I play a lot of DC Universe Online. I mostly play on the PC, but I’ve been known to play it on the PlayStation 4 now and then, and both those platforms support game pad and keyboard, and both have their own support for the voice communication that is so vital when playing an action-oriented MMO.
I’m picky about the MMOs I play, as I want to be sure I can really devote myself to one for a significant amount of time before I start one. I’ve been playing DCUO now for eight years – the same number of years I played the original EverQuest. It’s weird that I have played so long and still play so poorly… but that’s a whole ’nother post that I will probably never write.
Anyway… I have a Nintendo Switch, I play DCUO, it’s free, why not try it? What could possibly go wrong?
This is actually the perfect time to pick up DCUO. Daybreak is celebrating DCUO’s tenth anniversary this month, and one of the benefits is a free boost to the max level of 30 and enough gear for a combat rating of 290, as well as a free 75 skill points to spend however you like, and a leveled-up artifact of your choice. PlayStation and PC players get the same benefits, as well.
This won’t bring a new character up to the latest content (requiring a combat rating of 310 or better), but it’s not far from it, and a serious player could make up the difference fairly quickly.
The game itself is a straight port. The graphics are significantly lower resolution, which is really obvious when the Switch is connected to a monitor, but doesn’t look too bad on the Switch’s built-in screen.
Because I didn’t feel like spending money on the Switch version, and since it doesn’t share accounts or servers with the PC/PS versions, I wasn’t able to create a character with the powersets I have some familiarity with, Munitions and Electricity. I went with Fire instead. Daybreak says Fire is the most common power set.
Prototype for the Fire powerset? The Flash. The guy who got hit by lightning, has a lightning bolt on his costume as his emblem, and shoots lightning from his hands and follows him around when he runs. They give him the Fire power set.
DC literally has a character named Fire, whose power is Fire, and who is actually in the game so they would already have her model.
Actually, the cognitive dissonance is so bad that I forgot I passed over The Flash’s weird Fire and went with Batman’s Gadget build instead. You can see how much time I put into playing Gidget Girl. Well, at least I got to write my Fire rant.
That it plays exactly like the PC/PS versions is a mixed blessing.
A PlayStation player, or a PC player who plays with a gamepad (as I do), will feel right at home… as long as they have a keyboard connected to their Switch, for chatting, and a monitor connected to their Switch, so they can see what’s going on, and a Pro controller so they can not have to use the joycons…
And then that player will have a low resolution version of the game, with significantly lower population servers than other players enjoy – PC and PS players share the same servers, but Switch players do not.
But if a Switch is all you have, and you really want to play DCUO – well, it will do the job. DCUO itself is oftentimes fun, and the grind isn’t really that bad if you just want to play casually.
For me, I won’t be playing it on the Switch. I can’t access my actual characters, and I have both a PC and a PlayStation, both of which have a better playing experience. But for others… I’d heard that DCUO servers for the Switch were dead, but when I popped in for a few minutes around lunch time, there were a decent number of players around. I’m not sure if they, like me, were also players boosted to near max combat rating, but even if they were, it’s a nice thing for Daybreak to do in order to get all the players on more-or-less current content, rather than spread out among ten years of empty raids and war fronts.
I would much rather they’d made a UI more suited for the Switch… DCUO is a huge money maker for Daybreak, and the game has gone ten years without any UI enhancements. Do one for the Switch, and then bring it back to the PC/PS versions. Now that would be something cool :-)