Free Comic Day At DCUO

I don't really play DCUO any more. It's arguable whether I ever did, really. I leveled to the extremely low cap of 30 a couple of times, which is tantamount to boasting about having completed the tutorial in any other MMO. And even that was many years ago. In recent times, about all I've done is log in when there's some new freebie to collect or if something's going on that I think might make a blog post.

And that's kind of what's happening today. Only this time I don't even need to log in! 

As you may have noticed (If you've been paying attention to anything I've been saying.) there's a new Supergirl movie out this summer. Next month, in fact. June 26 to be precise. I posted about it here and here which, since I'm talking about it again today, makes this three months in a row. DC should be paying me!

It's not so much the movie this time as the opportunity it represents. Digital Ink, the Daybreak sub-studio responsible for DCUO has, unsurprisingly, thrown itself headlong onto what it hopes is going to be the Summer Supergirl Bandwagon. If I had to bet, I'd guess the movie will be an artistic success but a commercial failure but until it comes out, its success or lack thereof is conveniently unsullied by either reviews or box office receipts so why not make the most of it while it lasts?.

There is, naturally, an in-game event based around the movie. There's even a (Not very good...) trailer, which you can watch below, although if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother.

I've completely lost track of how these things work in DCUO any more. There used to be Chapters and then there was some kind of multi-part story set up and now I don't know what they're doing. It must be well over a year since I last logged in and a lot longer than that since I played for more than half an hour before I got bored and logged out again.

Of late, I haven't even bothered to go in and get my free stuff. There's always free stuff but if you're not playing, what are you going to do with it? And I got a bit annoyed when I bought a new Hideout and instead of ending up with two, it lost me the one I already had. Which I never got back. Not that I'm bitter... 

I tried to redecorate the new one but my heart was never in it. Anyway, enough of that. For this summer's Supergirl event there's a freebie you don't have to log in to enjoy. And it's a good one, too. If you like Supergirl and superhero comics, that is. Which, obviously, I do.

To cut to the chase (In the skies above Metropolis, likely as not.) DCUO is "giving away" six issues of Supergirl's comic to promote the new Children of Krypton: Shadows Over Argo event. 

I say "giving away" but it's more like "Giving you a lend of" as we used to say when I was at school. And when I say "comics", I imagine no-one really believes they're going to send you half a dozen printed copies through the mail. No, what they're giving you is limited-duration access to selected digital issues through the DC Universe Infinite portal. You do have to sign up and register an account at DCUI but it just asks for your age and an email and password but it only takes like thirty seconds.

The most interesting part of all this for me was learning that DCUI is now available in the UK. Has been since 2022, in fact. I completely missed the Bat Signal on that one. 

Several times, back in the twenty-teens, I tried to sign up for the service and was repeatedly rebuffed. I wanted to give them my money but they wouldn't take it. I kept checking back to see if they'd expanded into my region and they hadn't but then, some time during the pandemic I think it must have been, I happened upon a website that gave me free access to what seems like every comic ever published and I forgot all about DCUI. 

The six Supergirl comics you can read for nothing right now.

I've used that website, sporadically, whenever there's been something I particularly wanted to read.  I assume it's some sort of pirate operation so won't link it here but really I have no clue what it is. At no point has anyone ever asked for any money or indeed any personal details, You don't even need to provide an email address. It's as easy to access as Wikipedi and as public, which seems a bit of an odd way to do piracy.

Still, I prefer not to pirate if there's a legal alternative. FFS, I don't even like playing pirate-themed games! Pirates of any and all kinds are the antithesis of cool as far as I'm concerned. Bad pirates! Pirates bad!

The upshot of which is that, having been alerted by the DCUO promotion to the fact that DC is now willing to take my money, I will very soon be giving it to them, not least because the monthly subscription is an extremely cost-effective £6.99. For reasons that are anything but rational (Or indeed sane.) I feel it would be foolish to give them that money before I've read my six free issues, so I'll probably start subbing next month. I fancy the idea of reading comics on my tablet in my lunch hour at work. You can download them and read offline with the DC offer so I won't even have to contend with our crappy wi-fi.. 

The one thing that's putting me of a bit is that, having read one of the issues on the DCUI platform this morning, the experience doesn't seem to be anything like as good as it is with the pirate version. I was only saying to someone at work this week that I now find reading comics on a screen considerably more immersive than reading them on paper but that certainly wasn't true of the one I read on DCUI today. I hope there are better ways to display and turn the pages hidden in the UI somewhere because the default option felt really clunky.

The six free issues are mostly very recent, including the first in the current run that's been so highly rated by Anj at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. Anj's reviews are so incredibly thorough that you could just read them and not bother with the comics at all. I have to skip most of what he says about anything I have any intention of reading. The word "spoiler" doesn't seem to feature in his vocabulary.

340 more Supergirl comics you could read for just £6.99 a month. 

Having read that one, I can confirm it's excellent but also probably of more interest to long-time fans of the character than casual readers. I guess that's likely true of most of the others but I would recommend anyone with more than a passing interest, especially if they have any plans to see the movie, to take the opportunity to read the free copy of  Issue #1 of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, the full graphic novel version of which I wrote about at some length in one of the posts I linked earlier.

