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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."
Looks to be Windows-only. Gee thanks guys. Also I apparently have to be some member of IGN and/or FilePlanet, both ad-ridden slow over-commercialised scourges of the Internet. Does no one understand that this stuff is mainly a ploy to get users to sign up for the forums and buy subscriptions? Get me an actual freely available download and a Mac or Linux version, otherwise I think I'll pass on this one.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
How do they deliver your 20-sided dice via snail mail?
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
I'm curious as to what slashdotters really think about this subject.
Here we have a possible new MMO and, trust me, I'd love to try it and be a paying customer. However, I'm deeply involved in another major MMO right now (WoW to be exact). I know many people who also will not try other MMOs because their current one is too infatuating.
Furthermore, if the most popular MMO has most of the population of gamers (like WoW does), doesn't this hurt the industry?
Yes, I know this has probably been covered in another thread but I was hoping someone could give me good reasons to stop trying to get to level 60 with my priest and spend my valuable free time trying to get into DDO. After browsing the site, I'm definitely going to go home and give this one a shot but what about all the MMOs that aren't slashdotted?
I'm reminded of an old friend from high school who hated the game franchises on the older consoles (like Mario Bros) because he was certain that their high pricing and continuous rehashing of the same story line not only stifled creativity but turned off gamers looking for something fresh. What do you think?
My work here is dung.
I think it's a great chance for non-gamers like me (well, pretty much) to see what all the MMORPG fuss is about, especially under the D&D banner. I think I might do it.
Dark Reflection
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..
Looking at those screenshots, it looks like EverCrack on steroids. I dare not try it. Must... not... try...
All they had to do was torrent af few copies out- no need to blow their own bandwidth or force people to use IGN file networks.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sign up early, see what's behind door #3. Ah, a +5 broadsword. Haul it over to eBay for some nice coinage.
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
From the FAQ:
c h/stresstest/
Q: How are participants for the Stress Test Event selected?
We are offering a limited number of Stress Test Event slots as an exclusive to FilePlanet members. Stress Test Event access will be offered on a first-come first-served basis until the total number of Stress Test Event accounts has run out.
Q: I was accepted into the Stress Test Event. Does this mean I'm in the Beta now?
No. The Stress Test Event is separate from the Beta. Acceptance into the Stress Test Event will grant you access to special servers for three days only.
Q: If I am a FilePlanet member, where do I go to get signed up?
http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/ddo_stormrea
Come on...
Looks like FilePlanet just want boost its members numbers... again.
Nothing to see here, move along.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
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.
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
How much do you think IGN/Fileplanet paid for them to release the stress test exclusively over their site(s)? The D&D name carries alot of weight, so I'm guessing quite alot.
"Bottom line:
NO crafting.
NO housing.
NO PvP."
Sweet. This means I can just play without having to grind for days? This means that I don't have to worry about griefers screwing with my fun by engaging me in PvP when I don't want to?
Why does every MMORPG need to be the all-and-everything? Let this game specialize in hack-n-slash, while some other game can specialize in a crafting economy.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
seriously, how many fucking MMORPG's do we really need? I got into WoW for a month before I got sick of the grinding, I fire up Guild Wars every now and then for a quick 'fix' of gaming with a few close friends (that I actually know on this physical realm we inhabit..), but then what? How many alterations on hack/slash/walk/repeat can there really be?
Am I in the minority of gamers when my real life is far more important than spending 5+ hours a day wandering aimlessly through someone elses fantasy world?
"And when someone talks shit about yer mom, what are you going to do?"
Put them on the ignore list. Not stoop to their level. If it's an all-ages game, report them to the mods for abusive behavior.
"And when someone steals your loot?"
This is avoidable if the game is designed properly. I remember from Runescape, ages ago, they used to have a time period when only the killer could pick up the loot. Or instancing, if camping is your problem.
This problem can easily be addressed by means other than PvP.
"What's the point of these games? Just seems tedious to fight against stupid AI."
Again, it depends on game design. Quests can be designed well, cooperative play can be required/encouraged. The AI deosn't necessarily have to be stupid. It could be challenging.
What's the point of all the PvP games? Just to run around ganking people, and to fight massive battles that might as well be PvE?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
These kids have it easy. Why, in my day, we'd start White Plume Mountain or Temple of Elemental Evil on a Friday at 4pm (enough time to get off the bus, grab the backpack with books and dice and pedal over to someone's house) and game straight through until Sunday morning.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
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-
Well, having read the Gaminggod synopsis the thing that struck me most was that you were REQUIRED to have a balanced party to progress.
:-)
The high end game in Everquest became like this, and this triggered a lot of casual players to leave. I've known LDoN (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) groups take so long to get together that by the time you have a quorum, it is so late in the evening that players have not got long enough left online to actually finish the adventure properly. Some players have families, or work in the morning. (BTW this was the main reason my entire guild left EQ for WoW).
Casual gamers in DDO who are only online for a short period will find themselves locked out from being able to progress unless someone has a revolutionarily good way for people to quickly find a suitable group. Hanging around waiting for tank/healer/thief combinations who have the right levels and also speak the same language and aren't on any of their blacklists will quickly become frustrating. If I were cynical I'd suspect that they can push advertising at these people waiting and pay for the servers that way.
I wouldnt miss PvP, crafting or housing. If you want PvP play halflife
World of Warcraft has this solved - you can still solo meaningfully at even the higest level, letting you enjoy yourself whist a group slowly comes together. If the group doesnt pan out, well, that isnt the end of the world.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
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).
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.
I understand your point, but somedays when I take the bus from Ottawa to Montreal I just really fucking want to get to Montreal. Other days, I want to just take a ride and enjoy the scenery. Either way, the 'fun' is in getting to Montreal...I just have a different attitude about it. I don't think either game will be mutually exclusive. You can play both and find what you need.
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.
Arguably, no you are wrong.
The only points that you have brought up, basically state that the reason why Windows is a better platform is because the developers develop for it. Please note that this is *very* different from Windows actually being the better platform.
If the developers have actually developed cross-platform in mind, the world would be a different place. http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ is a good example of this. It supports OSX, Win and Linux no problem.
So, it isn't a platform problem, it a *developer* problem.
Betatests are an excellent opportunity to find bugs and game issues and fix them, as well as give your testers a taste of what the game will be like.
In this day and age where the MMORPG market is completely saturated and the only way to actually get players is to hook em early and hope you're good enough to topple the current titan (WoW), it is NOT a good idea to be putting an intentionally crippled product into the hands of potential customers, no matter how much IGN/Fileplanet may be paying you.
Not to mention it is a complete slap in the face to every gamer out there who is damn well aware of how easy it is to release a client via bittorrent for a simple stress test.
This isn't a betatest folks, this is a sponsored marketing campaign for IGN and Fileplanet that you have to pay to truly enjoy. I for one won't be playing this game ever, although it is a shame because I'm a longtime player/DM and love NWN. Guess I'll just stick to that game.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Hey, I took a bath last week!
fuckin
In my dreams!
nerds should be out of harms way for another 18 months once this gem hits the newsgroups.
I never leave the basement anyway, so HA!
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.
Yeah exactly - windows has been tweaking Direct X for games, and video cards have been tweaking for directx for so long, theres no question.
NWN on Linux had no Antialiasing or anything advanced that current cards use - it basically supports what directx 7 or mayby 8 support. Either that or its the video card drivers... which also need improvement. Also all the programming teams are quite experienced in doing what they do now, programming for Windows.
DOnt get me wrong, ive been wanting linux games for years, but the best way to do so at this point is to either emulate windows+directx, or to advance drivers and SDL in linux to do the same tasks as direct X so that the APIs can either be easily converted over to or remapped efficiently (straightforward emulation). I dont know much about wine, but whenever ive tried it, it feels like its trying to remap apples to oranges then back to apples (DirectX -> SDL -> DirectX videocard).
I put on my robe and wizard's hat...