f13.net

Dam near everywhere I turn I see people saying the same things over and over about how bad this game is because either the gameplay is stale, community is stale, the gameworld and game mechanics are bad, etc.

Examples (There are so many, but they all repeat)

D&D Online Official Forums

1.
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22065

2.
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22070

3.
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21119

MMORPG.COM

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/load/forums/loadforum/569/loadthread/58676/setstart/1/loadclass/192

Corpnews:
http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2848&start=0

IGN-Vault

My firewall at work doesn't like the vault boards today, but pretty much you see people on the official boards and other MMORPG vault boards mostly saying the same things as what's in the links above.


I loved AC1, hated AC2.  I am not saying DDO is going to be a flop, but there seems to be little middle ground about this game. People either love it or hate it. It seems the instancing has really got people divided on how much there "is or isn't" a community feel for the game. 

I guess that seeing what a train wreck AC2 was (even though it won game of the year 2002, had tons of awards) that its suprising to read all the similarities that DDO seemingly has.

I thought about getting this at release, but I'm going to wait at least 6 months before I try it now.

This is one of my favorites:



A video game that plays like a video game?  HORRORS!

(edit) Read a few more and... wow.  These must be those same people I keep finding in pickup groups that haven't yet made the leap that mages should cast spells in combat instead of running around hitting stuff with a stick, or that if you want to be able to open locks you should maybe take the Open Locks skill at some point.  Thank God they won't be around after release.

DDO is GuildWars with far superior PvE but no PvP and a subscription.

DDO PvE somehow is not leagues ahead of EQ2/WoW/FFXI's PvE which it should be.

DDO will run out of content for its players within 6 months (for many I expect four) with no pvp, crafting, exploration or social activities that causes a great deal of unease with many people.  Despite the fact that logically those things shouldn't matter, see the "no game is fun forever" line of thinking.

Tell me I'm wrong if I am but that is how I'm reading things going into this launch.

I'm one of the few eople who seem to be in the 'meh' category about it.  I like D&D.  I like Ebberon.  Hell, I even like PvE and instancing.  The combat was decent, I didn't think the interface was all that horrible, though it took a bit to figure out how to inspect stuff...  but nothing really grabbed me and said "FUN" beyond the geekiness quotient potential of trying out every wacky multi prestige class minmaxed monstrosity I could come up with (granted that could be seriously long-term entertaining, provided there was sufficient variety in the low level content.. and that is a problem.)

I want to like it, but I won't be buying it at release.

I don't hate it. I don't think it's a bad game. I got really burned out on the same early-level content. I wanted to like it. But I just feel frustrated by trying to advance, which leads to /meh feelings.

I should login again before beta is over to see if it's improved before deciding on whether I'll buy it or not.

I'm going to state 2 problems here, one is a problem of f13, one is a problem of DDO.

1. F13.net members would rather go into a chat channel and shoot the shit for 7 hours while efficiently playing solo or in a very small group, while not catassing at any time.
2. DDO Requires more than that. It requires group play. Efficient, tactical group play if you want to play above the normal difficulty. That, unfortunately, seems to be asking too much.

It doesn't matter if the game had 17 years worth of content for levels 1-5 (read: 1-30). If it can't cater to playstyle, it's dead in the water.

Some of us have spurts of catassery and poopsockedness, but on average I'd say we keep it to a minimum. However, I would not say this is a problem in any way shape or form.

It is when it makes 80% of the games on the market near unplayable to our standards. But I'd rather blame the developers for not making games that appeal to everyone!!!?!!?1! or niches. You can pick. Half-empty. Half-full. Etc.

Because the standard forum troll question is "Why should I pay a monthly fee?" and the standard fanboi answer is "Because we're going to be getting more and more content," it sounds as if Turbine has put themselves in a very difficult position.  People are not flocking to the license.  They aren't flocking to the combat (at least, opinion seems divided).  There is no crafting or PvP.  Rumor seems to have it that the artifical, concurrent server population cap of "around 1,000" will be enforced by self-inflicted queues. 

