Not that I expect the gameplay of DC Universe Online to be earth-shatteringly different from City of Heroes, or that I expect to be any better at it. Much like CoH, I expect DCUO to be a game I play occasionally and enjoy more for soaking up the environment than engaging in the challenge. And inextricable from the online environment will be the online population.
(I mean, don’t get me wrong, the environment in and of itself will be rad to run around in. City of Heroes did an admirable job creating a new world from whole cloth, and exploration offered its own rewards, but it inherently had no real historical weight. DC Universe Online will be able to draw on 70+ years of comic book publishing history and can put Easter eggs in just about every nook and cranny for people so inclined to go looking for them, and they’ll actually mean something. Good times.)
So a new gaming window through which to avatar-watch will be opened to me, and I’m arguing that this one is going to be even more fascinating, for multiple reasons.
Let’s start with copyright. On the one hand, DC obviously owns the copyright for Superman, so there’s no legal conflicts to mediate there. However, there’s a storytelling conflict – in fact there’s more than one conflict. One has to do with the precepts of adventure gaming like this, where presumably you start off small, play the game and earn rewards, make your character stronger, play against more difficult opposition and earn more rewards, etc. If you play as Superman, you’re pretty much by definition at the ceiling of superhero ability, so where do you go from there? Another conflict is that more than one person will want to play as Superman, and from a coherent narrative perspective it makes absolutely no sense for there to be multiple Supermans running around. (This isn’t Arena the MMORPG. Although that would kind of rule.)
So – wild guess about an unreleased game, here – they’re not going to let anyone play Superman, even though they legally could, because it just causes too many headaches. That’s not a totally wild guess, to be fair, because from the previews of the game I’ve seen, I believe Superman will be in the game as a non-playable character, someone your character can interact with but who is for all intents and purposes part of the game itself, like the scenery.
So you won’t be able to experience the game as Kal-El himself, given. What about the gray areas of off-model Supermen? Can you play someone wearing blue and red in Supermanesque configuration and name the character ManOfTomorrow? Is that still narratively confusing, or does it dilute the core concept of Superman to the point where it’s simply not desirable to the folks who own and run the game?
Suppose, for either reason or no reason, Superman knock-offs are discouraged and deleted if discovered, or forbidden outright and impossible to create. What about characters inspired by Superman? This actually has precedent within DC Comics themselves, where at various times new heroes have appeared on the scene and to one extent or another taken on some or most of Superman’s trappings for themselves (Supergirl, Steel, the second Superboy, Bibbo, etc. etc.) and if you’re a game underwritten by DC Comics itself and trying to recreate the eponymous Universe, you would think that precedents like that would count for something. So the granular question is something like this: when making a costume for your character, will the trademark “S” shield be available? If it isn’t even an option, that will be lame. But if it is an option, then presumably there will have to be some kind of guidelines as to how unique your costume/name combo has to be so as not to overstep certain logical bounds. Logical when you talk through them at any rate, which means I’m utterly fascinated trying to envision how they’ll enforce those boundaries in a computerized system.
You could also take this one step further and point out other comic book precedents for duplication of ideas. Wonder Woman has always been one of many Amazons, some of whom have worn her costume and used her name when she was unavailable to do so. Green Lantern has always been one of thousands of members of a galaxies-spanning Corps who wear identical uniforms and are all, technically, referred to as “Green Lantern”. Will the game let you play an Amazon, or a Corps member? I’m looking forward to finding out.
Granted, there’s also precedent (although it gets thinner and thinner all the time) of creating brand new, completely original characters, and presumably that’s what the focus of the game will really be. Playing a Green Lantern is almost as unbalanced and game-breaking as playing Superman, and surely the game-designers’ intention was for everyone to play someone who just woke up and decided to start fighting crime at Level 1 the other day, armed only with some martial arts moves or a flame-throwing powersuit or something. So, for the sake of argument, let’s set aside all issues of infringement and homage and inspiration and legacy and just think about new, original characters. (Let’s also set aside how there are no more original ideas and everything is a rip-off of something else. Humor me here.)
So you sit down to design your aforementioned flame-blasting hero, and he looks unique enough (or generic enough that he’s not obviously aping anyone in particular) and you think for a moment about what to call him and you come up with Firepit. But the computer tells you that name is already taken. But you really like the sound of that, so you try Fire-pit (taken) and then Firepitt (taken) and then Fyrepitt which ultimately is accepted. Not much of a hassle, really …
… except that DC has always been kind of the square comic book empire. Because their whole universe is founded on unadulterated wish-fulfillment: Superman can do basically anything and can’t be stopped or harmed; Batman is rich, powerful, smart and generally awesome; Wonder Woman is like a female Superman and is a real princess; Green Lantern has a ring that lets him create anything he can imagine, etc. etc. Whereas Marvel comics has a more rough-around-the-edges feel, where Spider-Man can do nifty things but often loses fights to villains and has personal problems all the time; and the X-Men are hated for being born different; and Captain America (in the 60’s at least) was a man out of time and out of sorts after being literally frozen since World War II; and the Fantastic Four have family squabbles and can never quite manage to cure the Thing, etc. etc. If Fyrepitt fits into either of those aesthetics, it’s Marvel. Really, though, if you want to get technical, the aesthetic where Fyrepitt fits is Image Comics. DC springs from the 1930’s and Marvel from the 1960’s, and Image is the inevitable result of the 1990’s, and boasts such marquee characters as Stryker, Psilence, Violator, The Maxx and Bloodwulf. (OK, fine, most of those are minor Image characters, but they really get the whole Image vibe across pretty succinctly.) Marvel Comics in the 90’s was to some extent playing catch-up with Image and found itself incorporating a lot of characters who were edgy and violent and had codenames which were common words with the “I” replaced with “Y” or the “S” replaced with “Z” or the “C” replaced with “K” and some of those worked and some didn’t. (And honestly, Image itself was every bit as hit-and-miss in the final analysis, which speaks to the weaknesses of the whole motivating concept itself here.) DC Comics tried to jump on the bandwagon as well, but whenever they did the results invariably felt just plain wrong.
Still, the deliberate “kewl” misspellings of equal parts pre-millennial 1337-speak and bad-assery posturing (all of which sort of reminds me of vanity license plates, too, which may explain my tolerant semi-affection for it on balance) don’t seem that jarring in City of Heroes, because as I said last post that world is a pastiche world, part DC and part Marvel and part neither, and if some Image Comics tropes worm their way in, eh, so be it. But in a pure, DC-branded gameworld … man, I just don’t know. I’ve often suspected that one reason why I never really got into World of Warcraft was because there was just enough violation of the genre tropes to sour my suspension of disbelief. I love high fantasy, but when I experience it I fully expect the elves to have names that either evoke nature in English, like Dapplecloud, or sound like ethereal gibberish, like Daaladilai. And I expect the human knights to have names like Althorn and the human barbarians to have names like Gronk, and so on. I do not expect the lady elves to be named Kittysass72. I can close one eye and tolerate a leather-bodiced female vigilante on the city streets calling herself Kittysass72, but can’t do the same for a sorceress hanging out in the same pseudo-medieval village as my swordsman. Call me a nitpicker, and a wildly inconsistent one if you must, but there it is.
And I think somewhere in the middle ground between “whatever” and “nope, nope, nope” I will find the more jarring online handles that are bound to crop up in DC Universe Online fitfully amusing. All the moreso if the game owners decide to try to police them and enforce some kind of house style for all players. It should be gloriously weird no matter what, and I know I keep saying it over and over again, but it’s kind of the whole entire point of this post: I am looking forward to it.
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