Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Too awkward to control
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
My first impression of the game was quite awful. The game by default wants to be full screen. But the engine can't handle full screen on my computer, and displays really broken images. Stuff that is supposed to be visible is only intermittently there and warps around a lot. It took me several minutes to figure out how to skip the opening cinematic, as it's not obvious when the text that it attempted to display wasn't readable.
So with the game window mostly displaying garbage, I had to figure out how to change the resolution in an attempt to fix it. Some games give you the option to change it early on, such as at character selection. As best as I can tell, DCUO makes you go all the way through creating a character and logging into the game before you can see settings. And then once you get to the settings menu, changing the resolution isn't on any of the tabs that appear by default. You have to find a small button to click to scroll to other tabs several times before the correct tab that contains the option to make the game windowed will even appear. This is difficult when the game engine isn't drawing anything properly, whether the settings menu or otherwise.
After maybe 10 or 20 minutes of fighting against a broken engine, I finally managed to get the game into windowed mode. DCUO is hardly the first game to break at high resolutions. Trove and Elsword also broke in various ways, but not nearly this badly. In those games, at least most of the stuff would draw properly. In DCUO, nothing displayed properly until I switched the game to windowed mode.
Needing to play a game in windowed mode isn't a deal-breaker. The problem of the thread title is, however. As best as I can tell, the game basically has two different methods of targeting. One is basically classic hard targeting. I'm not sure what they call the other, but I call it random targeting. The problem is that the former doesn't work for ranged attacks, as it means a lot of your attacks fire off into the void and hit nothing. The latter doesn't work for melee attacks. And the game wants you to mix in a lot of melee attacks and a lot of ranged attacks, so you get to pick which of the two will be broken.
You can have the game pick targets for you automatically or not. If not, it's basically hard targeting. You can make it into tab targeting, but needing to spend two seconds tabbing to get to the intended foe is a problem when mobs die in under five seconds.
If the game does pick targets for you, it seemingly picks them at random. It's not the classic soft targeting of pick the nearest target. You can be standing right next to one mob, in melee range, facing it, with no mob selected. You attack, and it picks some random mob that is much further away, and you jump toward that other mob to attack. And miss, because it's out of range. That is not viable for melee use. Maybe I should call it broken targeting instead of random targeting, but for a game that released more than ten years ago, I suspect that it's working as intended.
Once you pick a target, you can press a button to attack. Simple enough, right? That first attack didn't kill the mob, so you press the same button to attack again. And again. And again. And so forth until the mob dies.
The problem is that combat often consists of pressing the same button quickly and repeatedly. And that's ergonomically horrible to the extent of being a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. There are three basic ways around this in various other MMORPGs:
1) press a button to toggle auto-attack and it will keep attacking without any further button presses until you tell it to stop,
2) hold a button down to keep attacking as fast as possible until you release it, or
3) have combat designed to be slower paced such that pressing buttons quickly doesn't even make sense.
Most MMORPGs do at least one of those. As best as I can tell, DCUO does none of them. Instead, you just get a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. That's a deal-breaker even for a game that is otherwise quite good--which DCUO isn't.
I play most PC games using a controller, but I don't believe that the above problems would be meaningfully ameliorated by using a keyboard and mouse. Like a lot of PC games, DCUO offers official controller support. Like most PC games that offer official controller support, DCUO's basically doesn't work. But it's more of a broken sham than most, to the extent that I'm skeptical that any of the game's current developers have attempted to play using a controller in the last year or so.
Like most games, DCUO has some default control scheme. It has defaults for both keyboard/mouse controls and also for controllers. But for the controller option, most controls aren't assigned to anything at all. For example, if you're only using the default control scheme, you can't use any skills with a controller. But some controls are assigned to something on a controller, so it's not like the default is just keyboard and mouse. I have no idea how someone thought that made sense. My best guess is that the keybind UI was revamped at some point, and no developers have bothered to look at the controller keybinds since then.
Like most MMORPGs, DCUO allows you to change keybinds. And you usually have to do that in order to use a controller. But what DCUO doesn't allow you to do is to map controls to combinations of buttons. You basically have to do that in order to get access to enough buttons in a lot of games, and that very much includes DCUO. So yes, you can remap the keybinds, but however you do it, you're going to have to leave most of the controls unassigned and inaccessible from a controller. A lot of games that don't offer any official controller support at all have much better controller support than DCUO.
So with the game window mostly displaying garbage, I had to figure out how to change the resolution in an attempt to fix it. Some games give you the option to change it early on, such as at character selection. As best as I can tell, DCUO makes you go all the way through creating a character and logging into the game before you can see settings. And then once you get to the settings menu, changing the resolution isn't on any of the tabs that appear by default. You have to find a small button to click to scroll to other tabs several times before the correct tab that contains the option to make the game windowed will even appear. This is difficult when the game engine isn't drawing anything properly, whether the settings menu or otherwise.
After maybe 10 or 20 minutes of fighting against a broken engine, I finally managed to get the game into windowed mode. DCUO is hardly the first game to break at high resolutions. Trove and Elsword also broke in various ways, but not nearly this badly. In those games, at least most of the stuff would draw properly. In DCUO, nothing displayed properly until I switched the game to windowed mode.
Needing to play a game in windowed mode isn't a deal-breaker. The problem of the thread title is, however. As best as I can tell, the game basically has two different methods of targeting. One is basically classic hard targeting. I'm not sure what they call the other, but I call it random targeting. The problem is that the former doesn't work for ranged attacks, as it means a lot of your attacks fire off into the void and hit nothing. The latter doesn't work for melee attacks. And the game wants you to mix in a lot of melee attacks and a lot of ranged attacks, so you get to pick which of the two will be broken.
