Racefail On Infinite Earths

[alexandraerin]

So, I kind of expected to spend most of the day today (Tuesday, that is.. or was) playing DC Universe Online or watching it be played, since it launched in the morning. Owing to the circumstances alluded to in my preceding post, I'm just barely getting my toes wet. I'll be making a post about what I think about it in more detail, but I wanted to make a separate post to address its character creator, which has some disappointing aspects.

It's definitely more limited than I would like. I doubt it will ever go as far in the way of character customization as the other two superhero MMOs have gone, both because they kind of made customization their "thing" in varying ways, and because DC has a brand to protect. They tapped Jim Lee to not just create a consistent look for all of the iconic DC Legends, as they're referred to, but to ensure that the PC options all add up to something that doesn't look too out of place.

Sidenote: The fact that it's Jim Lee designs gives the world a bit of a 90s vibe to me, but not in a bad way. I know he's still in comics, but I associate his lines with the 90s.

Anyway, the point is that in City of Heroes or Champions Online, you're creating your own character... in DCUO, you're creating your own character who fits into this alternate DC Universe. So you have a more limited range of options available. Much fun can still be had within that range. It really helps if your vision for your character's look is as general as possible, or if you're just paging through the options and seeing what looks cool, rather than trying to bring a specific vision to life. But just as an example, we whipped up a Tamaranian in under five minutes.

Now, one limitation that's a little weird: you pick your character's "skin", an entry which combines body type (human, anthropomorphic animal, mineral thing, undead, etc.) and facial features into one selection. By which I mean, you can be angry or you can be a mummy, but you can't be an angry mummy... the "angry face" choice has the default human skin atached to it.

That's kind of a strange choice, but it goes beyond strange and into outright offensive territory... did you reflexively give the sentence where I said "default human skin" the side-eye? If you did, you're not being paranoid.

The game comes with three different human skins. They appear to each have different markers of ethnicity about the face, and while they can be recolored, they do each have a different default skin tone.

The white one is labeled "Human Skin 2", but it's also the default choice and at the top of the list. I'd kind of like to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.

Now, if you're following me here, you might have noticed the really fucked up part of all this: Asian and African features are being presented as variants on the white default at the same level as Angry or Youthful. Or having tattoos. If I pick any of those selections, I'm looking at the same model as the default Human Skin 2, with added detail. If I pick Human Skin 1 or 3, what I see is what I get. I can dress the model up in all the same gear and items of costumery as Human Skin 2 gets to play with, but I can't do anything about her facial features.

It's like, you can be a "regular human being" with any of these features/variations... or you can be a make-believe creature like a Lizardman, Mummy, Cyborg, or Asian.

I'm sure someone's going to pop up to say that I shouldn't be throwing around accusations of racism when there could be another explanation, like the time constraints and money (in artist-hours) it would take to make variant facial expressions for each baseline set of facial features. I'm sure this would happen even though I haven't even said the word "racism" before this paragraph.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think anybody behind the development of the game said something like, "Fuck the non-white players. They're lucky to get one face. They're lucky we let them play at all." No, I'm sure the decision came down to time and money. But you know what? It is an example of racism in action that this was considered an acceptable shortcut, if it was even thought of as a shortcut at all.

So anyway, that's pretty fucked up and I'm going to be sending them some more direct feedback at it. <Show Privilege>It's not a dealbreaker for me</Show Privilege>, but I'd want to make sure anybody who's thinking about checking it out knows about it. This is going in my feedback, too... the fact that I can't in good conscience give anyone an unqualified recommendation to buy this game as it stands now.

Comments

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

The misogyny in the skin choices isn't very subtle, either. You can be a "normal" man, a little boy, or a giant man, if you want. On the other hand, you can be a "normal" woman with big boobs, a somewhat short woman with big boobs or you can be a really tall woman with really big boobs. Did I mention that you get to have big boobs? Because you do.

I played in the beta, and even when I overlooked all that, I just couldn't play it. The movement styles, especially acrobatic or speedster, made me want to throw up. Flying was a little easier, but I couldn't play for more than an hour or two before having to back away from the computer and lay down.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the fact that the woman models are basically the same figure in three different scales is something I plan to address in my more detailed review. It's a mark against it, but it was less surprising than the racial stuff.

The movement styles are one of my favorite things about actual game play, but I've never been prone to motion sickness of any form. For the wall-walking aspects of acrobatics and superspeed, there are some situations where either the controls need work or I do, but in general I find them to be great fun.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

I wasn't super happy with the controls in general, but I thought movement styles did look cool. I mean, it was the sort of thing that I would have loved playing around with if it didn't make me want to throw up all over my keyboard.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

How's the questing and gameplay? I wanted so badly to like City of Heroes/Villains but I found no quests whatsoever that weren't "Walk through this city full of humans to this generic-looking location full of humans and bet them up." Turned me off but hard.

