosaur..
i bought a lifetime sub..
This article has sparked an interesting conversation on the official DCUO PC forum, which can be found here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/dcuopc/posts/list.m?topic_id=25990
Someone in the thread made an interesting comment about having to come to MMORPG.com for information about the game, because SOE is doing an absolutely piss-poor job of communicating directly with its paying playerbase about DCUO.
Another poster observed the disingenuous nature of the lack of a "Might and Mastery" set, by saying that other games had done that type of power set and they wanted to do something different. Because Ice, Fire, and Magic haven't been done in a supers MMO before, right?
Actually, there are a lot of good comments in the thread.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
What a confusing statement you make.
So SOE pretty much lied about making monthly content updates. Lets be honest, SOE has enough MMO experience to know how long and how much they can do in 1 month.
Somehow it is the fault of players for believing what the developers say and not the developer for making promises that cna't possibly keep? While I agree that anyone with experience with SOE should have known better, it doesn't excuse what was being told to players being unrealistic.
Then you say more realistic expectations would put monthly content updates around 20-40 days. Doesn't that average out to be exactly 1 month, which you just said was unrealisitic?
DCU is heading into its 12th week of release and has only seen 1 content update. Everything else is just an excuse.
Keep in mind that the monthly content updates were not just some small feature being promoted about the game. They were being thrown around as the answer to almost every problem that players were voicing during open beta. Low content, lack of depth, limited features, etc.
On top of that is it completely inexcusable to delay fixes to major exploits that are driving players away from the game just so that they can be released at the same time as content updates. There is just no reason to let things go as long as they have.
It is a pretty bold statement conclude that SOE is doing a good pretty good job when all things are considered.
DCUO is very fun but i am starting to see why theres so much hate for SOE from their previous games. I understood it before, and all the older players did say "be careful with this one, SOE is full of promises they dont keep."
Im not saying the sky is falling or anything and i honestly wont be surprised to see this months patch come on the 30th or the 31st just so they can say they got it out this month but its really only the start of what we were warned about.
I dont care about this concerning DCUO itself, the money ive spent on it so far has been worth it to me, i love the game. I do care that SoE is living up to its rep.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
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Wow...is this really how Chris spoke?
it’s a very technically and creatively challenging thing to release true monthly content, right, not just fixes or tweaks, or every two months something else, right, and on a roughly monthly basis we’ve done it once
or
a month after you launch launch a February update and have everything there and be good, I’d be like, cool, I think we got closer than anybody ever has and we’ve delivered more than anybody ever has immediately after launch in the series that we’ve done
Huh? Am I the only one totally lost? That is probably the most incoherent, confusing, misleading (since THEY said they'd release monthly content) and just random thing I've heard him say...
Kudos on the interview Mike, but...wow...the whole quote from him was just odd.
Fail MMO from a fail MMO developer.
I fail to understand how they keep making games - and how big name IP's keep giving SOE license to ruin potentially huge money makers for them.
Also I like hearing how Cao gives himself a pat on the back for releasing new content last month....when if you just read a few paragraphs up that the content was orignally slated for release ANYWAY. Which means that it's actually OLD content that they weren't able to finish for release.
So why did it release late again? They're taking over a month to fix extremely annoying bugs and pvp exploits, whereas Trion is hotfixing and patching several times a week.
They just "don't get it."
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