So if they don't deliver regular, bug-free, well-balanced content additions quickly, then what?  Does Turbine have a plan for these content additions?  Will new content be ready in time?  Does the limited amount of existing content indicate that they are having problems generating things to do, or simply that they are developing post-release content now? 

(I got distracted as I was typing this... this was aimed at Hoax, but there have been 6 new replies since then.  Oh well.)

I uninstalled Guild Wars after the tenth foozle in the shitty newbie area, and resolved never to play WoW after watching over a friend's shoulder as he spawn camped fifty wolves so he could bring back ten wolf teeth.  As I've said, the mere fact that DDO has structured quests instead of fields of randomly spawning foozles makes me consider its PvE to be leagues ahead of MMOs that use that paradigm, right out of the gate.  The fact that the combat requires some degree of twitch and spatial awareness is a nice bonus.  YMMV.

Not sure about the 6 month timeframe - we still haven't seen how fast they'll be producing new content, and the rate of content consumption is going to vary widely.  From reading beta boards it sounds like there are people out there who were able to blow through all 10 levels in a week.  I've been playing pretty regularly since alpha and my highest level character is at level 5, with a bunch of quests sitting in the quest log that I haven't tackled yet.  YMMV.

I don't agree that there's a lack of exploration or social activities, but those aren't well defined terms.  If "social activities" means an Entertainer class a la SWG, no, I guess it doesn't have social activities.  Good riddance.   :evil:  And I've hated the PvP and crafting I've seen in other games (yes, I played a crafter in SWG, which is often held up as the holy grail of MMOG crafting), so again, good riddance.  I think chatting in a tavern or doing a quest with a group of good people count as social activities, and I think discovering new areas and poking around them to see what's there counts as exploration.  YMMV.

"Love or Hate" is definitely apt.  I wouldn't say I love DDO, but I like it better than any MMOG I've seen to date.  On the other hand, I wouldn't expect someone who enjoys EQ-style gameplay (which is 95% of the MMOG market if subscription numbers are any indication) to like DDO at all.

My biggest problem: The world is dull and rainy, the sky is always overcast, and every dungeon is some guy's basement loaded up with crates or some sewer.

Not a game for people with seasonal depression.

I agree with some comments that the game seems to have a solid core but the stuff around it is weak. Remember how dead AC2 felt? DDO feels the same way. The community is very segregated (I never say anyone above level 2 my entire time playing), the world itself is awful looking and feeling, the dungeons are bleak and mostly the same.

Give me a couple different towns, a desert, a jungle, some sunshine once in a while - then we'll talk.

No surprise to say I like it.  I also knew lots of people wouldn't which is one of the reasons I tried to elucidate what I considered the major decision points of love/hate mentality in my writeup.

It's all about expectation setting baby :)

Xilren

Did you ever do any of the "red triangle" quests?  Those are the outdoor ones - stuff like Irestone Inlet, Three Barrel Cove, and Redwillow's Ruins.  Three Barrel Cove is actually a little town unto itself (with a few aggros in it) with quests and a tavern and so forth.

I tried out this weekend's stress test and uninstalled after about an hour.  The dark and dingy town just pissed me off for some reason,  I think because it's such a stock background.  Then I discovered that while NPCs could sit in a chair players couldn't.  Not a huge deal I suppose but doesn't do much to make the tavern a place that anyone would spend time in if they weren't forced to heal there.  I did like the lfg interface, it looked like it would be useful but since the only guys I saw when I looked on it were looking for 'True Roleplayers!!!' I didn't actually try using it to find a group.  The two quests I finished felt very' new GM I'm following the quest building instructions in the DM guide' to me but they were fine as far as they went.  I did get tired of wandering around smashing chests and barrels, I was amused to find that using a sword to smack one didn't break stealth but using my bow did.  A lot of the animations (especially the use object one) reminded me very strongly of the ones used in NWN as did some of the sound effects.  All and all it just added up to not my cup of tea.   

