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Dungeon Masters in Cyberspace
The New York Times has a piece this afternoon about the launch of Dungeons and Dragons Online. They talk with some of the folks who made the game, and reflect on roleplaying's move from table-top to online spaces. From the article: "While players in most online games communicate by typing, Turbine has tried to enhance the in-person feel of D&D Online by building voice-chat software into the game so players can speak with one another using a microphone plugged into their computer. And while most video games try to adopt a cinematic mode of storytelling, D&D Online plainly reminds users that they are playing a computer approximation of a pen-and-paper game. During combat, an icon of a spinning 20-sided die appears in a corner of the screen, just as modern slot machines still show spinning reels even though a microchip has already decided if you've won the jackpot."
First Post!
But these days, aspiring wizards, druids and paladins are more likely to click and type their way through the evil necromancer's tower rather than huddle around a table casting spells between grabbing bites of pizza. In recent years, millions of people have flocked to rich online games that let players express their inner warlock without leaving home.
:)
There's only one unique advantage of online play is when you don't have any friends. I really wanted to be into Dungeon & Dragons in the early 1980's, but I had no one to play with except my Commodore 64. (Sad but true.) It wasn't until I got into college in the early 1990's that I started playing Magic: The Gathering and RISK until the wee hours of the morning with my roommates. Playing those games and running a BBS didn't help me when I got kicked out of the university into the real world.
They had an offer that if you pre-ordered from EBGames or GameStop, you'd get a pre-access key that would let you start playing now, a full 10 days before the game showed in stores.
The offer was prominently displayed on the EBGames website, until last week, when they ran out of keys. They asked Turbine for some last Tues, and still haven't gotten them.
In a moment of near-irrationality, I went to the EBGames site to buy the game, excited about playing early with people in the office that had also pre-ordered. No offer.
Now they don't appear to have any pre-orders left at all.
Rationality has returned, and I'll probably stick to BF2.
Their support pages say they have no plans to make a Mac version, so if you're a D&D fan who only uses Macs [or just prefer them], you're out of luck.
Personally, I found (yes, without playing) the descriptions of D&D Online to be lacking in the creativity and originality that makes the pen and paper game worth playing, and I was pleased to see that the article actually took some time to explore that. Frankly, I see nothing particularly creative about the new game. I look forward to future experiments in the field, but this just feels like a solid commercial product, nothing with soul. I'd love to see some software designed to help p&p gamers do videoconferencing for their gaming.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
squeaky kid voice: "And I was like, so into it, ya know? We pwned that baby dragon like it was your little brother, hehehe. LOL"
seasoned adventurer voice: "Are you supposed to say LOL or just laugh?"
squeaky kid voice: "Huh?"
seasoned adventurer voice: "Here, drink this swirly potion, it'll fix that voice problem you have."
squeaky kid voice: "'Kay."
seasoned adventurer voice: "Bye now, have a nice day."
squeaky kid voice: *gulp* "Wha..Aiiieeeeee......." (squishy sound)
Any chance there will be a way to weed out the, um, weeds? Otherwise, I'll have to say no. Unless, PK is allowed, in which case the weeds have a purpose in the game.
Cheers.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
D&D online is of course far from being the dirst D&D-based computer game, nor is it the first to try to stick close to the source material as a pen-and-paper game. Remember Neverwinter Nights?
What's always been missing, though, is the truly freeform experience that a pen-and-paper game provides. When being chased by enemies, can you knock over a crate of apples to trip them up? When fighting an enemy on a bridge, can you grab them and chuck them off the side? Can you pay an assassin to get rid of a troublesome bad guy? Can you choose to spare the bad guy's life if he helps you overthrow the reigning king? Can you seduce, marry, and then murder an NPC so as to inherit their land or an important item?
Maybe a few games have tried things like the above on a limited basis, but the point is that computer gaming and pen-and-paper will always be two wholly different things. It doesn't seem to me that either type of gaming is well-served when one tries to emulate the other.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
No PvP.
Ten levels.
Forced grouping.
No exploration.
Everything's instanced.
The Everquest fans that haven't moved on to EQ2 will have a field day. Not sure who else this game is for, exactly.
In the PnP, you have wide flexibility in what you can do, limited only by your GM. In the MMO, you have a limited number of 'dungeons' that you can run, which only seem to involve going into someplace and killing monsters to get stuff. If you ran any of these dungeons, you know they reduce into 'warning, trap, kill that guy, this way' said over and over and over again, but that's about it.
