My Gaming Diary: Trying DDO

[Morreion]

Dungeons and Dragons Online now has a free to play option, so I checked it out for a few hours- here's my first-look impressions. Anyone who has played it more than I, please add to this or correct anything I got wrong.

One neat thing about DDO is that if you have played the original tabletop D&D game with dice and paper and pencil, you'll find many familiar things (saving throws anyone?). That brought a smile to my face and took me back to the good old days.

Downloading the game is easy- you can download it in steps so that you can jump right in on character creation and the starting tutorial without having to spend all night downloading the whole game. I liked that. You can view a handy faq while you are downloading as well, letting you get more familiar with the game before you play. Well-done.

I like character creation- you pick a playstyle (melee, caster, specialist) and it gives you 3 or 4 choices of classes based on your choice. Then you pick a specialty for that class- you have 3 specialties to pick from. Neat. Then you pick race and after that you customize the looks of your character. For instance, I picked Melee style, Paladin class, Truthbringer specialty (a balanced approach to both defensive and offensive abilities), human, then customized his looks. The customization is pretty good, not as in-depth as Aion or EQ2 but better than many games that take a more basic approach.

You do an instanced tutorial where you learn the basics of how to play. The camera controls weren't as flexible as I like, it took a bit of work to figure out how to pan the camera so I could see my face. You can rebind key commands to whatever key you wish, which is good. There is a good player search and looking for group tool where other players can set messages for you to see. This is very useful.

The graphics of DDO remind me of LOTRO (it uses the same engine, no surprise). It looks good but it is not as detailed-looking as Aion or Age of Conan (which are admittedly top-of-the-line games). It has sort of that soft-focus look that LOTRO has. The game runs very smooth windowed, I had no problems with lag at all. Performance is great.

You then progress on to the starting village. Basically, DDO is a instanced quest hub type of game, which means there are some common areas such as Korthos Village and the city of Stormreach where you run around and other players are there with you. This is where trainers and vendors are. You get quests from NPCs in these common areas and then you go to a portal- it may be a doorway into a building, a cave entrance or other entryway where you zone into an instance. You get a quest to go to a dungeon, cellar, building etc. and you go there and zone in- the neat part is that when you enter the instance you get a choice of difficulty level, ranging from Solo/Normal/Hard/Elite/Epic. In other words you can solo these instanced dungeons or you can go in them with a group (I think groups can have 6 people in them). That's a neat system, reminding me of Anarchy Online's mission approach to questing.

The interesting thing about instanced dungeon adventure areas in DDO is that you do not get experience for killing things, you only get experience for completing the instance. You fight plenty of things in these instances, but your whole purpose is to complete the instance to gain experience and open the final treasure chest at the end of the instance for your loot. And there is no fighting over loot, the loot you see when you click on the chest is your loot, no one else can see it. So there is no arguing over who gets what, which is nice.

This instanced dungeon approach is interesting- you are completing missions for experience and loot. As you kill mobs in the instances, they sometimes drop loot (usually copper and silver coins at level 1 anyway). Instances are not simply 'kill everything in sight and you are done', they usually have a goal- I did one where I had to destroy 3 evil sarcophaguses and bring their seals to fit into 3 niches in a wall to open a secret door. So there are little puzzles that you have to solve sometimes- you sometimes get the message 'you sense danger close by' and you use your Search ability to look for details, such as hidden traps or levers. So that angle is neat, it isn't totally just hacking things up like in most games.

When you finish the instance, you get your treasure chest loot and you gain experience. There are something like 20 levels I believe, and each level has 4 ranks within it where you gain a point to add on a new ability or spell at your trainer.

From what I understand, you can play the game for free but as you rise in levels there is less free content. You can purchase adventure packs or buy items in a built-in store in the game for real money. If you subscribe, you get more advantages over the free to play folks.

Overall, DDO is an interesting approach to an MMO. My opinion? The negatives in my mind are that it is heavily instanced and doesn't have a big-world feel to it that I usually like, but as a game where you play with a small group of friends it has its advantages- you all go in the same dungeon instance. One thing I didn't care for was that you don't get experience for killing monsters- I am so used to getting experience for that that it bugs me that I don't gain anything more than the occasional coin drop from a mob. You have to change your mindset to beating the instance you are in at the difficulty level you accept, and most of your rewards are for doing that. It is an interesting game worth a look!

