Following the recent DC Universe Online press event, Andersen shares his thoughts on the game's delay, the planned update schedule, the status of secret identities and more!

ZAM: I thought your comments during the DC University presentation about time sink versus having fun were quite interesting. Can you elaborate on that concept?

Andersen: We want to entertain you, not age you. We don't want you to just grind through and feel like, “oh, we have to have 60 levels in the game because we need 120 hours to max level.” And then it's great to max out your character, but what do you do at the end? It takes a long time to create 60 levels worth of content and 100+ hours of gameplay. To do that much and make it meaningful is difficult. The fidelity of our content moment to moment is higher than you'll see in most MMOs. The story that we tell is more deep because of the property that we're using. DC Comics is based on stories. That's what drives the entire game. This isn't about rat tails and beaver pelts. It's about defeating Scarecrow and taking down Black Adam. That's the story. The bosses aren't afterthoughts that you get loot from at the end. They are the culmination of these great narratives.

When we say we want this to be about the end-game, that's not saying we don't care about your journey there. You have an origin story and spend significant amount of time in the game getting to max level. Once you get to max level, we want it to be a fun cycle that you go through with your friends daily, weekly, or whatever you choose. Our game is highly soloable. If you go in with a group, it will go faster. If you want to blaze through to max level, good for you, but you're going to miss all those feats, collections and exploration. People can take their time with our game. I hope they don't feel like they have to rush to the end. The end will be there. Enjoy the moments as you level because they have more story and immersion to them than you would normally see in an MMO. Come into the game one day and play an episode for an hour and a half. Want to play another? Great. You can also take a break and come back tomorrow. We also don't lock you out of raids. If you want to run the same raid five times in one night, go for it. You will only get loot on that first time you go through until your victory flag expires, but we don't care if you keep cycling through it.

We want casual people to get in there and have fun with our game and interact with these great characters. Once you get to the end, that added challenge comes in the skill and coordination that's required to pull off the great feats and earn those extra skill points. But it's not like, “I'm in the 20s now  and I have to get to 30 and it's going to take forever.” That's not really fun. Our goal is for you to be entertained moment to moment. We wanted to focus on how much entertainment we could add to the game, not how long we could make the game. When we move forward and put out more episodes and more content, we want to meet that fidelity bar and not have the content that came before it feel lackluster because we rushed through to add too much of it at once.

ZAM: Speaking of updates, you mentioned in the presentation that DCUO will have monthly updates that will feature different characters. How much new content can players expect to see after launch?

Andersen: We're going to have a focus character every month, and usually that character will be available to be played in our Legends system. So let's say we did Two-Face somewhere down the road as our featured character. You would get a Two-Face episode. Heroes and villains would get to play in this new episode, which is a full story that adds various content pockets in the cities. At the end, you'll fight a boss in an instance, which will drop loot that's new to the game.

ZAM: So there will be new items added every month?

Andersen: Yeah, totally. And that's just the focus character. And then there will be an additional character for the Legends system that you can usually purchase. So one of them you can get through the content, and the other one you'll be able to purchase if you want. There will be the content episode itself and various feats attached to that, so you can try to accomplish them to get more skill points to buy weapons and movement mode stuff. You'll also have duo modes and hard modes you can play for some of the alerts and previous boss fights.

We also have seasonal updates. Valentine's Day in February, St. Patrick's Day in March, that kind of stuff. These will be available for a window of time, but the focus stuff will be added permanently to the game. Our Legends system grows as a result of this, your appearance collection grows, you'll get more items, and you'll get fun content. And that's just monthly. There's also the trimester updates, which focus on larger things like the Fortress of Solitude. We have a whole bunch of Kryptonian stories and themes to explore there.

ZAM: And I'm sure expansions are also planned, correct?

Andersen: Absolutely. We have three types of content updates planned right now. For your monthly subscription fee, we're going to be giving you the monthly updates that include the focus characters and seasonal content, as well as a trimester publish that includes a major content update. They will be larger, such as adding a bunch of content and characters for the Fortress of Solitude. We can add places like Kandor and the Phantom Zone, which gives us areas to focus on for alerts, raids, episodes, iconic characters, PvP maps, duo modes, hard modes, and so on.

And then we'll have expansions. For launch, we're focusing on Earth and places around Earth, like the moon. In expansions, we'll eventually get off the planet and into the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, and other dimensions. We may even see Darkseid at some point. We're trying to work our way up to that stuff.

ZAM: What would you say to fans who couldn't attend the DC University press event?

Andersen: Get your hands on the game. Putting your hands on our game is the ultimate way for you to understand what we're doing here. It's really hard to evaluate what the appeal is when you're just watching it on a screen. It's the scope and the scale. It's the open world. It's thousands of people coming together and creating their own hero and villain in this universe. It's just a lot of fun. It's something new and different. It's not your dad's MMO.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief