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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.
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.
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.
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?
Non-Gamer kills the skeleton for the 100th times:
"Uh, why am I killing skeletons again?"
Gamer:
"To get to level 5!"
Non-Gamer:
"What do I get at level 5?"
Gamer:
"Improved fireball man!"
Non-Gamer:
"What do I do with the improved fireball?"
Gamer:
"Shit, man, you need improved fireball if you want to get to level 6."
Non-Gamer:
"So I am getting to level 5 so I can get to level 6?"
Yeah... better you just not show non-gamers what MMORPGs are all about. Unless they addict easily, they are probably just going to think you are insane and need to get out more.
MMORPGs are a bad habit that I kicked a while ago. Wake me up when someone grows a pair and offers something new... and by new I don't mean prettier graphics or a refinement of the old formula. If you can stip the core game play down to "killing stuff to get to the next level", count me out.
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 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).
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.
In pen&paper, that's the kind of thing that gets glossed over with a "search check". Or just say that you destroy every barrel in the room untill you find it. It's as simple as the player maybe saying one sentence, and perhaps having to roll the dice once or twice.
If your tabletop DM were to try to run a game like an MMO does, he would have set down miniatures of their characters and each barrel, and the conversation might have gone something like this:
Player1: I destroy all the barrels untill I find the key.
DM: Ok, which barrel do you destroy?
Player1: All of them.
DM: No, which one do you bash in first?
Player1: Alright, I'll play along, the one on the left.
DM: Ok, make an attack roll.
Player2: It's a barrel, it ain't going anywhere!
DM: I have to know how much damage you do to the barrel.
Player1: I'm just beating on it untill it's destroyed!
DM: But you didn't roll to attack, how can you know if you really hit it?
Player3: I fireball all the barrels. Does that destroy them?
DM checks his notes, measures the room for radius of effect of the fireball, then replaces mini barrels with mini piles of ash.
DM: Yes, that destroys them.
Player1: Ok, so we have the key now. I just dug around in the ash untill I found it.
DM: No, which pile of ash are you going to search?
Players all stuff the pile of minis down the DM's throat.
> How do they deliver your 20-sided dice via snail mail?
By making their saving throw vs. shipping. Duh.
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'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.
Well, doing the PnP version you could also do a form of this that drives the DM crazy.
DM: Ok, you're in a room with 3 barrels inside of it, what do you do?
Player1: My character does what is appropriate to find whatever clues are inside the room and discovers them if there are any.
DM: Um...what are you talking about?
Player1: Well, I'm role playing.
DM: what?
Player1: I'm role playing. I'm role playing a character that is smarter than I am. Since he would know what to do and I wouldn't, the only way I can say it is to tell you that he does the appropriate thing.
DM: Um, why don't you just tell me what he does.
Player1: Because I have no idea what he does. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't know what to do. Don't penalize my character just because the person playing him is dumber than he is.
DM: Ok, I quit...is there any Mountain Dew left?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith