To Cut A Long Story Short - A Day Of Reckoning For DCUO's New Narrative-Led Approach

Following on from yesterday's post, where I talked about how reliable Daybreak's patcher is and finished up promising I'd say something about the actual content of what I'd downloaded with it, namely DCUO's latest update, Light and Rain: Day of Reckoning, I thought I'd probably better go play the thing. So I tried. I managed about half of it.

The first part was fine, although I can point you to a forum thread where 98% of the posters would beg to differ. No-one had any problems with the setting, a snowy town in the Balkan state of Kaznia. Most people agreed the snow looked great and there was lots of detail. The art department was clearly having a good day.

Unfortunately, no-one really plays DCUO for the scenery. The game engine is getting quite elderly now so even a good-looking map only looks good relatively speaking. None of them are going to be winning any prizes for looks in 2025. I don't think it would be controversial to say no-one plays DCUO for the story, either, which could be a tad more of a problem, given the whole, new, narrative-first rebrand. 

Okay, I'm sure someone plays DCUO for the story. Someone probably plays it for the music. Speaking of which, the music in Day of Reckoning is probably the best I can recall hearing in the game. In fact, it's the only time I can remember noticing music in the game at all, except when I've turned it down in combat because it was too loud.

Again, though, no-one's here for the music and Dimensional Ink isn't pretending otherwise. They are, however, trying to sell players on the concept of more story than they've been used to getting and this update is the first practical evidence we've seen of how that change of direction is going to look. So far, it seems to be going down about as well as Spinal Tap's pivot into free jazz.

As I said, I've only seen maybe half the first installment so my judgment is necessarily incomplete. It's  likely to remain that way, too, because the reason I had to stop halfway through is that I can't even come close to beating the first of the two storyline bosses, Felix Faust. 

I'd say she has to be freezing in that costume but then, y'know... magic.

This is entirely down to my complete incompetence as a DCUO player. I can't play my own character - as in I literally don't know what most of her powers or abilities are, let alone which sequence of key-presses activate them. Ironically, after playing a ton of FPS and action rpgs these last few years, I no longer have any real issues with keyboard dexterity. I can press the buttons now - I just have no clue which buttons I ought to be pressing.

I tried to beat Faust three times and the closest I got him was halfway. I'm reasonably confident I could learn and improve enough to beat him in a few more attempts but I'm neither interested or motivated enough to try. The only reason to do it, other than to be able to write a more complete and balanced post about it, would be to see the story through to the end and sadly that's no motivation at all.

Coming to Day of Reckoning off the back of the Riniscita storyline in Wuthering Waves feels a bit like putting down Animal Farm to go read a three-year old their Peppa Pig book. I mean, they both have pigs in but otherwise...

Okay, that's a bit harsh. I'll make a fairer comparison. Yesterday, I played a fair bit more of the Scars of Destruction storyline in EverQuest II. There's a lot of narrative to get through there. EQII NPCs are chatty as hell but generally I enjoy the house style, verbose and off-topic though it often is.

Scars of Discord, though, feels like one of the weakest expansion storylines to date. The plot is the main problem but the writing in general feels a little tired, as though whoever was responsible knew they didn't have a lot to work with. Even so, SoD is orders of magnitude more interesting and entertaining than what I had to plow through in DCUO yesterday and today.

They grow 'em big around these parts, it seems.

The writing in the game has always been terse, to put it politely. I think it must be someone's very misguided idea of how DC comic books work. As a lifetime reader, I'd say they were never that basic, even in the glory days of Bob Haney, but it's been the game's house style since launch so I don't expect anything different.

At least, I didn't until DI started to hype the new, narrative-driven approach by issuing press releases about it and posting short stories on the website. That does kind of raise expectations, which is unfortunate because this goes nowhere at all towards meeting them.

The players complaining bitterly in the thread I linked seem to object mostly to the story being there at all, although a minority would like more story in their game, just not this one. I had a slightly different take. Had I not read about in advance, I would have had no idea this update was any different to any of the others I've played in recent years.

