DC Universe Online Interview

More material from the New York Comic Con, as MTV Multiplayer interviews creative director Jens Andersen on the female friendliness of DC Universe Online.

MTV Multiplayer: A few months ago, I spoke with John Smedly and he said that (DC Universe Online) is trying to be more female-friendly. Can you elaborate on that?

Creative Director Jens Andersen: Well, we definitely want to make sure that people can participate in the action. Obviously, it’s a comic book game, right? So there’s a lot of punching and stuff like that. A lot of my friends play with their significant other or spouse, and they usually like to play the stuff that’s not so up-front combat-wise; they like to do the healing, the support, the buffing, and that sort of group management. So we made sure that we tried to make that more than just watching people’s health bars on the side of the screen. It wasn’t just playing the interface; it was actually still just playing the game. So our concepts for having the support people involved are very different from what other MMOs have.

And also, we don’t have death in the game; we just have knock-outs so when you do (die,) you can get right back up again and into the fight. So there’s less critical failure points for people who are more casual and aren’t necessarily as into a hardcore of an experience. It’s a lot more forgiving in a lot of ways. And it’s not a necessarily a male-female thing so to speak, but it’s just what I’ve noticed when it comes to what characters females tend to gravitate to gameplay-wise as opposed to men.

Wonder Woman is in our game; she’s one of the most recognizable female characters in the world. So the appeal that we have as far as just female presence in the [intellectual property] is very large. The amount of customization that you get to do we’re taking a lot of care in terms of like what types of characters and archetypes that women gravitate to when they play have the cute character, we have the motherly character, we have the sexy character all the different kind of traits you can kind of choose from and can identify with.