Come for the games, stay for the drama.
So, I listened to the DCUO livestream the other day, where they showed a preview of the House of Legends episode, packed to the rafters with quality-of-life changes and new content. I was listening, fascinated, until they mentioned that House of Legends was currently LIVE ON THE TEST SERVER.
So, I, um, quit the livestream and installed the test version of DCUO and went to have a look for myself.
I don’t play every MMO that comes out — not by a longshot. But, I follow a lot of gamers, streamers, and game developers, and between me and them, I see a lot of discussion about the new MMOs that come down the pike.
Crowfall was released a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. And then, suddenly everyone was not. What did it all mean? I asked Google Trends to help me analyze searches for a dozen or so MMOs to help understand what all was going on with MMOs today.
I like my main character, Teal Green, just fine. Well, most of the time. She started out as a hard light controller — a deputy of the Green Lantern corp. But I soured on all the constant comboing and didn’t feel I contributed much DPS. With wild abandon, I tried a few different DPS options, finally settling on Munitions when it came out. I later changed over to become an electricity-based healer, and that is where I am today. My DPS is … reasonable. Team Spode (the league I belong to) is usually at the tops of the DPS charts, and I’m usually third or fourth behind Lord Spode’s ice tank and Stingheal’s sorcery healer.
DC Universe Online has had a problem. It’s the most popular of Daybreak’s MMOs, but its spandex tights flies under the radar of most MMO players. Recent content dumps (called “episodes”) are still very crowded. Recent changes to show exactly how many players are in each zone (and across how many instances) shows that the most recent hub areas support hundreds of players at any time of the day — and this isn’t counting the Nintendo Switch players, who have their own sets of servers.
A long, long time ago, in a different blog, I was frustrated with myself for trying and abandoning so many MMOs. Every new MMO that came along — I’d try.
So I started the MMO Challenge. The challenge was simply this: to play a MMO as my main game for at least a year. I’d join a guild, I’d level up, grind gear, go on raids, see all that I could see and make some memories along the way. Really dive deep. If I made that challenge, I’d know what to do when I sat down to game. I’d log into that MMO.