LOL

I disagree with the "most people love it or hate it" line.  What I see almost everywhere I look (not that many places, here, foh, sa) is "bleh."  It's a second-tier product with shitty production values (i.e. exactly what you'd expect from Turbine).  The settings are bleh, the gameplay is bleh.  It's not horrible, just very, very bleh.

I like the concept, but I don't like Turbine's execution thus far. I really wanted to get behind this game, but after slaving away for awhile, I just felt...kind of....bleh.

I guess I am somewhere in the middle - I don't hate the game, like EQ or WoW...but I don't love it either. I think it was the combat mechanics that did it in for me...the timing of events and hit detection just seemed somehow "off"...and in a game that requires a degree of twitch, that's just not acceptable to me.

I agree that I don't see the love/hate. I see a lot of "nice attempt but..."

Turbine needs to fire everyone responsible for world design, world graphics, etc. This game looks and feel a lot like AC2 and that ISN'T a good thing. I know it uses a similar engine but your engine doesn't make the world always rainy, the armor look like latex, etc.

AC2 just felt dead. Part of that was the fact there WERE NO TOWNS (nice one dumbasses), but a lot of it was the overall content and art design.

The word "uninspired" fits pretty well. I didn't see one thing in DDO that made me think "neat!"

Turbine seems to have mediocrity basically mastered. Come up with an OK concept, have a horrible production staff work on it, then put it out months too early.

One thing that made me think "neat!" was the way they handle XP and loot.  No ninja looting/rolling, almost no reason ever NOT to group with people, no powerlevelling, no grinding.  That's a rare thing.

(edit) I'll explain for those who haven't seen it: basically, the XP for a quest is given out to each group member seperately, rather than split up - hence, you get the same XP for doing a quest with a group of six as you do for soloing it, except that doing it with six is bound to be much easier.  All of the significant loot drops are given out in a similar fashion; each chest o' loot you find will spawn a different set of items for each member of the group, and reserve the items so that only that person can pick them up (they can trade afterward if they want to, but ninja looting is impossible).  And the XP award for the entire group is scaled by the highest level member of the group relative to the level of the quest, so there's a strong incentive (but not an absolute requirement) to try to group with people around your own level rather than having your 10th level friend powerlevel you through all the level 1 quests.  I think this is the most elegant reward system I've seen in an RPG yet.  Again, a few of the individual quests might need their numbers tweaked, but the core concept is really solid, and for most of the quests it works really well.

Hmm. I like the looting mechanism. I *love* the fact that it requires significant tactical awareness instead of AUTOATTACK FOR THE WIN OBI WAN! Bleh. I wish it had henchmen for hwne you just don't want to deal with that nitwit who doesn't seem to get that mages are supposed to cast spells. Sometimes. Maybe once even. I really liked the DM Voice overs. I *really* likes the traps and the way certain puzzles required certain classes to solve them. The quests and the mechanics felt D&Dish.

But, I just don't see why anyone would play a monthly fee for it.

Go the guild wars route and add henchmen (or hell even just promise it, alla UO's necromancy) and I'd buy it as a nice Diabloish game with what appears to maybe have an interesting plot under the covers. But as is? Don't see the point. Especially at $49.99 +$14.95/month.

*shrug*

I played beta for about... 15 minutes.

Not that I quit after that, but I had to go to work and it wouldn't connect once I got back.  Got in right at the tail end of that stress test.

However, from what I did see, I was a little disappointed in how the combat handled.  I guess it was too optimistic, but I didn't think I'd feel "locked in" when tumbling like I did.  And, maybe I suck, but I didn't notice any difference between trying to tumble to avoid attacks and just standing there and letting the spider take a free shot.  Felt a little clunky, overall.

However, I'd still play it.  If I didn't have to pay a monthly fee.  That's pretty much the only thing keeping me away.  As a Guild Wars esque kinda game that I could pick up whenever I (and maybe some friends) feel like it, it'd be perfect.  But I won't be marching around my house declaring "My life for the Turbine!" any time soon.

After playing a little bit, I kinda felt like it'd be better without being a MMG.  And Xbox Live or battle.net service would've done just fine.

I will announce that I am very happy that someone finally made lighting matter for stealth in a MMG.  Howabout that, if I want to stay hidden I should try to stick to the shadows! Whodathunkit?

I wanted to like this game. I really did. Maybe I would with a bit more experiance in it. I doubt that I will get any more experiance with it though. Here are some of the things that really bugged me during the preview weekend.

During character creation you cant see some of the feats, so you dont know what the prereqs are. Also, a lot of feats dont give you the exact info on what they do. I believe it was the 2 handed weapon feat that said. Improves fighting with a 2-handed weapon by 15%. Huh? 15% of  what? Also, when I finished the tutorial quest with my rogue, I took a mini-feat of rogue combat, and it says it increases short attack speed and some other stuff for a short duration. I couldnt for the life of me figure out exactually what it did. Or how I activated its short duration.
Then I got to questing. Well, being a rogue, I tried to be sneaky, but it seems there was a problem with rogues stelthing through entire quests very easilly, so they put in monsters that would trigger and rush you no matter what. These fuckers would always kill me. I tried to spec myself for combat rogue, and I was still getting hammered. I would hit about 1 in 15 swings or some such. It seems a low level rogue is only good at two things. Finding secret doors, and killing sleeping monsters. I think my rogue had a sneak attack ability of +1d6 damage. Not that I would know, considering I missed EVERY SINGLE ATTACK FROM STEALTH! And that was over a period of 3 hours playing.

Also, didnt SWG teach us that people really dont like standing around in an inn? Gah, this infuriated me. Every time I died (and it was a few) I had to spend 2-5 minutes sitting in the inn regenerating my hitpoints. Maybe there are better ways to do it, but in the spam of help windows telling me the "w" moves me forward, maybe I missed it.

Also, from talking to some people, they said there is no endgame. Once you hit lvl10, you have nothing to do except roll an alt, or help lowerlevel players. Honestly, I think if they try and charge $15 a month, they are not going to retain many customers. They would be better served with Guild Wars type pricing.

If this Sneak Attack is the same as the Feat from Neverwinter Nights, it is not an attack you do from Stealth. Not like a backstab. It's an attack you do from the flank or when your opponent is engaging someone else. In NWN, it's easier to get a Sneak Attack if you take the fighter henchman and my rogue henchmen gets them all the time when I play my fighter, so I assume in this game the best way to use the Sneak Attack Feat is to have a buddy tank the stuff for you while you stab it from the sides/rear.

A lot of this game just feels incomplete. For example in the basic combat training area, there are three guys you have to beat using mroe and more advanced techniques - except that you can easily beat them by just standing still and swinging away. I never figured out what exactly I was supposed to be learning.

Enemies in dungeons seem to just appear out of nowhere. I'll look down a corridor and it looks empty, I move forward a step and suddenly two or three enemies are in my face. I have no idea where the hell they came from. In one quest were you have to defend some treasure enemies LITERALLY appear out of nowhere, they just phase in in the middle of the room.

I can't think of anything harsh enough to say about the people at Turbine. It's one thing if you have no talent and are just incapable of making something decent. But these guys clearly have some talent in a lot of areas, they just have no clue what to do with it.

Now that to me is classic DnD lol.  I remember the first module I ever played:

"Okay you enter the room - and see a bear!"

The DM and I fought constantly.  The ecology of DnD bewildered me :)

I agree.  Better to have a DM spawn monsters on you than instigate a sudden cave-in because you made a miracle saving-throw that just trivialized his masterful encounter.

Put me on the list to pick up someone's account second-hand.

I think the thing about monsters appearing out of nowhere is that a lot of mobs use stealth, and you need to proform spot checks to see them. Thats the only explination I can think of, because I also was having this problem of mobs just appearing on top of me.

Surprisingly, most of my characters take lots of ranks in Spot and don't have that problem.   :-D  When I play a ranger I make it a point to target stealthed enemies as soon as I see them and fire an arrow to flush them out.

