A Very Late Look at DC Universe Online

I finally decided to take the plunge and give the now-free-to-play DC Universe Online a try.

Right up front, it's kind of a culture shock, because I've only ever played two MMO's, City of Heroes/Villains and Champions Online. Not only are both superhero MMO's, which have major differences from fantasy-based MMO's from what I hear, but both were designed by basically the same people, which means both games are very similar in their design philosophy, mission design, character design, power design, villain groups, etc.

But DCUO is a very different animal. It was designed to work as both a PC game and a console game, for one thing, so the control schemes and on-screen graphics owe a lot more to console games than other MMO's. There are key combos for special moves, and combo hit counters, and very simplified power controls.

But the game is absolutely gorgeous. The avatar costume designs are not as customizable as Champions or City of Heroes, but every available costume piece seems to work pretty well with every other available costume piece. The attention to detail in the visual design is incredible.

That's my first character, Mr Contingency, on a Gotham rooftop.

Of course, since this is a DC game, the two big locations are Gotham and Metropolis. And unlike the other games I've played, which had accelerated day/night cycles, DCUO has none. It is always night in Gotham, while in Metropolis, it is always day.

That's my second character, Ms Crush hovering over Metropolis, showing just how high you can fly and good the distance rendering is.

Jim Lee was supposedly deeply involved in the visual design of the game, which means everything has a lot of flair, but for an old-school fan like me, I don't always appreciate the Image-Comics-meets-DC aesthetic.

The DCUO website also brags about having missions written by DC star writers like Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. However, while I think a lot of the missions are fun, there is one aspect to most of them that I'm starting to find tiresome bordering on ludicrous.

Missions are designed in arcs--you fight several linked missions in the open world, and then are sent to an instanced mission for the boss fight (if you don't know, "instanced" means the game creates a special map just for you and/or your team--you and another player could go through the same entrance at the same time, and if you aren't teamed up, end up fighting solo in separate "instances" of the same map).

But just about every boss mission, with only one or two exceptions, has you fighting other heroes. They might be hallucinations of the Batman family created by Scarecrow's fear gas, or illusions created by Dr. Psycho, or they may be robot duplicates, but usually they're just possessed and/or mind-controlled. In one, you fight the Teen Titans one by one, who are mind-controlled by Raven, who is in turn possessed by her evil demon-father Trigon. In another, you fight Aquaman, who is mind-controlled by the sorceress Circe. Robin is pheromonally controlled by Poison Ivy. Eclipso possesses the Spectre, Green Arrow and Green Lantern in turn. It gets pretty silly after a while.

What I'm Doing During the Long Silence

I really should be going to bed right now, but I've been meaning to post something here for a week or more and never getting around to it, so here I am, getting around.

I'm trying to decide what to do with Hero Go Home, the website. I've committed to keeping it up for the rest of the year, but then, I'm not sure what I'll do with it. I've been trying to find a way to make money off of it, but it hasn't really been working. And when I look at it with both eyes open, I don't really see how it ever will work.

Which isn't to say that there's no way to make money on the Internet, or that I have no other ideas I'd like to try. But seriously, I'm having trouble translating ideas into action.

A big problem is that I do everything myself. I generate the written content, the graphic design, the illustrations. I format the ebooks and the print books, choose the fonts, design the covers and do the artwork. I produce the annual radio show: write the scripts, do some of the voices, do the sound effects and mixing. I produce the videos. I'm my own webmaster.

And the problems is not just that it takes a lot of time. I technically have "time" to do a lot more than I'm doing. What I'm lacking are the mental and emotional resources. It's hard to shift gears from movie reviewer to graphic designer to novelist over and over every day. And when I think about incorporating something new that has a learning curve, the amount of mental horsepower I have left for everything else nosedives.

Which brings me to my current situation. I have not written a word of fiction in about six months. One of the eventual goals for the site was to make more money off of a smaller audience by getting revenue streams from multiple books, and I figured I was good for one or two books a year. But it's like I broke something inside myself with the Run Digger Run experiment. I have several novel ideas that are kind of half-baked, but nothing I'm close to being able to write yet.

And the longer I go without writing, the more anxious I get about the moment I actually do start again. I'm not sure to break out of that right now.