In the PnP, role playing is encouraged, you interact with people, you are forced to come up with solutions to social situations. (which is very hard for the usual anti social RPGer!) In the MMO, you click the first answer over and over again until it stops prompting you. There is very little varability and because you end up having to do missions multiple times, it's very 'non' RPG. Even when you enter an inn and are talking with strangers, it's usually 'Level 2 Cleric, LFG'.
In the PnP, you can get by without a cleric and a theif. Your GM usually modifies things so it's doable, or adds and NPC to come along and help out. In the MMO, you *MUST* have one or the other, or you will have a rather short run due to accident or lack of healing. If they had just added NPC helpers, this problem would have been mitigated.
The only thing the MMO does have is the rule set, in painful detail, which is quite good in reality. However, everything else about it is bad for an MMO. The interface is horrible, the monsters have little AI, there is limited content in place, you run the same things over and over... Players are instanced to death, and even then it's laggy with just a few people in one place. Were this released in the days of EQ or AO or UO, it would have done pretty well. But in the days of ever-present World of Warcraft, or the beautiful Guild Wars, or the player-driven Eve Online, I just don't see how it can compete.
The only thing it has going for it is nostalgia, and people already know the rules way too well.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
The things that make D&D attractive are exactly the things that cannot be recaptured in a video game. I'd rather just stick with OpenRPG and the normal pen and paper D&D.
The new D&D online just looks like Guild Wars to me. If I wanted to play Guild Wars, I'd have been doing that already.
If only OpenRPG didn't crash so much when you run it on macs...
I thought this was going to be about BDSM.
"One of the hardest things about pen-and-paper games is that you have to actually get people together -- 'Hey, can you come over on Thursday night? No? How about Saturday afternoon?' " said David Eckelberry, one of D&D Online's lead designers. "It was a lot easier to do that when we were younger, but it's harder to find time with your friends as we get older and get lives and jobs and families. With the computer, the game world is always waiting for you, so you can play when you want."
This is just an outrageous insult. I'm so mad I'm tempted to shoot him with my +2 composite longbow of indignation.
"Thanks for reading our uninformative marketing press article. Back to your regular schedule."
yeah! Let's argue on the Internet...
For those too lazy from eating pork rinds from 10 am Saturday morning until 2 am Sunday morning playing it FTF to bother actually getting on the bus or their bike to go play it next week.
Wow.
Plus, you don't have to pick up after your friends who leave all their dirty socks, pizza boxes, and scribbled on pieces of paper all over the basement that your mom gets on your case for, and you can press mute when your mom yells at you to finish your chores.
Bonus: if you talk in a really deep voice, noone will know you're not a wise elf lord with really cool hair but are really a skinny kid with broken glasses and a bad case of acne who is too shy to get a girlfriend even though his best friend who's a girl is secretly waiting for him to ask her to the school dance if he'd just stop boring her talking about AD&D for just a second.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
GIVE SWORD TO TROLL
--
make install -not war
Since the end user of DDO has absolutely *no* control over the content of the game whatsoever, making comparisons between it and actually playing AD&D is ridiculous.
I was in the Beta. It's probably one of the biggest computer game disappointments I've seen in a long long time.
They totally abandoned any semblance of the 3.0/3.5 d20 system (or really any pnp D&D system). They modified everything: Abolished the combat round (real time variation or otherwise), changed power levels of all the spells and monsters from the core game, got rid of concepts like attacks of opportunity. They changed level ups, hit points, armor class values. Everything is "modified in the interest of game balance."
They basically took the Players Handbook cut about 5 pages out of the 200+ page manual, and then built their own game from that.
This thing is basically Dungeons and Dragons in name only. It's essentially Counterstrike with swords (all combat is real time), but with horrible graphics and an unusable user interface and a terrible quest engine.
Seriously, Turbine would have been better off just buying the Neverwinter Nights engine and building the game from that, it would have been far superior in terms of usability and overall gameplay.
People might say that "not everything translates well from Pen and Paper". This is very true, but as Neverwinter Nights illustrated you can make an excellent rendition of a Dungeons and Dragons computer game and make it *feel* like real D&D. Hell I would have even settled for an updated online version of the old SSI gold box games.
This game does not do that. It's not even close. If you want to make yet another MMOG in a fantasy setting go right ahead but please don't abuse the Dungeons and Dragons license just so you can move sales.
