f13.net

Alright, I didn't spot a post about it and since I managed to get an account I'm guessing it's fairly fresh news. There's now a beta available for european citizens over at Fileplanet (http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/ddo_stormreach/eubeta/ddo_signup.aspx), you don't need to be a subscriber to sign up but expect brutal wait lines. If there's anyone who knows any other place than fileplanet to get the install from I would be glad to give it a shot.

I got in to the Euro beta but I had to get it from file planet.

Installed this morning but keeps erroring after an initial small patch and launcher restart - not sure if the servers are currently down or something....

yay!
I can finally check it out. I made a bard on Boldrei only to realise I don't remember jack shit about DnD. I'm taking my player book to work today  :-P

Don't care anymore.

Geez, you're grumpy.

Well, yes, I am, but that's not what I meant.

There's enough data coming out of the non-european testing to convince me that I'm not interested.  Had they decided to do concurrent tests and not treat us like lepers, they may have hooked me early.

It just doesn't sound like D&D by any stretch of the imagination.  I already have WoW.  No thanks.

DDO and WoW share nearly nothing in common in terms of possible variations on a flavor. Both are icecream, one of them is plain vanilla and the other is pistachio. A lot of people like plain vanilla. It's the most popular flavor in the world. A good number of people like pistachio, but even they get bored of pistachio sometimes and more often than not, they probably replace it with vanilla. Point being, it's different from WoW (and unfortunately it's D&D to the T, so much so that it almost drove me back to playing P&P games). I think, unfortunately, that the setting is the weakest link. After they work out the kinks I probably could have enjoyed it a good deal. Unfortunately it's just Not There Yet. Also, it's more brown than the Peat Bog in EQ2 - if that's possible.

Um.  So what ?

I have enough fantasy online.  I don't want another that adds nothing.  Comparing it to flavours is silly.
Especially when someone is re-branding that vanilla flavour I used to like in my childhood with new 'soybean extract vanilla' that's just ass.

Mentioning WoW was not germane to my point.  But I should have known it would have drawn you.

;)

I don't have a lot of experience with D&D. Me and my friends gave it a go some years ago but since none of us had any experience with it whatsoever, we had troubles geting it going properly. A lot of rules got made up by us to fill in the gaps and it really felt like something was missing. Since I've been a hardcore gamer for a while now I've played BG, TOEE etc. With the lack of insight I judge DDO simply as a bad game. My guess at why people even dare to call it decent is the fact that they're into D&D, because as a game it's simply not good. To continue with the icecream metaphor, it's more like poo flavored icecream than pistachio in my opinion, even if it's very high quality poo flavored icecream.

DDO does bring something different to the medium, specifically the "twitchy" combat concept. It just isn't executed very well.

I'm in the European beta... that is, I played for a night and then remembered, that I haven't played WoW for almost 5 months (but still pay), so now I'm playing WoW again. Thanks to DDO.

I like the idea of twitchy combat, but not the way it's doen. I like D&D, but not 3.5. I like instancing, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I like the social possibilities of MMOGs, but not forced grouping. I'm not the typical levelwhore, but I do want some sort of price at the end of a nights gaming... and a +1 to some skill doesn't quite do it for me.
Nah, WoW isn't the be all end all of MMOGs, but it's still the most fun and casual friendly out there, so that's where I'll be.

The mandatory grouping and the "all or nothing" aspect of questing (i.e. if you die you have to start the quest over from the beginning) are what killed the game for me. The game also lacks a lot of polish both technically and creatively and could stand to stay in development for another 3 months or so but that's obviously not going to happen.

You have to wonder what Turbine's fate will be.  AC's long in the tooth, AC2 is dead, DDO is getting a passionately apathetic response...

I hope they aren't staking LoTRO's fate on returns from DDO. 

I do, the sooner another stupid MMO that is misusing established IP that everyone's else's vanilla fantasy MMO borrows heavily from already dies the better.

Lets set it during the time of the books, then not allow pvp!

