Impressions of Dungeons and Dragons Online

[HaemishM]

Xilren's Twin gives us his take on the still-in-beta Dungeons and Dragons Online from Turbine Entertainment.

[Ironwood]

Sounds a little like what NWN should have been.

Interesting.

[tazelbain]

Hmm, catassers are going to unhappy.
No end game?  That didn't work out so well with CoH.

[stray]

I'm still scared to say anything, but some quick words:

[EDIT]

Not that scared then.

No, actually, I am. Forget what I said.

[Ironwood]

Not that scared then.

[Shockeye]

I wish they would've chosen Forgotten Realms as their first world instead of Stormreach. I don't know Stormreach, I don't care about Stormreach. Even Dragonlance I would've cared a bit more about.

[Merusk]

Xil, I'm going to PM you a bug I found in the first stress test but forgot to submit.  I wasn't in the 2nd one more than a few hours and forgot to test it then and resubmit. ><

Umm other than that, no comment at this time since I'll wander off the  page.   Oh.. except one thing. 

Damnit, use less brown. 32 Million colors and all I saw was 124 shades of brown!!

[WayAbvPar]

Less brown would be good for sure.

I have had fun the few times I have played it, but I worry about burnout. Ideally I would like to see some sort of pay per play pricing available- get all my friends together for a weekend of questing, then pick it up again in a month or 2. If we could pay $ or $5 to play for a weekend or something, it might be worth it to schedule a get together (just like PnP).

Combat is still too fast, but the recent slowing is a step in the right direction. Would still much rather see a turn-based strategic combat system ala ToEE (sans the crippling bugs, of course).

[Strazos]

This just further impresses upon me that I have to get this game to work.

[SuperPopTart]

Xilren this is an excellent article if I do say so myself.  I will say that this is the first game that has encouraged me and that I've let myself use WASD for and it's nice to actually have to utilize some form of thought while playing.

If this game works, and it stays decent I do believe I'll become a Turbine_FanGirl01 type player.

Nice article, said again.

[Hoax]

I'm going to stick to my guns and say I would not pay $15/mo for this game.  This sounds like what NWN should have been, if DDO had the module creation tools that NWN did I would consider paying but the idea that devs will be able to keep up with the content that players tear through is just plain silly.  There are plenty of logical counter arguments to this position I know, but really I'm not going to cave to allowing subscriptions to seep into other genres/mediums.  Also no pvp = who cares for me, so its not like they are loosing a customer or anything.

*seriously that to was there in my head*

[stray]

GAH!     

[Merusk]

 

But I don't disagree with Hoax about paying $15 per month.

[Murgos]

I've been in the beta for about a month now but have yet to find time to even install the game or register for the boards.  Damn you life!!!

Friday will probably be a good day for me to check it out.

[HaemishM]

I'll say a few things. If you are in the beta and have not tried it, you should. If for no other reason than to determine how engrained the MMOG Way to play games has become. You feel it in your very fingers when you start to play this game because it simply WILL NOT bend to that way of playing. Hardcore, catass MMOG'ers aren't going to get pissy about the "lack of content" because they'll have a conniption fit at the mechanics. It's subtle, but it's just that alien to them.

Also, I SUCK at this combat. I suck hard. It is quite possible to suck balls at this combat system, and I do. Copious amounts of balls. See above paragraph.

[Merusk]

Yeah takes a bit of a mindset shift to remember 'oh right, I should be blocking/ dodging beacause this guy will WTFPWN me in just a few hits.'

Also, lest my previous comment be seen as an implication that I hate the game, I don't.  I'd rather see a model like Way was pining for, which is the exact model D&D has always been based around.  Buy an 'adventure' and run through it with your friends (or online PUGs if you are so brave).

 It's not a world, it's a game, and it IS D&D. (Which also will give the MMO Achievers shitfits because of the lack of uber item inflation.)

[Strazos]

Well good - fuck those catasses in the face.

[Swede]

Dunno whats covered by the NDA and what's not in regards to this - but I'll chime in my 2 cents..

It's fun to see a "fresh" pve skillbased system - but its also the biggest flaw - computers really dont have anything to put up versus real players if you wanna keep it fair....

[Bunk]

Well, it sounds like the type of game I can get together with friends on a planned night and run some online quests in. I like that idea. Games like WoW are great, but you always end up with people getting left way behind on the curve. This sounds more like something I can make a point of only playing casually.

[Paelos]

I like new things. This sounds like it has some of what I like.

Good writeup so far, and I'll keep an eye on this now.

[Margalis]

Well, it sounds like the type of game I can get together with friends on a planned night and run some online quests in. I like that idea. Games like WoW are great, but you always end up with people getting left way behind on the curve. This sounds more like something I can make a point of only playing casually.

Yep.

I can only play games like Phantasy Star Online or Resident Evil Online. Anything more persitent and what happens? I log on after a week of absence to find all my friends are now 15 levels above me or will take 45 minutes of travel to even meet up with me. I really need a game where I can log in, run one mission, and log out.

So it sounds pretty good to me. The endgame? Roll a new class or unsubscribe. To me that's the endgame of every MMORPG anyway.

[Strazos]

From the sound of it, this might be worth getting at launch, especially if I can get people to play with.