I've been waiting 10 years (ever since Ultima Online came out) for this MMOG and it is a collossal disappointment.
I've tried almost every mmog that's been released since UO. I've been playing D&D for 20 years. I won't be buying this game. I hope Turbine realizes how badly they screwed up that even I won't be bothering with this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've had DMs kill an entire party for making too much noise (arguing) and attracting wandering beasties with the noise... and then penalize us with - die roll modifiers with the surprise attack... Remember, it's not really 'Role' playing if you're not playing your role.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
Unfortunately, in my book, Turbine is synonymous with faux pas. The first one's that come to mind is letting M$ distribute Asheron's Call, making it part of M$'s Gaming Zone, and licensing the developmental reigns to M$ for waaaaaaay too long.
...but I'm not bitter.
Then of course there was the release of Asheron's Call 2, which we're told is a completely different game then Asheron's Call, and is not meant to compete with it for customers. Nevermind the fact that the game never contained the features mentioned on it's box, web-site, and advertisements. It didn't compare to AC for playability, and it folded shortly after the release of it's most recent expansion pack. <Insert class-action lawsuit here>
Here we are now, with Turbine regaining control of AC, breaking it away from the Zone, over-promising and under-delivering on it's own recent expansion pack, and for what? Tiny, meaningless, monthly "content" updates, that are really just a grind to an anticlimatic ending for your six-years-in-the-making toon.
"Put your message in a modem, and throw it into the cyber-sea." - Rush
The big thing missing from (most) online RPGs is the ability to have your actions influence the course of history. Sure there are story arcs to some, but everyone is playing the same story. You're not going to be able to challenge pencil and paper games until you can wander through the ruins of a keep or a capital where last year's campaign failed.
My friends and I hoped that DDO would allow us to relive our D&D pen and paper days, but as others mentioned, DDO falls far short of that. We did however search the net and found a couple of programs that did a better job of it.
My personal favorite is Fantasy Grounds (http://www.fantasygrounds.com/, which mimics a table top with dice and such. There's no real automation in it, but if you know XML you can customize the rulesets and such.
There are a few others, Klooge (http://www.kloogeinc.com/) is a bit more complex, but you can tweak the heck out of it if you know what you're doing. OpenRPG (http://www.openrpg.com/) is another one.
To each their own, but these programs (combined with voice comms) can really help ya relive the tabletop experience if your friends are long distance like mine.
H
I've played the beta for 2 weeks @ 4 hours/day (IAABT). DDO looks great and is well made but I can't recommend it because of an utter lack of content. After the beta I had a level 7 and level 6 toon, having played every dungeon to boredom. Hard core players maxed out their first character in less than 2 weeks.
a meID/163 before spending time and money on this dud.
During the last week of the beta the hardest part in starting a party was deciding what to do: noone cared anymore which dungeon to go to.
You may want to read the beta reviews at http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/hype/g
I'm very disappointed.
I already play City of Heroes and Halflife 2 on my Linux box via Cedega. You can purchase the updates to it cheap or just compile it yourself. Some games have bugs but most games play perfect.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
So far I've enjoyed DDO. And I know a lot of you are disappointed with it,but I went into the game not looking for a PnP in MMO form but something that isn't WoW. I played WoW for half a year. I had a level 60 orc lock and a 40 something troll theif. I never liked the raids. I would rather be forced to play with 5 other people(11 others if it is a raid party) than to have to deal with 40 people.
So far I haven't ran into any whiny kids on the voice chat, or immature 1337 speakers! My guild is doing quite well, and all of them I've partied with so far have been mature about every quest. The built voice chat is something that other MMOs need to start doing.
I know it isn't much, but I've had a good experience with the game. I was never into endless grinds or racing to get some amazing set of equipment so I could be the same as everyone else. On the same note I wasn't expecting the D&D PnP experience from the game. I got what I believe is a pretty engaging game, if you have the right people to play with.
D20... I just don't feel as good about it as I did when I use to sit with my old AD&D books. Does anyone else feel that Wizards have destroyed something that was once good? How can the MMORPG be any better? I think I'll just be sticking with EQ2.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
....I'm attacking the darkness!
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
'nuff said.
But suppose I'm an aspiring necromancer working towards lichdom ? Can I reanimate the remains of these intruders of my home once I've dealt with them ? And if so, what happens if they respawn and try again - or does this game actually have a permanent death system ?