Ah, yes. Issue #1 and only Issue #1 for free. That's worth noting because of course the hope is that, having had a taste, you'll crave more and be willing to pay for it next time. Remind me again what profession uses that sales model?

I was curious (Read: suspicious.) that the free Supergirl comics were just the regular free tasters on offer over at DCUI. Well, I was once I remembered that, when I was checking the platform out all those years ago, giving away free issues was a thing there. So I went there directly to check, using a different browser, and they're not. 

Not the same, I mean. There are six free comics anyone can read over there, just not the same six. And none of them feature Supergirl, which seems odd now I come to think of it. Why would they miss a chance at cross-promotion? Free Supergirl comics coming to all in June, I'll bet.

Thinking about that, it occurred to me to wonder just who it is that can access this offer. I got an email but whether that's because I'm a Daybreak All Access customer or because I have a history of playing DCUO so Digital Ink has me email address I couldn't say. Well, I probably could, if I dug into it a bit but I have better things to do with my Saturday afternoon. It's not like I'm a journalist!

In that spirit, I offer the information, for what it's worth, "as seen." If you play DCUO or have played it, maybe you can read six Supergirl comics for free, too. Or maybe not. If you care enough, I imagine you'll go find out, now I've brought it to your attention. 

And if it turns out you can't... well, there are other ways. 

Carded

I'm not sure where I first heard about DC Dual Force. Probably MMO Bomb or MassivelyOP, unless maybe it was NME. For a music magazine, they do run a lot of gaming news, some of it quite random.

I may not have paid much attention to which site I was looking at but at least I registered the salient points:

1. Free
2. Steam
3. DC

Put all three together and there seemed no reason not to give it a try. I'm enough of a DC fan to get mildly excited at the thought of just about anything that might feature one of my favorite characters. Granted, most times it's just it's Batman again, but I can always hope.

As far as I can gather, the game is supposed to be DC's answer to the highly-rated Marvel Snap. I already added that one to my Steam account weeks ago but I haven't yet gotten around to playing it. I must not be such a Marvel fan, obviously, although as I was running through my mental list of Favorite Characters From Superhero Comics just now, it did seem to be mostly names from Marvel that drifted to the top. I can thank the relentless over-exposure of the last few years for that, I guess.

Both games are DCGs or DCCGs or whatever the acronym is. Collectable card games in which there aren't any actual cards. I have no idea whether the gameplay is identical or even similar, not having played both of them (Probably could have done that before I decided to write this post) but people do seem to like comparing the two so I guess it's at least in the same general ballpark.

DCDF has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, which seems to reflect not so much a meh response as a psychotic division. From the reviews I read, people either absolutely love it or utterly despise it. Very little middle ground.

Having played for nearly three and half hours - a couple of lengthy sessions - I find myself weirdly in sympathy with both camps. I spent most of the time thinking "This is a total waste of my time. It's half-assed nonsense. I'll just have another go..." I wouldn't mind playing again right now...

The game begins with a Tutorial in which - guess who? - Batman takes it upon himself to show you how to play. There's a framing device that I found amusing; Bats keeps beginning to explain some technical feature he thinks is important but before he can get into it he gets interrupted by some emergency and we have go sort it out, which is when the actual instruction happens. Learning by doing rather than yawning through yet another Batman Knows Best lecture. Jason Todd must be laughing his cape off.

Other than the actual gameplay, the tutorial involves voice acting, comic panels and speech balloons, which not unreasonably creates the impression there's going to be some form of narrative structure or storyline to the game. As far as I can tell, there is not. Once you hit the game proper, all of that goes away. At least, it did during the eight or nine rounds I played. Maybe it comes back later but I doubt it.

I'm guessing the nearest you'll get to a plot is in Comics mode. There are a number of Modes, in one of which, Comics, you get to play through the events that occured in specific published issues. Well, you do if you imagine them as comics produced for pre-school children, the kind with a single picture on every page and just the odd caption to explain the extremely basic plot. Oh, and a lot of sound effects apparently lifted verbatim from the ultra-camp 'sixties Batman TV show. 

This perfectly sums up my issue with most, if not all, of the superhero video games I've ever played. They all seem to have been designed by people who have not only never read an actual comic but who have taken all of their cues from the kind of cultural commentators who believe the form exists purely and simply for the entertainment of very small children or adults with an extremely low IQ. 

Given that the absolutely least interesting thing about superhero comics over the last forty or fifty years has been all the punching each other in the face, I find this quite peculiar. It's not as though other media haven't moved on from the 1950s stereotype. I mean, I know a lot of non super-hero fans complain about the final act of every Marvel movie being one long fight scene but even those critics acknowledge the two hours of soap opera melodrama and would-be witty badinage that comes before the explosions.

In superhero games it's just thump thump thump. It certainly is in this one.

I'm not saying it's not fun. It is quite fun. What I'm saying is that this kind of gameplay has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons any of these characters ever became famous enough for anyone to care about them in the first place. The designers are relying one hundred per cent on the recognition factor to pull eyes to their game without understanding why people recognize the characters to begin with.

