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D&D Online Stress Beta Begins
kafka47 writes "Turbine's much-anticipated MMO, "Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach", is now opening up its stress test to Fileplanet subscribers. The registration is free, and it is a great opportunity for MMO and D&D fans to sign up and try out the game! Paid subscribers get a higher-rez client, but if you're curious about what DDO has to offer (and by all accounts, it's a lot) this is your chance to see it early."
Like it or not, Windows is what the vast majority of the gamers use, so that's who the developers develop for. How do we fix that? Well, we get more gamers to use Linux and to demand Linux support in their games. And these people need to be willing to pay for these Linux games -- wanting free versions won't cut it. So far, we're not doing very well in that front at all.
And seriously, getting most of the commercial games that are available for Linux working in Linux is somewhat tricky. Getting OpenGL hardware support isn't difficult, but there's often other dependancies and such that have to be done before a certain game will work, and even when it does work it often doesn't work as well as the Windows version.
Every time I have to defend Windows or explain why somebody chose Windows rather than Linux I feel like I'm in some sort of bizarro-world, since I'm a pretty serious Windows detractor. But ultimately, as things stand at the end of 2005, Windows is a better platform for gaming than Linux or MacOS -- the support is there, the games are there, and things generally work with little pain. The only platforms that can rival it are the various consoles (and in many ways, they do have it beat, and in many ways, Windows beats them.)
Sure, lots of people understand that. What's your point? OK, but lots of people will jump through their hoops, and a few actually will sign up for their forums and buy subscriptions, so I doubt that the creators of D&D Online and the IGN/Fileplanet people will really miss you that much.Ack! Don't feed the trolls!
It only makes them stronger.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I played it last night for an hour. It looks pretty especially the indoor places, but for some reason the engine wasn't smooth like WoW. I thought it was lags, but it was still not smooth even at 6 AM PST. Taverns (those are cool -- better than WoW's inns) are so laggy for me. Solo instances(?) are smoother, but not that smooth. Outdoor areas lag too for me. I had turn things down like use billinear, distance view lowered, etc.
/laugh, /dance, /p for party talk, etc.
I did not like its GUI. I think it was just too big especially when my maximum screen resolution is 1152x864. I prefer WoW's.
I loved the character setup. I made a hot chick with red long hair [grin]. Its setup reminds me of City of Heroes and City of Villain's. I also like the video clips (I wonder how much disk space these took up) showing each player class. I played as a barbarian since I like meelee fightings. I only got off the second boat after training. I will play more later hopefully. A lot of commands are similiar if you know WoW like:
Note that it it is only until THIS Saturday! Yep, it's a short test! Then, it's over. Downloading takes a while (1.6 GB for the standard client). You can apply for an account before installing. Note you need to be subscriber on those download sites to get the high quality package. The game was choppy for me with everything ON and without antialias on my XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (128 MB), Athlon 64 3200+, and 1.5 GB of RAM.
Other notes/FYI:
FYI from FAQ:
# Monday at 9:00am PST registration servers go live
# Tuesday at 11:59am PST game servers go live. If you received a key and created your stress test event account you can begin playing the game
# Friday night player event starting at 3:00pm PST and ending at 7:00pm PST. Everyone in the stress test will have the opportunity to win a closed beta account
# Saturday at 11:59pm PST game servers close
To compare, I still like WoW more so far. Check out other posters' comments on Blue's News.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Actually that is Bioware's fault, from the rad game tools website:
The Bink SDK supports the Nintendo DS, the Xbox 360 and the Xbox consoles (using pixel shaders!), the Sony PlayStation 2 console, all versions of 32-bit Windows, the Xbox console, the Nintendo GameCube console, MacOS, MacOS X and GNU/Linux. It supports pixel shaders, DirectDraw, DIBSections, DirectSound, waveOut, Sound Manager, NGC AX, NGC MusyX, SDL_mixer, and the Miles Sound System.
I'm assuming that they didn't want to spend $6,000 to license the Bink Player on Linux or negotiate for a cross-platform SKU wide license...
I always wonder why people fixate on D&D as the only PnP RPG? I mean, it's a solid game, but it seems to be stuck in the past. I played a fair number of Steve Jackson, White Wolf, West End, and Palladium titles, and D&D seems to be stuck in the past like the Palladium ones.
