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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."
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.
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.