There are a couple of places where enemies do appear literally from nowhere, but usually those encounters are designed in such a way as to have them come from "backstage", e.g. back around the last bend you took, or on the other side of a door, or in a dark corner that you're probably not standing in, so as to avoid the effect of having enemies magically spawn on top of you.

"Save vs. Plot"? :)

One member of my regular group had a former DM who'd allow that...roll 3 twenties in a row and you could violate even the most railroaded of plotlines.  Happened once, I think; I'm hazy on the details since I wasn't there.

I once had a player roll three natural 20s on an attack roll (our crit hit house rule stated that any natural 20 let you roll again and add the damage).  It was during a pit fight that he'd been sort of shanghaied into - the idea was to have him stripped of his armor and weapons and tossed in the pit with a wild beast, forcing him to either find a way out or face a really tough fight.  Instead it was more like the scene in Chronicles of Riddick where Vin Diesel kills the guy with a teacup.  It completely trivialized that part of the encounter but it was sufficiently memorable that I didn't care.   :-D  Good times...

Yeah, our DM apparently used to have a rule that three twenties on a crit was instant death to your opponent.  He ended up changing that one to "automatic max crit damage" after one of his major plotline villains got offed at an awkward and unexpected moment.

On another positive happy note (at least for me), the resident Drizz't clone in our P&P group got himself all squashed to shit this week; he has to roll up a new character.  Now THEM are some good times :)

Every time a Drizzt clone dies, an archon gets its wings.

alright so I'm playing this stuff now, a couple of questions.

There's no mana pots? It stinks that there's 0 regen and that my mana doesn't last 1 single player dungeon. To regen it I have to run to a tavern which is a couple of minutes runing every freaking time? The fact that when I once reach the tavern I have to sit and watch that fucking mana bar fill up slowly ( yes I know there's consumables which works in taverns ). So far I'm fairly unimpressed by everything.

First AAA MMORPG so far which I didn't even bear for a day, what a piece of crap. Alright I know they have to stay true to the D&D rules but no regen SUCKS in a MMORPG, ESPECIALY when they don't even have fast accessable refill spots out of mission. The twitchy combat wasn't very intresting, it's just a somewhat hidden auto attack + block. Totaly lacked atmosphere as well. Thumbs up for decent graphics though but that's it.

strange - the no regen mana thing was about the only part of the game that I liked - since it made the game at least a teeeny bit more tactical.

Yes it might add a slight tactical touch to the game, but at the cost of an unacceptable ammount of downtime and tedious travelling.

The DDO equivalent of a "mana pot" is a wand or scroll, since those allow spellcasters to cast spells without using their own mana.

There apparently are items to restore mana, they're just ungodly expensive.

What class did you play?  Low level magic users don't tend to fair well solo.  It's an issue with d20, mages start out wimps, and end up gods, while other classes start out well, but end up not being so great.  If you are a cleric, as I was, you end up melee'ing a LOT.  Then again, clerics have the same melee power as rogues, monks and other light fighters.  Save mana for healing yourself between fights.

Alkiera

Hate.

I really wanted to like this game because my best friend is a dungeon artist for it, but I just couldn't stand it one bit.  I'm sure there will be a good demographic for DDO, but I am just not it.  My complaints are similar to those that have been voiced already in this thread (esp. Margalis').

I feel sorry for your friend, as you will no doubt be razzing him until the end of time then.  (I know I would.)

Remind him of the primary colors.

Grey, gray and brown.

Burnt sienna isn't a color, it's a philosophy.

I only just read this.  There is mana in D&D now?  Must be a 3rd Ed. thing?  I'll wait for a response before saying anything else.

It's a Turbine thing not a D&D thing, the D&D method wasn't fun, so you go back to an Inn and stand around waiting for mana to regenerate, it's more fun that way because, um, I dunno, they think it is.

Red, Blue and Yellow are due in an expansion I think.