Goodbye Ethrus, Hello Superheroes

So our planetary romance campaign, Ethrus Prime, has finally ended, and I realize that--unlike Atlantis--I haven't really been posting updates of it here. Of course, since I moved Out of the Vault and Super Movie Mondays over to Hero Go Home, I've barely posted here at all in the last year. I posted a tutorial on how I created my character portrait, and then there were only a couple of other posts in the next couple of months.

Part of that is due to the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the daily serialization of Run, Digger, Run! But part of it was due to the game itself. It just wasn't as emotionally involving for me. And much of that is my fault for my choice of character.

Coming up with a character for this world was a bit of a challenge. It was a brand-new world, and quite extensively thought-out by the gamemaster, but I had trouble finding the kind of person I wanted to be within it. I had this idea that I wanted to be someone crazy who slowly goes sane, and so I came up with this idea: a guy who has had something done to his brain by a machine designed to fight a long-ago war. It overwrites people's brains with the memories and personalities and skillsets of loyal soldiers, therefore eliminating the need for recruiting and training and indoctrination. Grab a prisoner, stick him in the machine, and voila, instant soldier.

Problem was, a spy from the other side had infected the machine with a virus, another personality hidden in the code that would take over and defect to the other side, or perform sabotage among the enemy troops. The otehr problem was that the machine was old and defective, and so the job it had done was incomplete. Sunder (my character) was still himself, but he heard the voices of two other people in his head constantly. One was Torin, a trained sniper and assassin, a cold-blooded killer. The other was Amaris, a master spy who had the ability (like The Mentalist) to read people by their reactions, their tells. He could seduce women and fast-talk men, trained to infiltrate and persuade people to do exactly what he wanted.

Not a horrible concept, actually, and it produced some good moments in game. The problems were:

1) In an attempt to not seem like I was actually getting three characters for the price of one, with every Mary Sue skill in the book, I ended up buying almost all the skills for all three characters with one set of points, and advancing each character's skills separately. So for instance, Torin and Sunder had different pistol skills, and if Torin didn't make an appearance between skill advancements, his skills wouldn't advance. Buying all those skills meant all my skills were lower than I would have liked, and they never advanced as fast as everyone else.

2) Because I was unsure of the game world, I tried to dodge around it by giving Sunder amnesia. I planted hints as to what kind of background he probably had in my background document, but lots of it was left to the gamemaster. This might have worked out better if, in addition to having to create the entire game world from scratch, he hadn't also had another (more interesting) amnesiac character to fill in.

3) Although Amaris had one of my character's coolest moments in the game, he was not really a good choice for the game world. His conception as a con man/human lie detector might have worked well in a modern setting, but in the world of Ethrus, populated by a number of extremely paranoid non-human races that we mostly ended up interacting with, and in a party where more than one character had the mental ability to dominate a character and make him tell us the truth, he was basically pretty useless. Entertaining, but superfluous. It didn't help that the gamemaster and I had different conceptions of his reality (I posited him as a real person, like Torin, while Sargon insisted he was just code).

4) My character's main personality was paranoid and risk-averse, not the best choice for an adventuring party.

So to sum up, Sunder liked to run and hide a lot, Torin was a "master" sniper who was a worse shot than practically everyone else in the game (and falling behind all the time), and Amaris was as useful as a third nipple, plus nobody liked him. And yet, we ended up getting stuff done and having fun, and in the end, Sunder became a pretty interesting guy, I think.

Now it's time to move on to Orion Dusk, a futuristic superhero fighting space pirates in the asteroid belt, or something. I'm hoping I've done enough things differently that he'll be a better fit than Sunder, and yet, he's going to have his own issues. I'll leave those as a surprise to the people who'll be playing with him.

Oh yeah, and since I did this with Smeaton long ago, now that everything's over, I'll leave the members of the group with a couple of bits of Sunder trivia.

Back when I was first conceiving the character, I didn't know that it would be taking place on an alien world. I only knew "post-apocalyptic." So when I was coming up with my alternate personalities, I gave them more recognizably ethnic human names. Nicolai was going to be a spy/assassin, while Diego would be a historian/medic or healer.

Also, during the game, there was a physical tic I would use whenever I played the other personalities. Torin was on Sunder's left side, and Amaris was on his right. So if I would turn my head to left or right while "hearing voices," I was deliberately hearing one or the other of them specifically. And when their personalities would take over, I would tilt my head to that side--Torin to the left, and Amaris to the right. I'm not sure anyone ever consciously picked up on it, but I like to think it helped differentiate them. I know it gave me a crick in my neck sometimes.