Fucking genius there.

*note*  I haven't done any reading on LotR this information was true, or sounded true when we were first hearing about the game.  Sorry if things have sense changed, but I stand by the sentiment of this post.

Speaking as an obviously huge Tolkien fanboy, I think a Middle Earth MMO is a terrible terrible idea.

Whats the worst that could happen?

Oh right, SWG.

When you put it like that I start hoping it does see the light of day.   :evil:

I'm thinking SWG minus the crafting and blasters.  And housing.  Just a shitty fantasy MMO with a few theme park NPCs strewn randomly about.

I think it'd be possible to do a good Middle Earth game, but that game wouldn't be based on the LotR storyline and it wouldn't be a MMOG.

Unless you count Boromir trying to get the ring, there wasn't any PvP in the books.

:)

I think he's assuming they'd make orcs a playable race a la WoW.  Because nothing says fun like being Orc #13,784 acting as cannon fodder for the Eye.

There was PVP in the book or rather in a true conversion of the game world, if the option to play evil aligned characters was allowed, then there it would make perfect sense to allow PVP.

Currently MEO (LoTRO) looks like it's a onion layer instance thingy with more solo options than DDO, no pvp, no evil races, set in the time period up to the fellowship leaving Rivendell.  

I would try and create a thread on the recent developments in MEO but the information flow is glacial and the forum posters are possibly the worst I have seen anywhere, that's including the Dawn forums.  One of the latest hot topics there is that pipeweed absolutely must make it in to the game (http://forums.lotro.turbine.com/showthread.php?t=44267) but they have not raised much of a fuss about characters apparently not being able to sit down in a chair, which sounds surprisingly like DDO to me.

Besides, anyone who tries to create a mmorpg in middle earth during Frodo's little jaunt is clearly an idiot.  ICE had a far better idea with their MERP setting being around the time of an extensive plague in 1640 (I forget exactly) of the third age.  Hobbits can go places and lots of interesting stuff (Fall of Arnor etc) is going on that allows freedom of design, the complicated lack of magic issue's with the later book period are mostly avoided, all without all the well known bits getting in the way.

Edit I should warn people not to read the pipeweed thread unprepared, there's 14 pages of high quality stupid there, don't get caught unwares by the posters with over 16,000 forum posts about a game that probably won't hit beta for another year.

I think a blood vessel just burst in my brain.

SWG had chairs you could sit in at launch.  The last time I checked, they still did not work right, and people would keep sliding out of them so as to be sitting in midair.

Really, if it's THAT hard to do right, I'd just as soon developers not waste the manpower on it.   :-P  Maybe someday someone will perfect the Universal Sitting Algorithm that will make the entire problem trivial.

WoW has chairs you can sit in all over, and they work fine.  Too bad they weren't able to figure out and improve on Dawn's negative ping code.  They stole and improved on every other MMO's features. They even incorporated stuff from Horizons, for crying out loud(setting up crafting to 'make as many as I have parts for', etc.  EQ1 added it after Horizons came out too.)

Alkiera

Turbine already released something with twitchy combat in it. That product is called Asheron's Call 1.
runcasting and other animation breaking techniques were used by players to "twitch".

d

Ok, how about something people will actually hear of, instead of a useless nipple on Microsoft's aborted strategy to enter the MMOG market? Asheron's Call was hardly the best marketed game, even when it only had 2 other competitors. At least with DDO, there's name recognition.

But the twitch still isn't executed very well.

Well I still can't get in

Between the error I did managed to get it to patch (which makes me think its _not_ a problem at my end) but I've yet to actually get logged in

Rather predictably the replies to my forum post on the subject are full of people who didnt read the original post and people asking for my beta key since I'm unable to use it

I'm noticing a trend in beta's recently where (in the latter more open stages) no of the devs/support staff seem to be interested in looking into problems on the assumption that, since other people are playing ok, it absolutely _must_ be a problem with the users system (and not something they need to look at like, oh I dont know, XP64 support..........)