Last week saw the re-release of Dungeons & Dragons: Online, a game that has been on my radar for some time. I've probably mentioned this before, but when I was looking for my first mmo, DDO was one that caught my interest, however I was never a subscriber. The announcement that it was going free to play, though, meant that I really had no excuse for not playing it anymore. So, it went live last week as Dungeons & Dragons Online: Unlimited (Eberron Stormreach blah blah blah) and on Friday night I used their little quick start downloader to jump right in. I haven't made it past the starter town, but wow I have really enjoyed my time there, so far.
With the flood of new players coming to the game, myself included, I just thought I'd draw up a short list of Likes and Dislikes. Bear in mind, it's the small things that matter.
Likes:
- Run Speed - This was may be the first thing I actually noticed about the game. After talking to that little thief on the beach I began to try out movement...and immediately stopped. I had hit W and before I knew it was halfway up the hill to the encampment. Your running is more like sprinting. Apparently every adventurer in the D&D universe has the athleticism of Usain Bolt and at lower levels, before mounts come into play, this is an excellent thing.
- Journey vs. Destination - The focus of this game is very squarely on adventuring and exploration. True to its license the game puts an emphasis on story and the journey you take to accomplish a task. Yeah, beating a dungeon boss is great, but just exploring all the instanced areas is a ton of fun for an exploration junkie like myself.
- DM Voice Over - This might actually be my single favorite feature of the game. I'd even go so far as to say that every fantasy mmo needs to have narration like this. This goes along with what I said previously about journey and adventuring. It feels so much more immersive and epic, as if you were reading a book.
- Integrated Voice Chat - I'll just show how much of a noob I am and say that I never used voice chat in an mmo until I grouped with some people in this game. I know vent and teamspeak are considered the programs to use, but for casual folks like me this is a great feature. It seems that every big budget mmo *cough* WoW *cough* needs to have this feature.
- Climbing/Vertical Movement - Look, my avatar realized he has arms...and they aren't just for swinging a sword! Apparently vertical movement doesn't have to be limited to walking up steps or the side of a mountain...who knew?!
- Graphics - Unfortunately, my main gaming machine for the time being is a Dell Inspiron laptop with an integrated graphics card, so not a whole lot runs on it, or runs well on it. WoW runs so-so at low settings, Guild Wars the same, Free Realms actually runs something awful unless I crank down all the settings and stay away from high pop. areas. DDOU, however, runs great! Even with the settings on medium to high it still runs smooth and doesn't look half bad. That's big points in my book.
- Knows its Name - It's incredible how many games don't follow through on the promise of their name, you would think it's such a simple task. In DDOU you wake up ship wrecked on the shore, look up into the sky and you will see a dragon (check one) flying overhead. Follow the path up past the encampment and you enter a dungeon (check two) for the starting/training area. The game designers aren't wasting my time and for that I applaud them.
- Plenty of People - Obviously, this is mostly due to the free re-release and I don't know how large the community was before last week (although I could guess it was much smaller), but I hope the population stays high. A game this good deserves to be played by as many people as possible.
- Instances - As always, there are pros and cons to heavily instanced games like this, but what I really like are the details and options DDO gives you about its instancing. When you click to go into a dungeon a screen pops up asking if you want it set for 'solo', 'normal', 'hard', or 'elite' difficulty and tells you very roughly how long the instance will take. This is good for those (like myself) who have a more pop-in and out playstyle.
- IT'S FREE! - No one can argue that free isn't a good thing, especially in the case of this game. I would probably never have played it otherwise and now I'm even thinking of giving Turbine a bit of my money. If I wasn't so busy and could devote more time to the game with a steady group then they might even be able to pull the monthly sub out of me. Free to play and RMT are very obviously the way of the future for online games and Turbine seem to realize this. I wish this game nothing but success and hope that other companies see DDO as the start of big budget games going free to play with plenty of payment options.
Dislikes:
- Class Difficulties - At least the game is up front about it. From the start of the character and class creation menu they let you know that some classes are better and some worse in trying to solo stuff. Unfortunately, and probably accurately, caster classes do not fare well by themselves. Sadly, I'm partial to mages so I rolled a Wizard out of the gate and have been running when a group of more than four mobs comes after me. Even at the solo difficulty setting I've still been getting steamrolled by those damn Soughagan. At least I run like a championship track star.
- Instances - As I said above, there are pros and cons to instancing. Aside from the towns (and even within some towns) this game comprises a metric ton of instances. In this respect it could easily be Guild Wars with a different coat of paint. Even though it goes against the idea of the IP, I just can't help but wonder what this game would have been like as a persistent world.
- Complicated as Hell - I've never actually played a game of D&D so when I looked at my character sheet for the first time I was totally overwhelmed by all those stats. How does each stat affect how my character players? How do they determine the number of spells I'm allowed to memorize? How do I learn new spells? What is the story on action points and should I be spending them down a certain lane similar to Talent Points? These are just a few of the questions flooding my head whenever I look at the character sheet.
If anyone wants to group up sometime, I can be found on the Khyber server with the rest of the MMO Voices folks. My character is named Maxian Flaco.
-Max
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