[Velorath]

I wasn't really interested in DDO to begin with, just on the basis of it being yet another fantasy MMO.  I like what I'm hearing here though and I see they're offering some of the now typical extras with pre-order (10 day beta pass, +1 AC item, head start) so I'll probably be caving in.

[Arthur_Parker]

http://www.ddo.com is referring to f13 as one of their "fansites", no less than 3 times on one page.  :-D

[Ironwood]

Er....


Hang on, does that makes us fanbois ?

[schild]

http://www.ddo.com is referring to f13 as one of their "fansites", no less than 3 times on one page.  :-D

AND we're listed under those gold selling money grubbing cockknobbling AIDS SPREADING ogaming people. Oh, and Warcry. As in Joe's turf. As in Themis' turf. As in a PR group.

Yes, that page could have been more thought out.

[stray]

http://www.ddo.com is referring to f13 as one of their "fansites", no less than 3 times on one page.  :-D

Pretty pointless of me to say anything after this point then, NDA or not. I wanted to burn ideas into everyone's minds before they played....But now that they gone and decided for themselves, my knowledge is right back to where it started: Useless. Wtf.

[schild]

I'm a wee bit pissy.

Edit: Motherfuck! Does that actually say "Character customization in DDO is fun. My human female came complete with 30 different hairstyle choices?" Someone tell me I'm on drugs. Please. Someone. Anyone. Oh well, at least our sentence was the longest. Or something. Sigh.

[Arthur_Parker]

DDO NDA is meant to go soon.  Glad about that, I wouldn't want anyone to think that the NDA is still in place purely to ensure only positive "Turbine approved" reviews make it into the public domain. 

That sure would be clever marketing though, I mean if anyone ever decided to do that.

[Mesozoic]

Can anyone talk about how (or even if) an alignment system was implemented?  I was really hoping for the robust D&D alignment system, but someone indicated that it had been dumbed down to the old Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic scheme. 

I second the opinion that without large common areas, crafting, an economy, or pvp, its hard to imagine paying a monthly fee for this.  What exactly do you get for the fee?  Unless the actual implementation of combat and / or the dungeon / quests are a generation ahead of all other offerings, I don't see the draw. 

[Comstar]

For my monthly fee, I expect Fun.


From the article, I expect I shall have it.


So, where do I preorder the game from, and what server you guys going to be on? :D

[SuperPopTart]

Ha! Good luck getting everyone on one server. *Dreads this*

[Nevermore]

Ha! Good luck getting everyone on one server. *Dreads this*

Are the servers set up like a 'traditional' MMOG, ie: DAoC, WoW, CoH static servers?  Or more like PSO, GW universal lobbies to get groups together to do the instances?

[El Gallo]

D&D seems like an odd choice for a twitch-based game.  I mean, D&D itself was the epitome of "numbers vs numbers" combat.  I could see the combat system you describes as being fun, but I can't really see it feeling like D&D.

I haven't played D&D since 1.0, maybe the very beginning of 2.0.  But I read up on the 3.0-3.5 rules for NWN (and because I am a GIANT NERD).  The character building in modern D&D speaks loudly to the min-maxing-rules-lawyer-munchkin-whore deep in my soul.  Some of the threads I have seen about character builds are obscene (as in, resulting in extremely powerful characters that are also very un-intuitive).  Which leads me to this question: is there some way to re-spec in this game?  It seems very easy to gimp yourself, even by making ostensibly sensible choices.  And when the time comes to add high-level dungeons, you know deep down that Turbine will balance them around mim-maxers with +20 to hit rather than Joe Sixpack with +10.

I take it Clerics are still obscenely overpowered?

Are the social skills important?

When you say there are no tools for an economy, do you mean there is nothing like an auction house/bazaar, or do you mean that most gear is bind-on-pickup?

How does the loot feel?  Monty Haul-ish?

I echo the above re: FR, but I'd rather see Greyhawk.  Is there a good link somewhere for background on Eberron?  You can play a golem?  Hrmmm.

I am also dubious about paying a monthly fee for a Diablo/GuildWars-type game.  Especially with NWN2 supposedly coming out soon (anyone have any info on that?).

Then again, I know that I will buy and play this game for at least a while, because I do that with almost all of em :)

[HaemishM]

I don't think it's going to have "servers" as such. It'll be more like GW/CoH where the common areas all have multiple instances depending on how many people are online, and you can quickly switch to another instance of the common area like you do in GW, by a pulldown menu.

I don't think there is any gear that is bind on pickup or any of that stupid shit. But I don't know, I haven't really gotten any good gear. I know the starter gear can't be sold to vendors.

No respecs that I know of, but I haven't gotten very high. You pick your alignment, not sure what effect it has. See the "not gotten very high" comment.

Some of the articles that are linked from the same page we are on sound like they were written by gay pre-pubescent monkeys given typewriters and mice. I'm even more proud of Xilren's article now; he was able to make good coherent sentences that didn't sound like Hello Kitty lovegrams, and he actually talked about the game outside the tutorial.

I'm glad for the linkage and all, but we don't belong on a page called "Fansites" and we sure as fuck don't belong in the same page as people who talk about swinging at the air and magic missle at the darkness. Call me a snob, but there's some shitty writing on that page.