You can have the game pick targets for you automatically or not. If not, it's basically hard targeting. You can make it into tab targeting, but needing to spend two seconds tabbing to get to the intended foe is a problem when mobs die in under five seconds.
If the game does pick targets for you, it seemingly picks them at random. It's not the classic soft targeting of pick the nearest target. You can be standing right next to one mob, in melee range, facing it, with no mob selected. You attack, and it picks some random mob that is much further away, and you jump toward that other mob to attack. And miss, because it's out of range. That is not viable for melee use. Maybe I should call it broken targeting instead of random targeting, but for a game that released more than ten years ago, I suspect that it's working as intended.
Once you pick a target, you can press a button to attack. Simple enough, right? That first attack didn't kill the mob, so you press the same button to attack again. And again. And again. And so forth until the mob dies.
The problem is that combat often consists of pressing the same button quickly and repeatedly. And that's ergonomically horrible to the extent of being a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. There are three basic ways around this in various other MMORPGs:
1) press a button to toggle auto-attack and it will keep attacking without any further button presses until you tell it to stop,
2) hold a button down to keep attacking as fast as possible until you release it, or
3) have combat designed to be slower paced such that pressing buttons quickly doesn't even make sense.
Most MMORPGs do at least one of those. As best as I can tell, DCUO does none of them. Instead, you just get a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. That's a deal-breaker even for a game that is otherwise quite good--which DCUO isn't.
I play most PC games using a controller, but I don't believe that the above problems would be meaningfully ameliorated by using a keyboard and mouse. Like a lot of PC games, DCUO offers official controller support. Like most PC games that offer official controller support, DCUO's basically doesn't work. But it's more of a broken sham than most, to the extent that I'm skeptical that any of the game's current developers have attempted to play using a controller in the last year or so.
Like most games, DCUO has some default control scheme. It has defaults for both keyboard/mouse controls and also for controllers. But for the controller option, most controls aren't assigned to anything at all. For example, if you're only using the default control scheme, you can't use any skills with a controller. But some controls are assigned to something on a controller, so it's not like the default is just keyboard and mouse. I have no idea how someone thought that made sense. My best guess is that the keybind UI was revamped at some point, and no developers have bothered to look at the controller keybinds since then.
Like most MMORPGs, DCUO allows you to change keybinds. And you usually have to do that in order to use a controller. But what DCUO doesn't allow you to do is to map controls to combinations of buttons. You basically have to do that in order to get access to enough buttons in a lot of games, and that very much includes DCUO. So yes, you can remap the keybinds, but however you do it, you're going to have to leave most of the controls unassigned and inaccessible from a controller. A lot of games that don't offer any official controller support at all have much better controller support than DCUO.
Comments
Yes, you get a fast travel power. But unlike in, say, Champions Online, the fast travel power doesn't make you actually move all that fast. It only really brings you up to what feels like it should be a more normal movement speed. And it also gets disabled in combat, which means that you can't use it to just zoom past mobs. You have to either stop to kill everything or else just run past them very slowly.
Other than the awkward controls, the most notable thing about the combat is the very annoying use of voiceovers. Characters will say something to taunt their enemies. And then repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it again. That is a shining example of how not to use voiceovers. I hope they can be turned off. I didn't dig around to see.
DCUO seems like it has the same problem as Star Trek Online: it's trying too hard to be DC Comics, and not hard enough to have interesting gameplay. So you meet a bunch of iconic superheroes right away. And look, you're just as strong as Superman, even though you just woke up and don't yet have your powers.
For all of the deal-breakers above, I don't really have anything all that positive to say about the game. The graphics aren't bad. The business model doesn't look like a problem. But when EG7 bought Daybreak, they said that DCUO was Daybreak's most popular game. I have no idea why anyone would play it at all, beyond just briefly and then quit upon seeing how bad it is. Based on how incomplete the game's wiki is, one suspects that not very many people do actually play it. At best, the game is merely very unpopular with the sort of people who edit wikis, which admittedly, is only a small subset of gamers.
Five years ago, in a world where Champions Online did pretty much everything better than DCUO, and often a lot better, DCUO didn't have much of a reason to exist. Now that Champions Online had the huge price hike that basically makes freeform characters inaccessible, which I regard as a game-wrecking change, I still don't see any reason for DCUO to exist.
Some of the games that I've picked up well after launch showed some signs of having formerly been good before the company did something to ruin everything. DCUO offers no such evidence of ever having been anything besides terrible. It's likely that I'm missing some things because I didn't play the game for very long, but I'd be really shocked if there's a simple fix for all of the deal-breaking problems laid out above.
Twp more recent examples in past couple years was the popular Phantasy Star and another Asian game Sword art online.
IDK why but Asian developers seem to have a completely different idea on player an game controls than we do over here.Another example is pointing with your mouse a spot on the map to move to or rotating camera views which drives me nuts.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I really didn't like the way you had to press the mouse in various combinations for the combat. My carpal had a field day.
Champions Online allows you to map combinations of buttons to single skills. For example, you can have 1, 2, 3 and 4 be four different skills, then assign one button to shift and make shift+1, shift+2, shift+3, and shift+4 be four other skills.
In a game like FFXIV, where the developers obviously made controller support into a major priority, you might map different buttons to shift, ctrl, and alt, and then map a particular skill to shift+ctrl+3. Being able to stack combinations like that allows you to have controller access to everything you need. Needing combinations of three buttons is somewhat awkward, but it sure beats critical functions being completely inaccessible to you.
If DCUO doesn't allow you to map combinations of buttons to things, then I'd expect the console version to be nearly unplayable. And if it does, then why don't they bring that to PC? It's such a simple thing to do.