Of course, if it featured wholly original characters no-one outside the company had ever heard of, no-one would be playing it at all, so I totally understand why they're doing it...

The question is whether seeing a bunch of familiar names and costumes on screen is enough, when none of those characters either act or speak in any way whatsoever like their originals. And no, it's not.

Honestly, it might be, if there was even the smallest hat-tip to authenticity, so you at least felt you were looking at the same characters you grew up with. They do change all the time as different writers and artists offer their interpretations after all. In DCDF, there's not the least concession to any of that prior history. The mechanics randomly team villains with heroes and pit longtime allies against each other for absolutely no discernible reason. Authenticity is clearly the last thing on anyone's mind. 

At first I couldn't really figure out what was going on. I'm long past the time when I knew what was current in the DC Universe so for a moment I thought maybe some of these people had switched sides. Certainly, over the years, a lot of villains have gone straight and the odd hero has turned bad, although it rarely lasts long. After a couple of rounds, though, I realised it was just opportunistic game mechanics in action.

There is a spurious veneer of canonical coherency. As a deckbuilder, the game groups the cards, to an extent, by having you pick from Teams. Each Leader (You get two Leaders in each Deck.) has their own Team, which is vaguely consistent with expectations but the whole thing falls down when you realise you can pair a Hero with a Villain as your two Leaders if you want and then your whole hand is just a mishmash of good and evil.

I had Poison Ivy and Batman working together. And Flash and Harley Quinn. I could just about accept that as not wholly egregious. Ivy and Harley have both worked with heroes before, when it suited them. I don't think anyone's going to be making the same allowances for The Joker or Doomsday, though. You can pair Doomsday with Superman or The Joker with Batman if you want and they'll work together as happily as though they weren't mortal enemies and (In at least some continuities.) each other's murderers.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me even while I'm telling myself it really doesn't matter. I know it's just a dumb card game that only exists as a bit of mindless fun meant to make money but I can't get past eighty years of history that easily. The gameplay may be moderately compelling but the lack of context keeps getting in the way. 

I keep asking myself  "Why is any of this happening?" and coming up with nothing but "Because". And just because isn't enough.

All told, I'm not sorry I gave the game a try. I'm not even saying I won't play it a little more although I suspect even its limited appeal will fade quite fast. I am a little disappointed by just how cynically exploitative the use of the characters seems to be. I wasn't expecting much but I got less than that.

Even the art, which I've seen mentioned by negative reviewers as the game's only saving grace, isn't that impressive. Much of it looks souless and calculating, lacking the personal feel I'd expect from even the weaker artists working on the comcs themselves. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it wasn't done by some of those same artists - it does look like the kind of thing people knock out for a few dollars a sketch at comicons.

Having exposed myself to the DC version of an online collectible card game, I suppose my next logical step is to do the same with their frenemy across the panel borders. I might as well. I already have it installed. 

Marvel Snap has a much better reputation so my expectations are higher this time. We'll see if they're diappointed once more or if I come back a convert. Place your bets now.

Transferrable Skills: Marv Wolfman on Planetside 2

Marv Wolfman seems to have been around forever. I interviewed him over a quarter of a century ago. I vaguely recall asking him a lot of overly-detailed questions about the Teen Titans, which he answered patiently and with good humor, even when I gave him a hard time over the death of Terra. I think he was hearing a lot of that at the time...

He had a reputation as a steady, professional comics writer. A very safe pair of hands. I lost track of his career trajectory sometime in the early 90s, when I stopped buying comics for the final time. Well, it's been final so far...

Yes my mentor is Ambush Bug. What exactly are you trying to imply?

If I'd thought about him at all since then, which I haven't, I'd have guessed he would have left comics by now, possibly retired. I certainly wouldn't have expected him to turn up working  on MMOs, much less for SoE, but there does seem to be a bit of  genre bleed going on, what with Todd McFarlane over at 38 Studios and Michael Bendis on the Marvel  MMO so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. 


I knew he'd done something on DCUO but I was never entirely sure what it was. I played DCUO quite a lot and still do on occasion and it certainly has a very 70s-80s take on the DC Universe, which I appreciate. It does feel a little like being inside a Marv Wolfman title from that era, although perhaps a Gerry Conway fill-in would be nearer the mark. Maybe the DC universe hasn't changed all that much. I don't know. As I said, I'm not keeping up like I used to.

Bats is out of town, okay? You got me. Stop laughing at the back!

 Marv must have done a pretty good job doing whatever it was that he did, though, because he's back at SoE again, working on the backstory for Planetside II. Is that a plum job? I wouldn't have thought so. Not for a writer, anyway. Hard to see how much backstory a 24/7 running firefight needs. I don't think there's all that much congruity between comics and MMOs anyway. Not in the writing department. But then, a good pro can turn his hand to anything.


Oddly, given that SoE is my preferred MMO development house, I never played Planetside. I often meant to but somehow I just never got round to it. I mean to rectify that with Planetside II. I'd be doing that anyway, but knowing Marv's on board gives me just that little bit more confidence. I don't expect to notice what he's done, but his influence will be there, solid and stable. He's such a pro, after all.