The earliest picture I have of DC Universe Online is from 2008. It’s of my son standing at the DCUO booth at a (then) Sony Online Entertainment Fan Faire. I was mostly excited about the upcoming Free Realms at the time. Twelve years later, Free Realms is gone, and DCUO remains.
Since then, I’d joined a static group eventually called Team Spode, and we drifted from game to game before eventually coming to DCUO somewhere probably around 2014, though it may have been earlier. The earliest screenshot I have is from late 2014 and it’s clear the team was working on end game content.
The thing about DCUO is that it’s not a really great game. The game play is pretty bland. My joke is that I use the same four buttons on my controller, again and again… the same four buttons for six+ years, no matter what we’re facing. The mobs change but what I do remains the same, even though I changed role from Controller to Healer a couple months back.
DCUO is a gear based game. If your gear is decent enough, you’ll do fine. If your gear is terrible, no amount of strategy will save you. They came up with a scheme to use Artifacts and Augments that must be leveled up in order to allow you to take on current content, and these items are very expensive to upgrade. It cost me thousands of an in game currency called “source marks” to upgrade a few artifacts to a low level. It would cost millions more to bring them to raid strength. And so we don’t raid.
What we do do is meet every Sunday on Discord and in game and spend an hour and a half shooting the shit and running instances and some open world bosses. We catch up on each other’s lives and complain about politics, the weather, our jobs and whatever else.
I’m not super wild about DCUO, but I’d miss my friends… and so I log in and do my dailies, save poor Superman again, and hit the buttons — 1-2-3, 1-2-4, 1-2-5, and back again.
