Slashdot Mirror
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."
but you could still take a look at the movies ;)
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1869
In general the game looks pretty good, I watched a few of them and in general it looks like "yet another hack and slash" party.
In other words: I don't think it will really offer anything more about other MMORPG other then a different set of terrain...
to bad..
Actually I'm a member of FilePlanet - didn't cost me a penny. I've never visited the forums, never received emails from them and only use the site to get game patches from. As a non paying FilePlanet user, I'm still eligible to play the DDO beta for free.
I think you're being a little hasty in saying that it's to push more people to their forums, more likely that a ready-made, limited userbase was there to be tapped for something like this, especially for testing purposes.
I have played dungeons and dragons most of my life, but somehow I just knew that I shouldnt get my hopes up for this game. Instead of being a fun and competetive game they seam to have catered to only the carebears. With a lack of real PvP, I know that I will probably never play this game. I guess I can understand why this is, since the D&D game system is not very well balanced. They probably just couldnt make a balanced online game so they just made it so you couldnt compete with other humans.
I just hope they provide at least some sort of interesting high level content to the game. In most games you have PvP to interest you at your maxed out level, since killing random computer controlled mobs gets very boring.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I played the beta for about 2 weeks... In my opinion it wasn't that fun.
I just remember this one part in the game where I was in a room and there were easily at least 50 barrels to destroy for items. After 5 minutes of clicking on barrels to attack & destroy them to see if one of them supposedly had this key I was looking for, I decided that this game definitely wasn't for me.
Now I only played D&D (the table-top RPG) for a few months on the weekend with a group of friends. I didn't really get into that either (they took it WAY too slow, all had characters in levels 3-4 after playing this certain campaign for easily 3 years), but I don't remember any instances where we had to break into a room, and destroy tons of barrels to find this "hidden" key.
You might be interested in DodgeIt. It's a site that provides unsecured, public, read-only email inboxes. To use it, simply send an email to somerandomphrase@dodgeit.com... and then go the the website, enter 'somerandomphrase' into the box, and see your message. No setup required.
The mail's kept for a short period of time, it's mostly anonymous (DodgeIt could theoretically record the IP address of incoming connections and track you that way), it's totally public, and no setup whatsoever is required. Very cool.
I don't think all that highly of myself. My point is that amoung MMO's, WoW is probably the most watered down. The mechanics are damn simple compared to its predecessors, like Everquest or ... well prettymuch any of them. I played WoW for 2 months. Hit 60 in less than that (on a PVP server), with a full time job and a pregnant wife. Wasn't hard. I'm not bragging - a lot of people on my server did. The game mechanics are easy to figure out. Everquest on the other hand will keep you busy longer trying to grind out 70 (if you are legit and don't power level) with much more complex character builds and game mechanics. And then you still have AA's (extra abilities that become unlocked when you funnel experiance into them).
Ever played D&D? Its based off the D&D core ruleset. Go get yourself a book. 3.5 is the current ruleset. It'll blow your mind away. The rules are way more complex than WoW. Thats all I was sayin'
-everphilski-
It depends on whether it'll actually be a better game than WoW, or just another "we've got a great franchise, so we can release any crap" exercise.
WoW itself also faced bigger franchises and established market leaders and won by being the better designed game, at least at lower levels. Whatever (legitimate) gripes you might have with the end-game grind, if you took someone new and gave him a level 1 account to every single MMO, chances are he'd find WoW the most fun.
That's what put WoW ahead, not franchise name, not "but everyone already plays EQ, so why would they even try a new MMO?", not anything else. The better designed game won.
And it had plenty of established competition. E.g., _the_ MMO at the time was EQ. All your MMO playing friends played it, your guild was on EQ, etc. Why would you move to move to WoW.
And EQ2 was just being released. For all other fame it might have had among gamers, _the_ name in the MMO market was Sony. (Think by comparison of another market. For all the fame and market Microsoft or Sony have, if you're into, say, platform games, then you think "Nintendo". Between a release by Microsoft or Sony and one from Nintendo, the platform fan will instinctively be more interested in the Nintendo release. Now you might be more interested in MS or Sony for other genres, but for platformers Nintendo is _the_ big name in the market. The same held for Sony and MMOs.)
Yet WoW handily won. Why? Because it was the better game.
Again, I stress that it wasn't just Blizzard's name or the Warcraft franchise. Bigger franchises, backed by bigger names, went down the garbage bin of the MMO market. E.g.,
- The Sims Online was based on _the_ bestselling PC game of all time. You know, the one that outsold any of Id's or Epic's or Blizzard's games, or a few of them combined. (And that's without even counting the sales for the 7 expansion packs.) For every single die-hard Warcraft player, the Koreans included, there were several of us TS gamers just waiting to move our virtual lives online. Yet for all the franchise name, and EA's marketting, TSO peaked around 100,000 subscribers and stayed there.
- SWG. Now that game was based on probably _the_ biggest franchise in history. Every single SW fan had waited for it like it was the second coming of Obi-wa... err... of Christ. If you have the patience to dig through the archive at PvP Online, Scott has a strip in which he captures the very essence of that expectation: one in which a character says goodbye to his friends, and says that having been a SW die-hard for all this time, he expects to never leave the SWG world once it's launched. That's how every single SW maniac felt about it.
Yet we ended up going back to other games, or later to WoW. Go figure.
What this huge rant is getting to is: the same applies to any other game. If DDO will be the better game, it _will_ unseat WoW, just like WoW has unseated the established names and franchises before it. If it will be the more traditional kind of "let's release some crap now and worry about balance or bugs later" MMO, it won't.
And I don't think this kind of Darwinism hurts the industry at all. The net result is that the good games and design elements survive (just look how much EQ2 rushed to copy from WoW for example), and the crap shrivels and dies. On the whole, we gamers are better off for it.
And maybe, just maybe, it will also force the industry to realize that quality _does_ sell. It's good and fine to have better screenshots (EQ2 has much better ones), or franchise names (SWG), or be the sequel to the best selling game (TSO), but at the end of the day, the higher quality game is the one that gets more of the market. And in the end that was the upper hand that Blizzard had all the time, even with their previous games.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Seed is promising to be something new entirely, with combat completely missing from the gameplay.
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.