Classic stories with heroes, villains, gods, and monsters spanning across timelines, pantheons, and dimensions crafting unique, gripping, and fun high-stakes adventures!
• Fantasy-fulling quests & instances for heroes and villains
• Unique settings, varied sidekicks, and tons of easter eggs
• Optimizing to min-max the fun
Always with the focus, “Who will players want to be, who will players want to see, and are there any good tie-ins?” Writing for DCUO was always a question of focus and precision, all in service of fun, empowering, and popular player experience to create...
•2 New & Updated Events
•50+ Event Reward theme packs
•1 Revamped Start-of-Game Tutorial
Narrative Design:
Story supports gameplay in this trial-by-fire tutorial!
Downloadable PDF
Story Writing:
In this five episode epic conclusion, Wonder Woman, the Justice League, and the Legion of Doom save the multiverse!
Plenty of twists and turns when dealing with villains and devils in this radio-drama themed adventure!
Downloadable PDF
The scattered (and scatter-brained) Justice League Dark have to set aside their shenanigans to fight this threat against magic everywhere!
Downloadable PDF
Dialogue Editing:
Highly requested cross-over between Static, Icon & Rocket, and the Teen Titans! Written by Leon Chills and edited by me.
Downloadable PDF
That’s in addition to:
Wonderverse, Long Live the Legion, 10 Year Anniversary, House of Legends, World of Flashpoint, Legion of Doom, Homecoming, and Brainiac Returns!
Narrative System Design:
I heavily improved systems like Achievements, Tooltips, Descriptions, Announcements... details that improve comfort, encourage monetization, and let players engage with gameplay more naturally.
Loading Screen Tooltips
I laser-focused descriptions to give players info when choosing weapons, powers, and origin, while removing pain points around any monetized options and improving flavor to boot.
• Confident Decisions
• More Fun & Flavor
| Original | Rework | |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
|
| Alignment | - | - |
| Mentor | Nonexistent field. No info on unique mentor quests. |
Added field. Build excitement: unique mentor quests! |
| Power | Abilities | No difficulty info. | Warning players: High Complexity. |
| Role | Abilities Role | Unclear what role means. Unclear what determines role. Unclear that all roles have Damage. "Control" is wrong term. |
Contextual info to explain role. Clarified what determines role. Added "Damage | " to every role. Fixed to "Controller". |
| Combat | Weapon | No difficulty info. "Combat" is wrong term. "Brawler" is wrong term. Separated from Abilities. |
No warning needed: Brawling is easy. Fixed to "Weapon". Fixed to "Brawling". Moved below Abilities. |
| Movement | Not obvious how much flying makes vertical exploration easier. | Added "Versatile" & "Ground-Based" to highlight advantages of Flight. |
| (Flavor Text) | Not that flavorful. Looks like mechanical info. Typo. |
More exciting! Italicized to indicate flavor text. Fixed typo. |
| (FYI) | Players might think quick create options are locked in. | Lets players know they can modify quick create options. |
Example: Players couldn’t intuitively know that their “Origin” of “Tech/Magic/Meta” would influence whether they’d get Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Joker, Lex Luthor, or Circe starter missions. Changing one field description to bridge this knowledge gap was an easy win in creating excitement and anticipation.
Overhauling Feats
As a year-long background project, I reorganized categories to be top-down by priority, to eliminate overflow, and to convey info faster.
• Easier to Maintain
• Consistent & Optimized Text Formatting
• Encouraged Monetization
A quick look at how reorganizing even just the top-level Feats categories helps funnel players into desired categories:
Example: The original “Alerts” section hadn’t been updated since the launch game, because new Alert Feats were lumped in with their episodes: easy for designer and sensible for players. So I eliminated the old “Alerts” section, moved the launch game Alerts into a launch game section ("Classic"), and made episode Alert Feats easier to find with consistent icons and placement.
I also updated feats to quickly and succinctly convey information in descending order from broad to specific by standardizing Feat formatting rules with the following example layout:
Name
Location (Difficulty): [Defeat|Complete] [Boss|Task] [under parameters]
+no punctuation
+consistent key phrases
+using string token names
Changing the wordy...
Stone Breaker
In the Wonderverse: Fractured God Sphere Raid (Normal Only), defeat all of the Effigy statues in under 2 minutes during the Zeus fight
...into...
Stone Breaker
Fractured God Sphere Raid (Normal): Defeat Zeus after destroying every Awakened Effigy in under 2 minutes
Short, clean, and accurate.
In addition to organizational and formatting issues, Feat icons themselves were just as jumbled and inconsistent.
Example: Some categories got so large and disorganized that finding a specific Feat within it could be tricky, like this power stance icon used in both itemization and boss fight mechanics (two very different areas of gameplay).
While my full documentation was more thorough, this quick primer shows my improved delineation for icon categories:
See what players had to say about this update in the test server:
"YES YES YES!!! this was needed so badly. always appreciate these quality of life changes"
- Drathmor
"Honestly I wanted something like that for so long, it kind of sorted like the achievements in Guild Wars 2 and I really love that. I need to take a better look at this but I love what I am seeing so far. I am really looking forward to use it on the live servers"
- Eve
"Thank you.. Thank you..Thank you!!!!!!"
- Tabula Rasa
"I love this so much it needs work but my goodness it's enough to make you cry or it could be my damn allergies. I also loveee how now the most recent episodes will now start at top instead of the bottom."
- FlawlessTime
I loved getting to unleash the hero in us all with DC Universe Online. Onto the next adventure!