Frazier Five-Oh

Long strange day.

Not a bad day. In many ways, a good one. But I decided for my 50th birthday, I would go out and do some things. I cashed in some quarters I'd been saving for a while and treated myself to lunch at a place I'd never been, Buffalo Wild Wings. Then I bought myself some presents: the second season of Archer was on sale, and the fourth season of Heroes, which isn't exactly good, but my daughter wants to see it, and I got some Halloween candy that was on clearance.

Then I came home and got dressed up in a suit and tie and went out to eat at P.F. Chang's, another place I'd never been. The food was really good, but I felt awfully self-conscious, sitting there all dressed up and all alone. After, I went to a club and smoked a really expensive cigar that I got as a free giveaway several years ago and have been saving for a special occasion.

So all in all, it was nice. But lonely. It's not as if I have no friends. I got lots of well-wishes on Facebook, and I have family and friends that I'll see on Saturday, including my daughter. But on THE day, everyone was pretty much busy, and I don't really have any go-to-a-club-and-smoke-a-cigar friends anymore, so that's necessarily something I have to do alone. Which is not necessarily the way I want it, but I don't see any real way of changing it for a while.

The Many Moods of Metatronic

City of Heroes will be shutting down soon. And even though I haven't touched any of my characters for 1,574 days, I decided I needed to take a last look before they're gone forever.

After playing Champions for over a year, though, getting back into the City of Heroes keymap was like learning to walk again. I had forgotten the keystrokes. I had forgotten the geography of the city. And it didn't help that multiple updates and the transition from a subscriber model to a free-to-play model had wiped out or made obsolete major portions of my character.

I will be writing up something more substantial in a few days, once I've finally wrapped up Run, Digger, Run! But for now, here's a look at the many moods of my number-one main man, Metatronic (click the image to embiggen).

The third image is his original costume (no cape, because the game did not allow you to have a cape until you earned it at level 20). When he earned the right to wear a cape and have a second uniform slot, I gave him the Masked Rider style armor you see in the second image. Later, I gave him the Super-Saiyan-style power-up in image four, updated his armor to look tougher a'la image five, and filled a slot with a civilian secret identity costume. And for the fifth and final slot, I took my inspiration from his name (inspired by the Metatron, the angelic being who serves as the voice of God) and gave him his winged form. I think, though, that I used metal wings that somehow got deleted in the interim.

Now I need to find out if I can afford to upgrade my membership to V.I.P. long enough to get screenshots of Metalord, the first character to own the name.

The Next Big Thing

I'm slowly developing a concept for my next project. I'm kind of Digger'd out, so I'm going to do something very different. I had three possible projects: a 1920's Horror/Action story that's been rolling around in my head for over a year; a hard-boiled crime story set in the 50's, probably; and a steampunkish thing set in the late 1800's in Europe.

Problems: The 1920's story doesn't have a third act. Not even the vaguest clue of one. And the characters are kind of boring.

The 1950's story is nothing but a vague idea of tone and one pithy line of dialogue. Oh, and a really strange (and probably unworkable) idea for how to structure the story, if I manage to come up with one.

The Steampunk story falls in between. There is even less plot (so far) than the horror story, but I think the characters are more interesting, and it's possible that I could develop it into something spectacular. Given my track record so far, the chances are slim, but I'm thinking that's what I'm going to turn my efforts toward as I wind up Run, Digger, Run!

Barack Obama's Jobs Plan

1. Increase regulations on businesses, making everything they do more expensive and more burdensome, including hiring.

2. Use the EPA's regulating power to discourage domestic fossil fuel production and to shut down coal-fired power plants, eliminating or forcing overseas thousands of jobs. This also makes energy scarcer and more expensive, driving up costs for businesses (and consumers) across the spectrum and leaving less money available for things like hiring.

3. Fail to pass a federal budget three years running and run the government on last-minute continuing resolutions. Likewise, propose huge increases in corporate and personal taxes, but leave temporary cuts in place for a couple of years at a time, so that businesses can never predict what their expenses will be by this time next year, including hiring.

4. Pass a sweeping change to the health care system, thousands of pages long, establishing over a hundred new bureaucracies with thousands of regulations "to be determined" in coming years, driving up compliance costs while exacerbating uncertainty over the true costs of hiring new personnel.

5. ...

6. Sit back and watch the jobs pour in.

How can any thinking person seriously plan to vote for this tool?