Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games have a long, strange history on consoles. While there have been some decent transitions from PC to console — such as the recent Final Fantasy XIV — most gamers would probably still choose their computers over a controller.
When it comes down to it, keyboards just have more buttons — there's no need to worry about layering menus or figuring out shortcuts if you can just assign a dozen different actions to just as many keys.
Of course, there are a few MMOs designed with the controller in mind: DC Universe Online always billed itself as an accessible, action-based MMO that would play just as well with a controller as it would with a mouse and keyboard. Many would argue that this potentially crippled the game's depth, but anyone still playing will tell you that the console controls do a fine job of conveying that feeling of playing as a DC superhero.
That being said, you may be hard-pressed to find someone who's still playing DC Universe Online: the community was never all that huge to begin with, and ever since the game's launch in 2011, it's only gotten smaller ... which makes the decision to bring the game to Xbox One so surprising.
Yes, it's true: after months of waiting, DC Universe Online is now officially available on the Xbox One, complete with all of its different expansions and post-launch content. If you've never played the game before, one could argue that this is a better time than any to jump in — that being said, is there really a market for this sort of game on Microsoft's machine?
Save for the aforementioned Final Fantasy XIV and a few other outliers, most console MMOs aren't all that successful; they may putter along for a time, but they're usually shut down well in advance of the PC counterparts. You could blame any number of factors — dumbed-down control schemes, hardware limitations, network issues — but at the end of the day, the fact remains that MMOs just don't seem to last very long on consoles.
Of course, DC Universe Online would have never made the jump to the Xbox One in the first place if the developers didn't think it would succeed (it seems to be doing well enough on the PlayStation 4). Who knows, maybe it'll be the one MMO that really takes off on Microsoft's next-gen hardware ... but history seems to tell a different story.
If you're interested in trying out DC Universe Online for yourself, you can download the full game for free on Xbox One starting today.