Part 1

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

To me, they're much more interesting and satisfying. Most quests involve going to a location where a crisis is happening (the crises seem to be static locations rather than dynamic events) and yes, beating people up, but there are often other goals that must be accomplished. And whereas City of Heroes used "beat people with swords and energy blasts and bullets until they stop moving" as short hand for everything from "arresting" criminals to freeing mind-enslaved people or whatever, DCUO generally actually shows you restraining a foe if that's the goal, or reversing a spell, or whatever. That much is still the same basic formula each time: defeat enemy, hold down the interact key, but it gives me more of a feeling of being a hero (or villain) to watch the results unfold. It feels more like I'm actually accomplishing something.

And while a lot of the game is combat, it feels more interesting and varied than City of Heroes combat. Your choice of abilities does more to give you a varied play experience in a way that doesn't amount to "This character will be able to solo, that character will be useless without teammates."

And every character has at least two very different sets of tactics available, depending on whether you're leaning on your weapon/fighting style at the moment. And you eventually unlock the ability to take another weapon type. As an example, the main character I've done so far, Punching Judy, has the Batman-inspired branch of the Gadgets power as her actual power. So she can tase or gas foes that she's beating on, or she can sneak up on them and do a sneak attack that tends to take out or almost take out normal foes, or she can rely on her immense strength (Brawling fighting style). She recently reached a level where she can get a second fighting style and took dual pistols. Now each fighting style has both ranged and close attacks, and when i read that i worried that they might just be cookie cutters with differing animations. But no, they are very, very different, to the point where not only do I switch between Brawling and Pistols based on which would be more advantageous in the situation, but also which one's going to be more fun. I recently got a free fire ability on the gun tree called "full auto", the instructions for which are to hold down the ranged attack button. I expected something where you hold down to charge up a meter and then let go and there's a huge burst of bullets, since that's how most of the hold down attacks work in the game, and it would be similar to the "spell-like" attacks used in City of Heroes.

No. You hold down the button, and as long as you're holding it down, you're shooting. And you can turn in place as you're doing it to spray an area. And pressing the movement keys in different directions makes you switch up the angle of your guns. It's so very different than what you get if you pick one of the other weapons or fighting styles.

The missions do a lot to make it feel more like playing as a hero or a villain. In City of Heroes/Villains, you could switch out the mission text and the same mission would work for either side. In DCUO, villains get missions like: convince five rookie cops to go on the take, suck the innocence out of enough random civilians to pass a detect evil spell (and rough up the ones who are too arrogant to be affected by the innocence-draining spell), etc. And there's usually an agent related to the faction that gave you the mission lurking nearby the crisis area who will give you side jobs.

The open air crisis missions generally are strung together in an arc and they culminate in instance door missions, but these are much less random and generic than the CoX ones, and they are pretty rewarding to do in that they tend to feature "special guest appearances" from established DC characters on both sides. Fighting against named characters is effectively a boss fight, and while some of them have mechanics that could be better implemented, they are not just regular monsters with a ton of HP and stats that effectively demand you either grind up your level past theirs or bring a lot of friends. In fact, as near as I can tell all the regular mission content is designed to be soloable. You get an NPC partner for the boss fights.

Part 2

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

The other nice thing about the open air missions is that because heroes and villains don't have separate "zones", you can see both sides working against each other even in PvE servers. For instance, the last mission I did was a chain of missions to help Brother Blood's cultists raise Trigon. The build-up missions involve doing things like corrupting people into vessels for lesser demons, who then turn around and attack the cops who are trying to stop you. The final open air mission (before an instance that involved fighting four of the Titans on the way to Raven) was basically a battle ground where heroes and villains both have goals: the villains are trying to open portals and take out the medics who are trying to treat people. I assume that there's a hero mission where they're supposed to destroy the portals and take out the demons who are trying to take out the medics.

During the instance mission that caps it off, you have the opportunity to release a bunch of the possessed humans from holding cells and they'll help with the Titan fights.

I was leveled past the arc by the time I went back and did it... it's a Circe mission, which means it's in the magic line and in Metropolis, and I was playing a tech villain which means I was based in Gotham, so this was something that popped up as a side opportunity. So unfortunately I can't comment on how different or challenging each of the four Titan battles would have been.

Also, the whole "walk across the city" thing is obviated quite a bit by the fact that you start with a travel power, the two cities are open zones, and there's much less "Okay, we started you off here, now travel across a hazard zone to meet a guy who will send you to a third zone." Your first missions are in the neighborhood you start out in.