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It's always a personal pleasure to drill the DC Universe Online team with questions about the game and where it's at. Unfortunately the team wasn't showing anything new at Fan Faire, so we caught up with the Senior Producer, Wes Yanagi to ask all the questions that we haven't received clear answers on yet. Check out our findings...
ZAM: You've gone into some detail about PvP. Can you give us some more information about how PvP will work in DC Universe Online?
Wes Yanagi: First of all, PvP is always going to be consensual. The main thing with Heroes and Villains is that it lends itself naturally to PvP encounters, so a choice you can make for PvP is say, picking a PvP server, where all bets are off. If you're on a PvE server, we'll have 'flagging' for folks to toggle onto PvP mode. The different choices that you make there are like going into a PvP zone. You'll know that it's a zone and it's contested or something like that and that will be a choice you can make. Nothing will be required for people who don't like PvP to go into this. The other thing would be something like battlegrounds where players go into contested missions and instances - so that's PvP right there. The most interesting one is going to be contested encounters. In that case you'll have, say, an armoured car that's going down the street and you'll look at that encounter and go "OK that's fully marked as a contested encounter," so as a villain you might go knock it off and take the object inside of it. Now you have to transport that to a safe house or extraction point. If someone was on the hero side, he might be flying by and see the encounter and see you flagged for PvP. That hero can say "yeah I want to engage in that," so then he has to go in and get that same objective and transport it to the vault to secure it.
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ZAM: Games like World of Warcraft have done a great job with Realm vs. Realm or Faction vs. Faction type PvP, where you're taking over a zone, or you're competing against each other in arena for currency points where you can buy items. What plans for natural PvP progression does the team have for DC Universe Online in terms of natural PvP progression, to keep the player engaged?
Wes: Well, you know, the other part of it is going to be "what happens in the world." We have the concept of "rule the world or save it." Eventually down the line we'll have areas that will hopefully get affected by those types of encounters and by the 'state' of PvP.
ZAM: You mentioned contested content. Is it safe to assume that we will see contested raid content in game?
Wes: Definitely we'll eventually have that. We really need to balance it because once you get that many involved, a lot of chaos will ensue. It would be really cool, but we just need to make sure it's playing correctly - fun.
ZAM: Obviously, with contested raid content; dealing with super heroes, one can only imagine what they would be contesting. It seems pretty far-fetched to think that they would be going after a large named rat or something like that. Can you give us an example of the kind of contested content that players might see in raids?
Wes: We're still developing those ideas right now, so I don't really have any details, but they will be something big, like you said; large scale events with something really important happening in the world.
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