When I briefly spoke with John Blakely, VP of development for Sony Online Entertainment – Austin, at E3 last week, he promised that “DC Universe Online” has something for everybody.
For anyone who’s a fan of DC Comics, they can, of course, expect nods to various aspects of the DC Universe. “The DC fan is going to be like ‘I want to see Superman, I want to see Batman.’ There’s Bizarro, Big Belly Burger and those kind of things,” Blakely said, without revealing too many details before a playable version of the game hits Comic Con later this week.
And for the MMO gamers, they can expect the familiar features they’ve grown accustomed to. “We are an MMO company and we know what our players like,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You can look at the feature sets that we have in our existing products, and we’re going to draw a lot of those pieces in… People are used to it.”
“I aim, I shoot and things happen instead of having this rhythmic, turn-based combat you typically see in MMOs.”
However, as for console gamers, MMOs are certainly something that they aren’t used to. But Blakely thinks that the “moment-to-moment” active combat system and skill-based gameplay will be what piques PS3 owners’ interest. “When you think of your favorite superhero games, typically they’re a console game or an action game and we’ve never been able to deliver that previously in an online space until now,” he said. “We spent the last couple of years really hammering out the technology that provides you a fully featured physics world where it’s action-physics combat which means I aim, I shoot and things happen instead of having this rhythmic, turn-based combat you typically see in MMOs.”
“It’s more like ‘Resistance,’ than it is ‘Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.’”
In other words, if a flaming fireball attack is directed at your character, you had better (and are able to) move out of the way. “It’s more like an action-shooter; it’s more like ‘Resistance,’ or something like that than it is ‘Hulk: Ultimate Destruction,’” he said. “[The gameplay] reflects what you would actually expect if you were a superhero. But that’s the hard part because if you look at our existing games, ‘Everquest‘ and ‘Everquest II,’ they deliver a really good experience but at a different pace — it’s much slower, it’s much more methodical.”
So while Blakely hopes the action-based combat will appeal to console gamers, he was quick to add that MMO players won’t be alienated. In fact, he thinks they’ll embrace it. He said, “The MMO guys will be a little uncomfortable with at first because it’s different. But [the combat system] is going to be something they’re going to get excited about learning about and getting into.”
“If console players prefer microtransactions, we might do that.”
As for the business model, SOE hasn’t decided what “DC Universe Online” will end up doing, but they have a few options. “If you look at the games we have, we have free games, games that are based on microtransactions, games that are based on subscriptions; we have infrastructure that supports all of that,” he said. “We want to make sure people feel comfortable. If console players prefer microtransactions, we might do that. But we aren’t declaring that yet.”
For those of you who plan on playing “DC Universe Online,” what payment model you prefer? And console gamers, are you ready to don virtual tights and a cape in an MMO?