Freedom (I Won’t Get You Down)
So, waaaay back in March, I began working on a post about my experiences with DC Universe Online. I have a coterie of internet chums, predominantly out on the Left Coast, who meet up virtually to kill mall zombies, snipe 14 year-olds and comic book professionals alike, and generally bond in a virtual environment. In part due to my East Coast isolation and my job-required early curfew — but predominantly because of my general ineptitude at videogamery in general and FPSes in particular — I haven’t really been able to join in the melee. But in this case, I decided to make an exception, I procured a PS3, and bought the game at launch so that I could experience it and learn about it with other players.
As boondoggles go, sixty bucks is not the most grievous penalty I’ve ever paid. And the experience was not entirely unpleasant. I can’t say the same about, say, Champions Online, where my stuttering, halting framerate completely obscured clarity of action and rendered me unable to determine whether my frequent, inevitable deaths were the result of poor gameplay on my part or a combat system that resisted easy fluency. That account was deleted quickly and with no small amount of vicious stabbing at the keyboard, and I didn’t regret no longer having to endure their faux-four color printing fetishism, which is not the aspect of superheroics that moves and compels me.
No, the reason I fell out with DCUO was because of bad timing. The PS3 was borrowed, and eventually needed to be returned. Unfortunately, a couple months into playing the game, Sony was rather aggressively hacked, and all gameplay was suspended as servers were frozen to prevent an exploit of user data (this is my hazy recollection of events, anyway). Despite some sops for the absence of access — a few costume pieces and free access to a new mission arc — much of the velocity was lost, and the community of players with whom I had hoped to adventure had dried up. Perhaps if chat had an easy fix, or typing on a PS3 controller has been at all feasible, we would have been able to feel like a group of friends, but gaming — to us — never felt like were were playing as a team, even when gaming together.
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