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DDO Goes Solo
Gamespot reports on efforts by Dungeons and Dragons Online creator Turbine to add soloable content to the gameworld. They have added a new difficulty level to the existing missions ('solo'), which will allow players unwilling or unable to form a group to successfully complete tasks. From the article: "Turbine has also adjusted the experience requirements for leveling up. The change heavily favors new players, cutting the necessary experience points to get to level two by half. However, the requirements for levels four and up will only be decreased by 10,000 points."
I wonder if they'll be offering an offline version of their game for those who only want to play solo?
I was talking to a friend the other day about how I don't play WoW because a) I just don't have the time, and b) the later missions pretty much require that I always have to have a group with me.
The problem with that is finding said group, organizing them, keeping them there long enough, before I decide I need to go to bed, blah, blah, blah.
But when I was playing Oblivion, I actually thought it would be nice to have other people around to chat with or trade things with (like "I'll restore charges on your weapon for some potions"), or just chat about things in game or otherwise. Some really good discussions I've had came around through old MUD gaming while talking to guild members about Friends or religion or politics.
What we decided is that the fun of MMRPG's isn't necessarily grouping together - it's just the shared experience. I'd be perfectly happy never having a group of people with me on a quest, but just being able to chat or trade with them as I chose.
So, I'd love to see a MMRPG with mostly solo quests that can ramp themselves up if you have a group to provide a challenge - but don't *make* me try and herd these cats you call other gamers if I don't want to.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
My brother played DDO at launch and from what I saw I was curious about the grouping and the level requiremets.
I didn't get a chance to try it before he un-subscribed, but it looked like a fun game even if it needed some tweaking.
I will have to tell him about this in case he wants to re-subscribe because of these changes.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
This is a good move, and might require a second look at the game. I played in the head-start pre-order program and cancelled my order before launch. Beyond the initial character set-up, there's simply nothing for a solo player to do, quest-wise, and since all advancement is tied to questing, there's no game here for the solo player.
Of course, the premise of the game is to form a group and go questing together -- One of the "M"s in MMO stands for "multiplayer," you know. But even hardcore players, and casual players more so, will want a breather from team play every now and then -- especially when the majority of players with which you can group are interested only in grinding through the same quest over and over again.
Should you play DDO 100% solo? No. There are other games for that (Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights, etc.). But to have the option to succesfully play the lone wolf from time to time? That's a facet of gameplay that DDO was sorely missing at launch. This is a good thing.
I don't know a lot about these online games but from what I understand on WoW you get people who don't have a lot of experience and no one wants to play with them which makes it more difficult for them to get any experience... and it goes on... so this sounds good. It also stops the problem of having to decide who gets what when you finish the level
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
A new difficulty options will be available to those who want to have a go at some areas alone.
What if another user walks into this area while the the user is going at it? Do they go blind?
Amazing, both of those suggestions were made in beta but Turbine insisted they wouldnt add solo content and said the levelling was fine.
Q: What's geekier than playing board games with friends?
A: Playing Dungeons & Dragons with friend.
Q: What's geekier than playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends?
A: Playing Dungeons & Dragons with strangers.
Q: What's geekier than playing Dungeons & Dragons with strangers?
A: Playing Dungeons & Dragons with strangers, online.
Q: What's geekier than playing Dungeons & Dragons with strangers, online?
A: Playing Dungeons & Dragons alone, online.
Though thankfully, LARPing still has all that beat hands down.
i share dark paladin's sentiments. i would love to play DDO, but quite frankly don't have the time to deal with forming groups, joining raids, putting up with stupid guilds, etc., I want to escape into the game and have fun, not put up with people at every turn. if they'd make the rest of the game have a solo option for difficulty then they'd have my money in a heartbeat. until then, the game can continue to sit in the $10 bargain bin. its not worth the hassle (to me) to enjoy half of the game and then reach the "must group" wall and have to quit. yeah, i have oblivion and enjoy it immensely. although i have never found myself thinking "i wish i could trade with someone". I would say oblivion is the closest thing that i've seen to what i'm after, a great game with a great story, and world to explore with constantly dynamic content (in this case via the endless mods). i don't see much changing however with mmorpg's. the developers are happy to keep them as nothing more then a glorified chat engine for $15 a month, since the majority of the players keep supporting the model.