I found the story, such as it is, to be so slight it risked slipping my notice altogether. If I hadn't been looking for it I'm not sure I'd have spotted there was one, or at least not any more than usual. 

Every chapter I remember from the old format began with a message over the communicator sending you to a new map where some questgivers would be all standing close to each other, handing out a bunch of combat or collect quests. This one does have an introduction of some sort, although I've forgotten it already. It probably also came via communicator but it was even shorter than usual. 

Then came the inevitable new map with its combat and collect quests, same as always. The only notable difference I could see was that instead of a bunch of superheroes all standing around like greeters at the mall, handing out quests, I had to keep running in and out of the Laughing Hound pub to get them from John Considine.

The cavernous interior of Considine's local.

The voice actor playing Considine spoke in a stilted and unconvincing way and employed a hard-to-define accent that was probably supposed to suggest London but occasionally sounded closer to Sydney. After a bit Zatanna turned up outdoors to hand out more quests and a local hero called Voivode, also hanging out in the pub for no obvious reason, added a few more. After just about every quest I had to leg it back to the pub and talk to Considine again.

All of this felt pretty normal to me but on reflection that's probably because it's how questing in most MMORPGs works. I'm so used to it, I don't even think about it any more. 

I'd not really thought about the way DCUO does it differently either. Or used to, I guess. Judging by the many comments complaining about the utter pointlessness of having to keep going back to the pub to get the next quest instead of just picking it up on location via the communicator, I don't get the feeling many players appreciate the old-school legwork.

The quests themselves were not popular either and for good reason. There's a lot of "talking" to NPCs that comes down to nothing more than listening to them spout the same handful of phrases over and over. Which, to be fair, is what NPCs in DCUO have always done, only until now they did it mostly while you were killing them. You didn't generally have to stand around waiting for them to finish before your quest would update.

As several people mention in the thread, there was also a lot of lag and the quests had a nasty tendency not to notice you'd done them. I had to speak to a lot of witnesses before I got all my updates. I do find it a little ironic that the forum, as it always is, is full of people claiming the update is so bad everyone is going to quit, while at the same time moaning about the lag caused by the servers being full of people throwing themselves at the new content...

It took me the best part of an hour to finish the first map and it wasn't always a fun time. It was okay, for the most part. Not terrible. The story was all over the place and hard to follow, the dialog was dull, Considine was annoying and everything felt undercooked but it was no worse than average for an MMORPG. It reminded me a lot of Guild Wars 2 at times in that there seemed to be about a quarter as much actual story as the time it took to see it play out suggested there should be.

Meet Voivode. Makes you wonder about the drinking laws in Kaznia, doesn't it?

Once that was out the way, it was on to the first solo instance. It takes place in a sprawling graveyard which , once again, looks very good, given the limitations of the game engine. The first part of the story there involved wresting control of an obelisk from Felix Faust by playing king of the hill with his lackeys. I enjoyed that part.

It was followed by an escort quest. Oh goody! No, wait, three escort quests. Even better!

You can imagine how well that went down with the regulars. And with me. No-one likes an escort quest, let alone the same one three times in a row. I failed it the first time but I soon got it figured out so I only had to do it four times in total, which was three times more than I wanted. And that's being generous.

After that it was straight to the throw-down with Faust which, as I said, did not go my way. He wiped the floor with me and Considine did nothing to help. As things stand, I can't imagine wanting to git gud so I can go back and finish the story. It isn't anywhere near interesting enough for that.

This is part one of the four-part arc that forms the spearhead of the new narrative-driven approach. It's not an auspicious start. I really hope the other three parts are a lot better than this one, especially since as it stands right now you have to do the whole thing on every character you play if you want to get to what most players think of as the meat of the game - the repeatable content.

I'm quite glad I don't have to deal with that although I'd bet it gets changed to Account access pretty quickly. If there's one thing that might really get people to quit it's having to play through this storyline on every alt they've got.