Really, why do necromancers take such bad PR all the time ? Using zombies and skeletons as workforce is perfectly logical and hurts no one - their souls have long since departed, after all. Would that "noble" paladin rather have me using slave labor ?
And what does the tree-hugging hippy care - I'm not hurting any trees or small (or even large) animals, am I ? Undead are perfectly natural, or does he perhaps think that every skeleton roaming some long-forgotten tomb was rised by a necromancer ? "Nature" - bah ! Druids only accept part of nature, and declare everything else "unnatural", while using their own utterly unnatural powers without remorse - or do you think that it's natural for a human being to become a squirrel at will ?
Hmmph. It's all baseless propaganda, malicious wrongfull accusations. They are all just jealous of the fact that if they get a tiny hole in their body they die, while if I get my head hacked off I'll simply pick it up and reattach it. It is pure bone envy, I tell you !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Suprisingly it wasn't very buggy. A few crashes was all but compared to other MMO's who have been released for years (Hello SOE) it was like a linux kernel so stable.
What was wrong with it then? Well there is an odd level design. The starter level (after the tutorial) has no healing potion merchant. If you screw up during the first mission and use all your potions to keep alive then you are stuck. You can't get healed and some classes find that first 'real' mission really really hard.
The problem is that it has about 10 kobolds in it who it is next to impossible to sneak by for a thief and completely impossible for other classes. So you have to fight your way through. It is do-able but usually you end up getting hurt. That is when the game spawns the end boss who seems to be insanely hard for your level 1 non-fighter/cleric.
Healing potions are the normal single player rpg answer and levelling up through some grinding is the MMO answer. Neither of wich is possible in this game. I ended up with several characters owning a small fortune but completly unable to move on.
I was not the only one with that problem.
Perhaps I and a lot of others just sucked but DDO expects us to pay them and then having a non-passable starter level is a criminal offence.
And all just because they didn't have someone selling potions. What the fuck does that tell you about the rest of the game?
Other parts of the game that sucked. Well have you ever played Jedi Knight Jedi Academy? Remember the lightsaber fighting? Well DDO fighting is like that. Except without the lightsabers, the force cool force actions, the jumping, the ai, the fun.
In fact the melee combat is just a giant click and turn fest. I am starting to realize something. Twitch on itself isn't fun. It is fun in a FPS when I am given the engine and the controls and the ai and the enviroment to make for a fast moving fight. DDO fighting isn't anything like it. It is just a turn around to keep facing that stupid monster that is jumping all over the place for no good reason.
I am reminded of the opening movie to Guild Wars. It shows some fantastic fighting moves that totally fail to be in the game. Same here. It is the same boring hack & slash as EQ and everyother fantasy MMO but now you got to move your mouse a lot.
Frankly the game is a big disappointment to me. It seemed to promise so much but delivers next to nothing. Worse it is in many ways unlearning a lot of the lessons from previous MMO's. It is not nice to say but this is actually a worse game then EQ2. At least in EQ2 if a mission was to hard you could do something else. Not in DDO.
Don't think for a moment that this is like the P&P D&D experience. It only shares the combat rules applied rigidly without a human dungeon master to make the experience fun (wich dungeon master would allow a party to get stuck for in the first 10 minutes of gameplay? Time to teleport in a wandering legendary hero to give the noobs a helping hand)
Stay well clear of this game unless you like laggy single user dungeons, endless twitching hack & slash, and boring level design.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So what exactly am I paying for with that monthly fee? Since everything is instanced, it requires very little bandwidth or overhead on their part. And non-instanced MMORPG's like WoW are available with much larger user bases and much more developed worlds for the same monthly fee.
The only thing D&D online is selling is name brand recognition, and who still gives a rat's ass about THAT?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've read reviews of this MMO, and the once promising hype seems to fail to deliver. What makes or breaks any D&D game is the ability for extraordinary things to happen. And unfortunately, this really can't be managed without a real life GM. Planescape Torment came close, but that's single player, but a great example of what this game should have been. NPCs with real, meaningful backgrounds that are not only enticing, but explain certain unique characteristics about them. Name another game where the first NPC you encounter is a floating, talking, no chatterbox, of a skull. And a main character with a real story and motive. Unfortunately, the MMO just doesn't create opportunities to be a hero, because there are 1000s of people out trying to save the world at the same time.
I think I'll just stick to my World of Warcrack for now.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.