sigs suck
Nothing new here, this was first published at the beginning of last month. Kind of funny for a game that had an advertising campaign of "Friends don't let friends play solo"
chown -R us
I'm noticing that since the success of WOW, more mainstream MMOs are leaning towards easier grinds and soloable content, IE, they are mimicing WOW in the hopes of recapturing some of the market share. Honestly though, I think they've already lost the faith of a lot of gamers by not making it this way from the start. MMOs have for me become a losing fight - the game developers are encouraged to introduce long, time consuming content, grinds, collections, or whatever, because you are paying them by month. Take EVE Online for example, in order to fly the higher class ships, you have to be subscribed to the game for X months to accumulate Y skill points in spaceship command and the appropriate ship class skill, not to mention playing the game enough to have the money for it. Take that X months x 14.95 a month, and you've got a premium fee to fly a decent ship. That's brilliant from the developers point of view, but as a gamer I'd rather not be locked into a system that encourages long periods of boredom to reach new content.
WoW was one of the best in terms of providing decent quests/content at every level, but once you struck the level cap it was the same old hundreds of hours of what became repetitive boring content (ie work) to receive marginal benefit in terms of new content.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Rather, Kaa's Corollary of Theodore Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
I'm willing to bet, from personal experience, that most D&D players already have at least a few proficiency slots used up in going it "solo."
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
What this really means to me is that unfortunately, Turbine's got a bad product on its hands (again) and now they're entering survival mode by just giving up and altering the game they made. You know, when game gets old, its normal that it receives an overhaul to give it some fresh air but...at the beginning like that ? hum...scary...
:)
In fact, im pretty sure DDO can be quite a cool game with various strategies..meant for the true D&D fan at heart. The cold hard fact is that people dont play online to play the way they do on the table with P&P. They just wanna bash stuff, get loot and fat xp
I said it when turbine came up with AC2 and I'll say it again, they need a game that offer an immersive solo player experience and not only for the beginning of game, for the WHOLE game. You know, another poster said the same thing in this thread. When i go online, what i like to do is chat with my guild, trade with people and go hunting on my merry own or maybe with two or three personal friends. I rarely have more than two hours in a row so I cant afford big groups with lots of coordination, nature calls, laundry breaks and knockings at the door, not that its bad, but on the large scale, thats very time consuming.
playing a mmo for me means interacting with people not being forced to be with a big bunch of PUGs just because my quests forces me to group. That is immensely why wow is so successful. Sure for high end instances you are forced to group for the majority of the quests, you can solo them if feel like so.
People keep saying that soloing quests defeats the purpose of playing a mmo but i disagree, I like to play alone or with close friend but I like mmos because I can interact with people. that is what mmo means to me.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
I just cannot help but hate this change. DnD is not a solo game, infact it is impossible to play alone. And not only that, but MMOs are not supposed to be solo games, so where is the point in this. All they are doing is catering to the mindless fools who just want an easy-mode for every game and to get everything so they can brag and think they are the best at everything.
Also I am viewing this as a sellout becasue when it was in development the devs stated that DnD is not a solo game and DDO would never be made to suit a solo playing style. Looks like the whining L33T speaking 13 year-olds of the world won out. Which IMO is so very sad for such a good rendition of a great PnP piece in an online setting.
In my opinion I think they are trying to make up in the virtual world for something they are lacking in reality.
Just my 2 cents worth.
--Valthan
I played DDO in the beta stage, as well as pre-ordering and playing at launch. They started off pretty well, kept to the PnP rules for the most part (I undersrtand that some things did have to change to work in a video game versus PnP), and it was fun. However, they started to slip, and make changes that made them less and less "the only MMO to stay faithful to the D&D rules!"
Whatever they do now, I don't really think it's going to help them in the long run.
with the fact they have another failed game on their hands.
The one constant in Turbines two games since the original Asheron's Call is that they fail to acknowledge the warnings of their fans. Turbine has many loyal fans from their Asheron's Call game and most are willing to try anything new Turbine comes out with. Yet at the same time Turbine fails to exploit this valuable commodity and instead ignores them and even at times insults them.
