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."

Comments

Re:oh yay

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Short answer: it depends

[Moraelin]

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.