I wanna see a Fading Suns MMO. Or even better, Paranoia.
I've been in the DDO beta for about a week. It looks better than I expect from what I had seen of the most recent screenshots. Although, while the females look very attractive the males are rather ugly. Not to mention that they look out of too shape considering they're adventurers. The graphics, however, are a lot better than I had expected from what I had seen in screenshots. It isn't quite on the scale of EQ2, especially as far as character detail is concerned, but the water effects look great and the lighting and bloom is nice. It also runs quite well. I have a 3ghz P4 with a 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro and I play the game at full detail getting roughly 25fps to 30fps. Maybe not perfect, but very playable. As for the game itself, I was underwhelmed. It's extremely tedious. The whole game seems to be designed around making progress as slow as possible. It also takes a little bit of time before you get the hang of how to fight and I cant say I like having to double-click on everything. The previous week I had tried the WoW 10-day trial and found that game very easy to get into and enjoy. Levelling is excruciatingly slow, right from the start. It took me hours to fill up my first XP bar and when I finally did I discovered I was still level 1. There are 4 or 5 ranks per level. And there are 10 levels total. I predict a casual gamer will take a month to reach level 2. The highest level character I found online was level 7. A friend mention that the game currently doesn't have any endgame content, but I can't confirm that either way. And the problem with that is that your progression is limited by your level and the quests you complete. You're restricted to the docks until you complete a few quests. Then you're stuck outside the main city walls until you complete another set of quests. You can't move on to another city until level two. At least there seem to be a lot of quests available, but the environments tend to all feel the same despite changing tilesets. The puzzles are neat, and quests don't consist of defeating everything in an instance. But it's still a grind. You don't get XP for defeating anything other than some bosses. XP is earned for completing the quest. Fairly early on I also realized that the game is heavily geared towards grouping. While there are benefits to instancing it tends to isolate you from the greater world, especially since the rest of the world is nothing but cities. While there's no travelling to deal with, for me it makes the experience less immersive. It seems like it follows a model similar to Guild Wars except that game is free. I don't think your average gamer is going to find DDO particularly appealling, especially those drawn to MMOs like WoW. If you're a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons you might enjoy this game immensely. It seems this game is a bit more demanding than others, which means it may lure some from EQ/EQ2. However, not having an open world to explore and no crafting may make it a turnoff. If the developers were expecting DDO to have broad appeal I think they're going to be disappointed. I expect this game will attract a select group of gamers.
D&D isn't particularly complex. The most complex stuff is all the background stuff, like saving throws, to hit rolls, damage calculation. Even that is pretty simple, roll a die and look up the result on a table.
If you want a complex RPG look at rolemaster, I only played it once but it was kind of ridiculous, took like 10 minutes to kill an orc because of all the dice rolls and lookups.
Q.
I have been in the beta since the beginning and I must say I am very unimpressed. I have played AC2, EQ2, WOW, and several other RPGs, this is by far the worst of them all, not because its really terrible in any aspect, it just isn't great in any either. When first playing I was seriously lost in an MMO for the first time, there are hardly any instructions, tutorials, and the dialog is very boring and uninspired, granted it is a beta.
I thought this game would be awesome as I absolutely loved AC2 and still hold it in high regard, the same team making a D&D game, now this can't miss, well it did. I don't know if its just the fact that I've been spoiled by WOW and EQ2, but this game seems like a step backward from AC2 even.
If you are thinking of taking your first plunge into the MMO world, I would highly suggest you do it with WOW instead of this game, as you will probably be lost. Pretty much every aspect of this game is sub-par when compared to EQ2 and WOW, graphics, gameplay, features, sound, music, quests, weapons, armor.
There are a few features and things that are very cool about it, like the way you move your character around, climbing ladders, hanging on to cliffs, etc. Also the games community will probably be better than any of the others, because only hardcore D&D fans will put up with all of the games shortcomings, so that could be a huge bonus.
Turbine has never impressed me, and this game didn't change that. The sad part is that they have LOTR Online too. Two outstanding franchises RUINED by one lousy game company. SO LAME.