I remember quite well Turbine representatives dismssing the claims that D&DO did not have enough content to launch, was not friendly to players who may want to solo or find themselves in that position. Combine this with a game world which is player unfriendly, meaning all areas are instance, with no real activity other than the dungeon crawl, and it exaggerates the games inherent limitations. Simply put, there is nothing to do other than group.
Yes I know the idea of D&D is to play with others but that ignores the reality of gaming today. If players want to game together there are many other ways they can do so and most of them allow for much more player interaction than an internet MMORPG. The best way to have a successful MMORPG is to appeal to the broadest possible number of players. Purposely excluding potential players is always a road to disaster and Turbine went down the road full speed.
Hopes for LOTR (MEO or whatever its current name is) dimmed significantly when Turbine emphasized the group play as a focus. The classes provided are meant to support each other but not necessarily be soloable. Some classes don't appear to have any real potential outside of groups. If this makes it to production it will yet be another game with limited appeal and a short life.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I can understand the attitude "I just want to play, don't make me work". In essence this is a call to eliminate the concept of character advancement. You start at some level of capability - and never get any more powerful. Developers would have to focus on making new and interesting quests. So you could be a 10th level fighter, or a 10th level thief, or any combination of 10 levels - but that's as far as you ever advance.
Or you might start out with the highest level of skill in one category - but if you want to have skill in more than one thing, you have to earn it. So for DDO, you might start as a 10th level sorceror if you want. (Or a 3/3/4 fighter/wizard/rogue if you prefer.) You could reach 20th or 30th level by training in a second and 3rd class - but 10th is the highest you could ever go in any single class.
Hmm - that actually sounds like it would be the simplest way for DDO to do to quickly expand their game - it doesn't require any additions to skills - just add some harder quests for the higher level characters. Then they could experiment with a server that allows people to start with 10 levels, and exceed the 10th level limit via multi-classing. See how people like the idea.
All this acronym overload is killin' me. The first thing I thought reading the title was: "WTF... Dance Dance Ovulation?"
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
I played it in the beta and thought it was pretty good, but not good enough for a monthly fee. With the option to solo, I may actually try it out again.
DDO's interpretation of 3.5 simply didn't work well in real time. Temple of Elemental Evil exemplifies what D&D is good at - tactical turn-based combat. DDO's "flip on auto-attack and try to keep the spastic kobald in range" style of melee, on the other hand, was the worst I've ever been exposed to in an MMO. On top of that, there was hardly anything to do in the quests. After the 17th "BREAK BOXES! BREAK CRATES! PREVENT THIS CRATE FROM BEING BROKEN!" quest I wanted to kill myself instead of the kobalds.
. . . is with a group of friends. Doesn't take many, all I have atm is 3 or 4 who log in each day. If we want to fill the team up with a stranger we can, but the game doesn't force you to join or grow a huge Guild in order to succeed (which is good). We even stopped using in game voip in favor of Skype beta recently.
Just take my advice and have someone who can deal and take damage (Fighter), someone who can handle the traps secret doors and locked chests (Rogue), and someone who can buff in the beginning and heal (Cleric) in your general party makeup. If the Fighter has 18+ strength, the Rogue has 18+ Int (requisite attribute for disable trap and search anyhow), and the Cleric has 18+ Wisdom you're pretty much set as far as runes and puzzles are considered and can typically get 100% of the realistic bonuses available in a quest.
What's nice about DDO is no hamster wheel, you can actually log in for the half hour you have each night and run quests. Sure the graphics engine doesn't compare to WoW or EQ2 or even the old AO with its fabulous chairs and tables but you play DDO more for the interaction of buddies in extemporaneous chat without needing the old meeting place for that feeling any longer.
Did someone just get housed because they ignored the battle plan and ran into a room only to get nuked? It's ok to laugh at a game again; no more angry disappointed wankers because 3 hours of prep time was lost this game is moer about the interaction than the lame status of claiming that your random number generator rules all.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I played the beta, and didn't even want to try the full version, it is just that uninspiring. They didn't do anything terribly wrong with the game in any way, its just that wow and eq2 simply blow it out of the water in almost every aspect. Finding groups in the beta was ridiculously hard, at least making everything solo will give the people who bought the game a chance to play it.