[Loendal]

Hopefully my long winded post will help inform people a little more about DDO.

I've played DDO since it was first opened. I quit after a while because you can only duo so far without healing and assistance from other classes. This has since changed; yes, you still need group dynamics, but things just seem easier now then when I first started playing the game, perhaps they made some behind the scene changes that I'm not aware of during the time I was gone.

My wife and I play this with friends of ours now, and we have a decent group (Even though our friends are MMO Noobs, making alot of mistakes that would infuriate anyone other then us, their friends. Things like running off alone when in a new zone or diving headfirst into a fight when they could easily use a little strategy and tactics and survive / win.) My wife and I are VIP (We pay a monthly fee of $14.95), they are FTP and are starting to bump into limitations already. I don't quite know HOW limited they are, but there are alot of quests that they can't go on with us. I'll have to create a FTP account so I can see what they see.

There are 20 levels in the game, not 15, and each level is broken into 5 ranks. Every rank, you get Action points which you can use to enhance your character's abilities and capabilities. After you gain a level is when you get your HP increases, spell advancements and new feats. You must go back to your trainer to gain this level, or you can multi-class. It does take some adaptation to get used to focusing on completing the mission for your XP rather then settling into the mindset that says "If I kill a few more Kobolds, I'll get my next rank". View each mission as a separate adventure and you will start to fall into the mindset pretty quickly.

Outdoor areas are an exception to this rule. Every outdoor area I've been in has three quests designated for them. The first is a kill total quest, where you get XP rewards for reaching certain plateaus of mob thwacking. i.e. 10, 25, 100, 200, etc etc. The second is Exploration rewards; there are certain points on the map that are designated as exploration spots. Usually they are features of the landscape which fit in with the story that goes with the outdoor area. For example, an outcropping of rock that the Sahaguin are using to monitor the coming and going of people into and out of Korthos. The third is Rare Encounters. There are special Boss mobs that are hidden out there. They don't always show up when you go there, but when they do and you kill them, you get a bonus for completing a rare encounter. Outdoor areas also often have quests of their own, much the same as the city zones do.

The heavy instancing (Ok, let's be honest, it's practically all instanced) is one of the big drawbacks. You rarely communicate with anyone outside of your group for the most part. There are world-wide chat lines such as General, Advice, and Trade but that still leaves one with the feeling of a glorified chat room as opposed to MMO and often times General chat is full of spam, arguing, bitching etc. This is especially true of Korthos island. On any given day, you can be assured of at least three arguments about WoW at the bare minimum. I tend to keep General shut off for the most part.

The game focuses on group dynamics, true to form with the real world D&D. It is, afterall, the game that spawned every RPG and MMO you've ever seen. Soloing IS possible, but very difficult. The monetary expense of potions alone will drive you into the poor house really quickly. The loot just isn't worth that much and when it costs nearly 50 silver to heal 1d8 HP, you can't possibly keep up. You either have to utterly dominate the adventure mobs or you have to have some measure of healing available aside from Potions. Let alone that there are puzzles and problems that need a good mix of classes and stats to resolve. i.e. There is a dungeon crawl called "Walk the Butcher's Path" which has a hidden treasure chest in it. I have never found it, but I have found a number of levers, runes and secrets here and there that say I need a Thief (To find some of the levers hidden behind secret doors), a Warrior (There's a valve that you need high strength to open), a Wizard (There's an Intelligence Rune) and I think a Cleric too (I THINK there's a Wisdom rune in there somewhere). There are several puzzles that must be resolved, so if you're looking for mindless hack and slash and not having to think, DDO is not for you. The game MAKES you think on occasion, true to it's D&D Roots. This has stuck in the craw of many of the internet's MMO babies who've been spoon-fed their entire gaming lives. It makes old-schoolers grin to hear the lamentations ("How do I get the scroll from the pedistal?" "You have to line the puzzle pieces up with the runes" "What?! F**k that!") I've even heard people spam the chat with "How do I solve the puzzle?" in frustration because they can't be arsed to take the time and figure it out.

There's more, but I've gone on far too long as it is...

DDO is a decent game if you take the time to adapt to it.