Has Anybody Seen My Invisible Plane?

 

DCUO is very much a drop-in game for me these days . Not that it ever was anything much more but there was a time when I did at least make new characters and level up in open world content once in a while.

Now just about all I do is log in to claim my freebies, clear the clutter that inevitably creates, then visit my Lair to put up the pick of the new posters and pets. If there are any nice style choices I might also play around with those for a few minutes before logging out and forgetting about the game until next time.

There are any number of mmorpgs where I could be doing the same but as the posting history on this blog amply demonstrates, after a brief infatuation my loyalty tends to fade. Time between visits gets longer, the visits themselves get shorter. Eventually everything folds neatly away into the forgotten stack at the back of my mind, to resurface, if at all, only as a footnote, brought out to shed light on some new infatuation as the cycle begins again.

While we're on the topic of new mmorpgs, there do seem to be a lot of them this year. Almost a glut. So many, indeed, I think this may be the first time I can remember not having time to sample them all, even to get a few posts out of the experience. 

I mentioned Gloria Victis recently, which admitedly is new only to me, not the genre, but there's also Elyon, which launched on Steam this week and today I got an email from NCSoft inviting me to the closed beta for Lineage2M. Not a very exclusive invite since you can sign up on the website but I'm not bothered. I don't have time to try it right now, anyway.

Amongst all this competition DCUO keeps itself, if not at the forefront of my thoughts then at least somewhere I can see it, by dint of two things: an emotional connection to my lifelong history with DC Comics and the pragmatic fact that it's part of Daybreak Games' All Access membership plan. That the stuff  Dimensional Ink gives away for free can often be really good doesn't hurt, either.

Just knowing I'm notionally paying for premium access wouldn't be enough. Planetside 2 is also included but I never log in to that one. I've tried it and it doesn't really do anything for me. It's unlikely anything they could offer in the way of pets or costumes or housing (not that I believe PS2 has any of those things, currently) would be likely to change my mind, either.

Conversely, even though EverQuest does have housing and pets and costume gear (of a kind), the nature of the game and especially its elderly appearance make those kind of incentives considerably less of an inducement. For EQ, the draw is the meat not the sauce (Weird metaphor from a vegetarian...) I keep coming back for the content and the gameplay, not the fluff.

Really, though, I pay my All Access subscription for EverQuest II. That's where the membership benefits really make a big difference. For the rest, all the games are Free to Play anyway and I actually play EverQuest on a free account most of the time, not on my AA. And when it comes to those attractive freebies in DCUO, Dimensional Ink are very generous about handing them out to all players, not just the paying members. 

This month it's all about Wonder Woman. Even as a lifelong fan of the DC extended universe (That should really be universes or better yet multiverses.) I can't pretend Diana Prince has been central to my affection for the franchise over the years. 

I own many thousands of DC comic books but I'd be surprised if more than twenty or thirty are Wonder Woman titles. I do have something of a soft spot for the Mike Sekowsky era "Mod" Wonder Woman, when she fought crime in a bell-bottomed jumpsuit. 

She was always there in the Justice League's classic line-up, of course, twirling her golden lasso to get the truth out of some super-villain or ferrying the non-flyers to the fight in her invisble plane. Ah, the invisible plane. I hear it makes an appearance in the second movie, which I have yet to see. If an invisible plane can make an appearance, that is. Bit of a koan, that, eh?

I have one, you know. An invisible plane. I got it this morning. It's one of those freebies I mentioned. The only one you have to be an All Access member to claim. I thought it was going to be a house item so after I claimed it I went to my Lair and tried to place it but it was nowhere to be seen. Yes, thank you. I get the irony.

Turns out it's not a house pet but an "Accessory", which seems to be what DCUO calls vanity pets. I had to go look it up. I also had to look up how to apply the "Chroma" I'd just been given, too. I had no idea how to do that although it appears I've done it before. 

There are far more things in DCUO I don't understand than things I do. I may have been "playing" since beta but there's playing and playing, isn't there? I've been playing at playing at best.

Another thing I don't know how to do, as I've explained before, is how to have more than one Base. Or Lair. Or Hideout. They're all the same thing except they're not. 

I did some more reading on that today and I think I have the hang of it now. "Base" is the generic term for "Housing" and "Lair" and "Hideout" are sub-types. A Lair is bigger than a Hideout and a Lair can have practical advantages a Hideout can't. Just don't ask me what they are.

The reason I was thinking about it was that there was a free Hideout in my Claims. Nothing to do with Wonder Woman as far as I know. She definitely doesn't have a space home in any of the comics I ever read. I haven't been able to check it out yet because although I've worked out how to swap bases now, if I swap from a larger one to a smaller one I'll lose most of my placements and I have everything set up how I like it.

The Space Base was one of many freebies from another event, one I'd completely missed, the 2021 charity livestream for Extra Life. I think it might still be going on. The web page says "The next stream is on Friday at 23:00 BST", by which time I hope to be asleep, since I'm working tomorrow and I have to be up around 6 am. 

The Space Base came from there, anyway, along with a load of other goodies like more Chroma color skins and a whole load of postcards. I do like the postcards but I'm running out of room to display them.

There's a really striking poster included in the Wonder Woman collection. It's the 80th anniversary of the creation of the character we're celebrating, by the way and she's probably more popular now than she's ever been. The power of these archetypal characters is astonishing. It's hard to imagine them ever fading.

It took me a few minutes to find a spot for the larger of the two posters and even then it wasn't ideal. I might have to move a few things around because it's too good to hide halfway down the stairwell on the way to the basement. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and pay for a second base.

I'm just rambling now. I'll stop. Oh, except to mention the Wonder Woman Chroma skin is really nice but I wish it didn't include my character's hair. That's just weird. 

Or maybe I just don't know how to use it. Seems likely.