The DCU Online panel was moderated by Blair Herter, from G4 and the guests at the panel included Jim Lee who is the executive creative director of the game and is also currently working on All Star Batman and Robin, Geoff Johns game writer and works on green lantern and Marv Wolfman was also the writer for the game.
The great thing about this game is that it allows you to enter the comic book universe you have always read about, and you get the option to play a villain character or a hero! This concept is at the very core of the game; to allow fans to step into the Universe, and progress through it and possibly ultimately become part of the JLA.
Johns: "The approach I had was you enter this game and can enter the game and interact with other superheroes. There is a story, I worked on what would trigger it and the why there is a sudden influx of superheros. Why would we need all these characters?"
Wolfman: "I filled in the rest of the story. What we are all doing is coming up with story concepts that would fit into the DCU. What Ive been saying is we are forming a whole group of people who are a part of the story."
Lee: "One of the tricky things was to reflect on all the things we wanted to draw from. We are going on the save the world mark. We focus on the earth right now, we are not going to be looking to outer space just yet."
The cool thing about this game is that you can choose to be a hero or a villain, which means that villains can win.
We are going from the two dimensional pages of a comic, and moving into three dimensional medium. I never really realized it before, but for Jim Lee, it was something he never really had to think about before when he was drawing comics. When drawing in 2D, all he had to think about was one side of the building; however with the video game, he had to start thinking about what it looked like on the other side of the building.
While there is not a release date just yet, they did mention that the game is pre-alpha. The fact that they already have a demo which was playable in February, and game footage gives me hope that we will see this sooner rather than later. I personally would love to see this come out sometime next year.