We sat down with DCUO's Creative Director Jens Andersen, Executive Producer Lorin Jameson and the newly promoted Game Director Mark Anderson in a roundtable interview about Update 3 and beyond.

This has been a particularly tumultuous month for the people over at DC Universe Online (DCUO), with the announcement of the new merged MegaServers, Update 3 on the horizon, the recent SOE server downtime and the appointment of Mark Anderson as DCUO's new game director. Happily, knowing just how many questions we had about these upcoming updates, the DCUO team decided to host a roundtable Q&A session with ZAM and a few other members of the press. So read on if you want to find out about Update 3 and the future of DC Universe Online!

For this month's roundtable, we got to grill DCUO's Executive Producer Lorin Jameson, Creative Director Jens Andersen and, the newest promotion of the team, Game Director Mark Anderson. Deciding to start with some Update 3 content, Jens and Mark shed some light on the upcoming Poison Ivy versus the Swamp Thing; apparently Poison Ivy has decided to make a bid to replace the Swamp Thing as Earth's Plant Elemental, so villains will be supporting Poison Ivy, while heroes will want to stop her. 

Comic book fans might recall that the Swamp Thing made a new appearance in the DC Comic miniseries Brightest Day, and some press members wanted to know what "version" of the Swamp Thing would be used for this event (there were some changes that took place in Brightest Day). According to Jens Andersen, a lot of what the DCUO team chooses to put into their universe doesn't necessarily correspond with the most recent canon; instead, they prefer to go with the iconic versions of that character, even if the event itself was designed to correspond with that hero's resurgence in the DC Universe.

We also got the scoop on Update 3's instance with Ra's al Ghul. Mark Anderson noted that, with Ra's al Ghul's stronghold, not only will players get a taste of some really difficult content, but this new instance will also have a unique 'random' factor to it. From the beginning of the instance, depending on what baddies you take out first and who you leave to the end, your choices can affect how your adventure unfolds for the rest of the instance. In other words, the DCUO team is really trying to give players a sense of variety in each play through, which is something they want to focus on in future developments.

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