Mana regeneration used to be really speedy, so that it took about as long for your mana to regenerate as unloading your unwanted loot on the bartender.  Then for some reason it got nerfed way the fuck down so you have to go AFK for five minutes.  I don't like it at all.   :cry:

In general, I think the gameplay has gone steadily downhill since alpha, despite the numerous small improvements and bug fixes.  The only really good gameplay change they've made since I started was the big ranged combat change (not getting snared every time you fired a shot); everything else has just caused DDO to slide closer to every other shitty MMOG in existence.  Their latest patch nerfed stealth (AGAIN) and dropped XP for some of the quests (meaning you have to redo them that many more times).

Suffice to say that I've decided not to preorder.   :|  A damn shame because I actually liked lots of the stuff that everyone else hated (like the group-oriented gameplay and the rain in the harbor).

OK.  I was going to shit all over this anyway, but I wanted to direct the hate properly.  This is one of the stupidest fucking ideas since someone designing AutoAssault thought a "cleric car" was a great idea.  Someone open a gas line in the Turbine offices.


I don't get it, why is mana in a D&D game?  Aren't you really playing Diablo?  The point of the magic user is to be a ball-and-chain around the whole party's neck until they need to read some ancient text or cockpunch the rust monster or WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT crack open a can of whoopass.  With mana, it's not about unleashing the fireball when you really and truly need it, it's PEWPEWPEWLASERS.  Might as well turn thieves into assassins now and call it EQ3.

All I can say about the mana thing is that you have to play it before you judge.  I had the exact same opinion as you until I actually tried it.  (The rules they used were an optional system from Unearthed Arcana or some such sourcebook, not an original Turbine invention, btw.)  It's not a straight mana system a la Diablo, it's more of a hybrid between a mana point system and D&D spell preparation.

The reason they did it, as far as I can divine, is that DDO quests have many more encounters than D&D quests (probably to compensate for the fact that real-time combat goes MUCH faster than turn-based PnP combat), so to compensate they give players more hit points and more spells per day.  Managing all of those spells per day as individual slots would be a royal pain, so instead of giving you 15 slots to fill individually they give you 3 slots for "prepared" spells and then let you use one mana pool to cast spells from that list.

It works very well, aside from a few annoying details like unnecessarily long regen times in taverns and the ability of clerics to use turning attempts to charge others' mana pools (which seems kinda imbalanced to me, as it seems like you end up with about 3x the mana if you use that skill right).

It's mana from the Unearthed Arcana book, the same system has been available as a play option since 2nd edition, at least.  I have an RTF file of the book with the play option in it somewhere... Mana only regenerates when you sleep, just like normal D&D.  The system works almost exactly like Psionics.... mana gains you some flexibility in what is not really a flexible class by the core rules.  Sorcerers advantage is now just having more mana, while wizards can have more(a LOT more) spells.

There was a huge post on Turbine's site on why they did what they did.  It had to do primarily with the fact that D&D's classes are built around 3-4 encounters per day, which is fine at the pace of PnP, given how much play slows down for combat.  It's NOT okay in a realtime game, where combat generally takes less time than getting everyone to the dungeon entrance.  So the average dungeon is in units of ~10 encounters, and there are 'rest shrines' in them where you can rest to regain 'mana', and some HP if you have a character with the Heal skill in the party.

Really, it's a pretty decent transalation of d20 to a realtime game.  Better than NWN, IMO.

Alkiera

Not true; wizards still have to pick "prepared" spells from their spellbooks, with the number of slots increasing per level.  Classes that don't need to prepare spells in standard DnD (sorcs, bards) treat all spells as "prepared" all the time, but have very few spells.

Classes that do prepare spells (wiz, cleric) get to swap out their "prepared" spells at rest locations (rest shrines in dungeons, taverns in town).  So it's actually a very decent translation of the PnP dynamic while removing a lot of tedious "ten copies of Magic Missile, five copies of Burning Hands" busy work.

Their solution seemed pretty reasonable to me - I do think choosing X of Y and Z of B would have gotten tedious.

Mana does not in any way mean wizards become fireball cannons. It just depends on how much mana you have, how it refills, etc. If you give someone enough mana for 3 spells clearly they won't be running around firing like a machine gun.

Fair enough, and good summary.  Naturally I missed the tiny window to get some playtime.