JAMES BEECH

DC UNIVERSE ONLINE

This was my first professional game job, I spent nearly five years on one single work of Art, along with several hundred other people. Kind of ridiculous, in retrospect.

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I shipped fourteen finished levels in this Unreal Engine 3 game, ranging from giant player cities (The JLA Watchtower), eight-player Raids (Khandaq), four-player Arenas (Bludhaven), and two-player Playrooms (Temple of Isis, S.T.A.R. Labs Space Station). For many of these I helped come up with the story/scenarios, and then helped setup the enemy encounters (in the playrooms, in particular). Pictures above represent a cross-section of this work.

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Overall, working on a MMO was an interesting experience; our designs had to account for potentially a hundred players at a time. We had to appease Warner Brothers in how we dealt with their IP. And, after Final Fantasy XI, we were the second MMO in console history, the first on PS3.

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The video below shows a player finding all the hidden audio logs in one of my Arena levels: Gorilla Island, where the super-intelligent Apes' giant spaceship has crash landed into a volcano crater. We definitely embraced the goofy qualities inherit in DC Comics.

 

Over a decade later and the game is still up and running, now on every console, and on Steam.