Unless you are an absolute hardcore fan of D&D you should definitely pass on this game, the only unique thing about the game is its D&D stats system, and honestly after playing wow and eq2, I absolutely hate the D&D stats system, it was one of the worst things about the game.
Seeing that the eq2 team with their 'infinite' wisdom with MMORPGs can barely keep the eq2 servers populated, I don't think any fantasy/orc MMORPG has a chance in hell of competing in todays market.
no one is mentioning the horrid bugs.
/tell bob hi!
The reason I stopped playing DDO had nothing to do with the game play.
it had everything to do with
*general chat not working
game up, but the chat server is down yet again. whoopie. but even when it is up..
*friends lists not working
is bob online? Duno! Says he is but he might not be.. Looks like Jack is offline.. oh wait no he just said something in guild chat...
*private tells not working
time to see if bob is online
ye know how other games say "Bob is not online".. yeah DDO doesn't do that.
Bob MIGHT be online and ignoring me or Bob might be at work. I have no way of knowing
*guild member lists not working
just as reliable as friendlists only at a larger scale!
*guild chat not working
Saying something in guild chat does NOT mean people in guild chat actually saw it
*Party chat not working
Same.
*missing characters
I could be talking to a guy in my party and asking him where the heck he is and would be talking to me, asking where the heck I am. But we are standing right NEXT to each other, neither able to see/interact with the other.. This happened to me a few times.. I always thought the other guy was being an ass.. Found out the truth with my roommate
DDO.. feh.
I think Turbine wanted to mimic the success of the D&D table top experience. You don't ever play D&D by yourself, so they created a world where grouping was the only option. In that situation finding groups should be really easy, I mean if everyone has to group then finding a PuG shouldn't be a hard task.
The problem they didn't account for was the fact that some character classes will be played more than others. This in and of itself shouldn't really be an issue except Turbine made it an issue with their dungeon crawling experience. Turbine went so out of their way to promote class diversification in groups they made many of the dungeons require certain classes to access most of the dungeon.
Now for experience requirements, I think they really messed things up now. I bought the game with high expectations and in general had a good time. What made me cancel my subscription after the free month was the fact that I was level 6 already with alts on the way as well. I am by no means a power gamer I play maybe 2 hours at the most a day yet I was able to plow through the 60% of the entire game content in 1 month. And yes I don't just mean levels I mean I did all the dungeons I could by that level.
D&DO would be an awesome game if its pricing model was the same as Guild wars. And I would probably be still playing it.
I really liked ddo in beta and the first few weeks it came out. But then TurDBine pulled out the nerf bat, and never stopped swinging it since. It is one thing to 'balance' missions, but that was not what turdbine was doing. Instead, too many people hit lvl 10 to fast, and they seemed bent on simply stopping and litterly punishing the power players instead of properly balancing things, they took out rest shrines, added tons of annoying slimes, lowered loot tables to utter crap , made virtually all casters healers (with no limit to mana and no cool down timers), ect ect. , mission after mission they utterly destroyed to the point nobody even wanted to do them anymore. This actually seemed to be Turdbine's goal.. to make it so the higher level content wasn't even worth doing anymore in order to stop the power players.
But I hung in there for another month.. maybe they would get better. Nope, instead it got worse. They destroyed the replayability of the chain quests, which I think are the most fun, by removing the random end loot rewards and replacing them with a limited static loot table. This was good for the casual players, but again, killed the game for the high end and power players. The straw that broke the camels back for me, was they also made you reset the quest chains now, so once you complete the series, to do any of the high level parts of the series over again, you must do them all over again! The quest chains start at mid level and progress to high. So now they are forcing level 10 players to do quests that yield zero or very little xp and of course the loot is nothing a higher lvl will want. But must waste time anyway just to get to the higher level quests again. This became a waste of my time at this point and I cancelled.
Solo content is not what DDO needed, in fact, I use to solo all the time lower level quests on hard or elite. I don't know what people are talking about that they can't solo, that's BS. I could live with the limited content.. but don't make me repeat quests that are useless to me, and then make the few quests a high level can even do , not even worth the time to do anymore. Nice way to kill your game Turdbine.
Don't you remember the solo random dungeon in the DM's guide?
Hello?
Then advantage is you don't have to solo. I play at odd times, so having solo content is good for me.
Too bad my trial period is about to expire.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on