DC Universe Online, Now Free to Play

I haven’t talked about DC Universe Online before because I wasn’t willing to pay a monthly fee for it. I pay a monthly fee play World of Warcraft as is, and I’m a lifetime member of Star Trek Online, as I’ve mentioned before, so I just couldn’t see myself paying another monthly fee just to play a game in a comic universe I don’t know a whole lot about. Still the game looked interesting…

On Tuesday, DC Universe Online became free to play, which means that basically they’re giving it away in the hopes that people will buy DLC and that they’ll retain a few monthly subscribers. I don’t know how well the model works, but personally I’d bet that this game will be killed off in under a year. Nonetheless, I decided that I would download the software and give it a shot.

If I remember correctly the basic client download is almost 2 GB, not too bad considering the typical PS3 game download or demo is in that neighborhood. I got the download going last night and was going to check it out today. A few minutes ago in fact…

The problem is, that there’s apparently a 14 GB content download that occurs when you launch the game…! 14 GB!! I don’t know about you but when I go to play a game, I want to play then, not several hours later…! Even Blizzard learned that a few years ago and made the WoW client capable of downloading data as it needed it! Sheesh… this is not going to be positive influence on my opinion of the game…

 

Update: 6:53 pm: [Unofficial] Strike 2! So, sometime over the last 4 hours, DC Universe Online finished downloading its data, so that in theory I could play. I just spent the last 15 minutes or so trying to log in to actually take a look at the game, but I couldn’t. Maybe it’s system maintenance. Maybe it’s the PSN maintenance that should have wrapped up by now. Maybe there’s an unexpected outage. Maybe my router’s firewall is interfering though all other games seem to work. I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t connect at all to the game, and it says that I need to be logged into PSN (which I am) in order to play. I’m going to give DCUO the benefit of the doubt on this one, but this is not a good way to impress a potential customer…

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