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Dungeons and Dragons Online Beta Impressions
The NDA for the Dungeons and Dragons Online Beta is now a thing of the past. F13's piece prior to the lifting of the NDA is a good place to get started. They also have a lively discussion going, discussing all aspects of the upcoming game, which launches February 28th. From the f13 piece: "The most important thing to understand about DDO is Turbine is trying a different take on the genre. People looking strictly for a WoW clone in a D&D flavored wrapper won't find it. For some that may be a good thing, for others not so much. Oh to be sure, it has a lot of the same trappings as your previous favorite graphical-Diku-mud; after all, most fantasy computer role playing games owe a little or very large portion of their structure to the granddaddy of all pen and paper rpgs, Dungeon & Dragons. So it comes as no surprise to find this game with familiar fantasy races, defined character classes, and easily recognizable fantasy monsters, magic items and spells. But, as I have grown fond of saying these last several years, the devil's in the implementation. To that end, DDO is almost as easily defined by what it is NOT as by what it IS."
But once you move from 5 friends on a table to 5,000,000 on a server, some things will have to change.
Not only that, but when you move from a flexible system limited only by the imaginations of the people playing it to a rigid system limited to what's been written in code, some things will definitely have to change.
Also, there is no DM in D&D Online. With the pencil and paper version of the game, players who exploit loopholes in the rules can be dealt with very quickly, because the DM is there to arbitrate. In the online game, the only option is to change things in a patch.
No computer game is ever going to perfectly reproduce pencil and paper role playing, but hopefully they can come pretty close. D&D Online doesn't seem to be the closest you can get to the tabletop game, but it's a step in the right direction at least.
it's really fun and addictive for about 2-3 months. Then the glory really just dies. The main problem with how the game is setup that as stated above you can only get xp by finishing a quest completely. and all of the early quests are geared for either full grps or lone fighters. try soloing a dungeon as a mage and you'll pretty much end up dead. This then leads to masses of people only playing the dungeons that grant the most XP. but ofcourse playing a dungeon to many time will lead to no xp. overall the graphics and sound is pretty good though. I loved my 3 months i played hard-core but i def. will not pay to play it.
So basically, it can't do anything new, anything Neverwinter Nights hasn't done for years. Plus, the review says combat rules are nothing like D&D and more like Diablo?!? Oh my, what a letdown. Wake me up when there is a persistent world that obeys D&D (or better: Hackmaster) rules.
The core idea of D&D has always been the adventuring group venturing into the dungeon to face the dangers, alone. There's possibly only ever been 1 dungeon in D&D that receives enough traffic to make a non-instanced dungeon feel right, and that's not in Eberron(Undermountain). As Turbine seems to be going to great lengths to make it feel authentic, the instanced quests make perfect sense.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
So heres the final word as to why I dont like this game:
The art style.
Its not about weither or not its gritty. Its about the artist copying the bad dnd 3rd ed art. I can quote atleast one friend saying that the Elves look like they all have downs Syndrome. I know, probably spelt that wrong, but you get the picture. The art is just plain Ugly overall, and stickfigury.
The only plus I've seen to it, is that it avoids the "Busty Female with no pants" syndrome. If the character = female, than they're armored to the gills just the same as the male counterparts.
I wont be buying either. I bought NWN because it had a linux client. In fact I bought it 2 times. Once for NWN, then the 2 expansions, and once to get them all on a single DVD. But I wont buy NWN2 becuase there will be no linux client.
Grouping up with a high level was added to EQ2 with the high level then lowering his level to yours but it is a pain. You got to find a really nice person who is willing to help you level up and that is exactly what they will be doing, trying to get you to level up as fast as possible.
Actually City of Heroes was the first to have this feature. If I'm remembering right, originally it allowed lower level toons to be a higher level toon's sidekick, artifically inflating the lower level's fighting abilities while near-by the high level character. Later they added the "reverse" sidekick/mentor option, allowing a high level character to be a low level character's sidekick and thus reducing the higher level's fighting abilities & available skills.
Will it avoid the level grinding trap of other MMORPG games or will it to have endless walktrhoughs for levelling up the fastest
I think levels in MMORPGs are here to stay, even if the game is more skills based(e.g. Asheron's Call) than level based(e.g Everquest). The levels are goals, something to be accomplished and from a publisher's point of view a reason to charge a monthly fee. It is also a "hook"... so close to leveling, must stay awake.
FPS(e.g. Quake) don't charge a monthly fee to play. Well, maybe do now... I haven't played a FPS regularly since the FvF mod for Quake.
Comparing FPS to MMORPG isn't really an apples-to-apples comparsion. MMORPG are basically graphical muds or at least that is how they started. Today's call for more PvP is moving MMORPG closer to FPS. The most interesting FPS+MMORPG hybrid I've played was Endless Ages. It was point&shoot combat, not point&click. A lvl 1 player could beat a lvl 10 player.
On the crafting front, the biggest problem I've seen is the crafter is rarely able to make stuff usable(or desirable to use) at his level and/or better than loot drops. Crafting always seems to be an after-thought and no dicussion with loot devs. Haven't played enough Eve to comment on its crafting.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
So you have actually played the DnD Online. The groups don't need to be huge, usually a group of about 3-4 PC's of the quests level plus one of the next level up... and I played for 3-4 hours a night while my test machine was running and had no problem finding groups when I wanted them. The LFG option is a good one. My only problem with the game is that I am going to have to pay to play after the release date... I had a few problems during the beta but nothing to huge. The balance of characters is very good. The only down side was the fact that you almost always needed a Rogue for all the traps. Someone needs to think that one through. A few of the side quests were a pain though like the friggin boss parts of the Sewer Quest part III. now I'm not quite sure I liked the leveling scheme but that is something that I may find out more about once I get into the game better. I just hope that the world expands for some more outdoor quests ontop of everything else. And maybe even adding in a jobs function much like that in the old SW:Galaxies, for those that want to do something like that.
Where's that cap to the Decanter of Endless water???
While I didn't much like DDO, a friend of mine, who is an avid pen and paper D&D gamer, did like the game. It provided the kind of D&D experience he's been looking for. For comparison, we both tried the World of Warcraft free trial, and while I very much liked that game he didn't care for it in the least. His main concern with DDO was the feeling that there was a lack of content especially given the low level cap.
I'm convinced DDO is going to cater to a very specific group of gamers. I don't expect many are going to be lured from WoW, perhaps more will come from EQ/EQ2. One big problem is that the game made me feel very isolated from the larger world. First of all the game is very linear, at least initially. I'm stuck in one small section of the city until I complete a number of quests. Then I can only move on by completing another set of quests or by levelling up, which takes an excruciatingly huge amount of time. The second problem is that the player teleports to every instance. There's some dungeon hundreds of miles away and the hero materializes there suddenly. It hurts immersion.
Of course, there's a more significant problem here with all the instancing. Guild Wars instances all quests just like DDO, but that game is free to play. Furthermore, there's more of a sense of location in that game because you actually travel through the lands outside towns and forts. That game also progresses a lot more quickly than DDO does, but it does provide a very different experience from DDO.
I think Neverwinter Nights provided a very similar, but more fast-paced and entertaining experience than Dungeons & Dragons Online. That's not to say DDO is necessarily a bad game, but I don't think it's going to appeal to most people and given that it's a subscription-based game it's going to be even more difficult to attract gamers, especially given the competition. I guess this game will show whether or not there's a market for a reasonably faithful D&D experience in PC gaming.