NDA is up. This board goes public.

[Venkman]

DDO could do for non-playing fans of DnD what MTG:O did for non-playing MTG:TCG fans. It's not an MMO in my opinion. It's not a glorified NWN mod either, nor is it Guild Wars. Rather, it's a game about linear storylines with an interesting combat system that has no built-in repeatability. It could take you months to play the game once, but once it is playable unless you truly love seeing the exact same thing from a different point of view.

That's the contradiction. Raiding works because people love their foozles enough to overcome the boredom of sameness. Yet raiding is not built into DDO. Every character you make goes through the same content unless you found the magic formula to let you bypass certain quest instances. As a result, unless the content doubles or triples in three to four months after launch, players who hit 10 will reroll as they normally do and find themselves in the exact same sequence doing the exact same thing.

This is why I don't consider it MMO. There's no longterm relationship set up with players at the core of the mechanic. Yes, new content will keep them interested, as will the occasional live event in the persistent spaces. But knowing the pace at which players will "beat" the game, I do not feel there's enough intrinsic repeatability to keep them interested between the release of that new content. Even AC1 didn't introduce an entire month's worth of content every month. They were more like spikes of newness throughout an otherwise typically-MMO experience that DDO does not have.

I want it to be successful. The truly creative quests made possible by the use of destructible objects gives a slightly HL2 experinece. The combat system is much better than just throwing stats around. And Turbine is a company I like. I just have my reservations about the potential, which, oddly, have remained largely consistent since the first I read about the title.

[Llava]

DDO could do for non-playing fans of DnD what MTG:O did for non-playing MTG:TCG fans.

Sounds like I'm probably going to end up buying it anyways, then.  Since I like D&D (and most of the World of Darkness White Wolf stuff, for that matter) but never, ever get to play.  I've played like 2 or 3 times and they were all awful.  Watching that "If there are any chicks in the tavern I wanna doooo them!" thing is just so frightfully familiar.

But I dunno.  A major part of the appeal of D&D is its inherent flexibility, which is removed in this medium because we haven't yet figured out how to program infinite content/fluff.

[Margalis]

Wait, I'm confused. The problem is D&DO is the same thing over and over again and other MMORPGs are not?

Raiding works because people love their foozles enough to overcome the boredom of sameness. Yet raiding is not built into DDO. Every character you make goes through the same content unless you found the magic formula to let you bypass certain quest instances.

Every character in a MMORPG goes through the same content as well unless you are talking about switching Queynos/Freeport or Horde/Alliance or something like that. I mean, you roll an Orc Warrior you are going to be collecting 50 tiger hides the same as if you were a Troll Shaman.

DDO could easily add "raid content." A quest that is really long, gives good loot, and can only be done once a week. That's all a raid is.

DDO is weird - I'll probably write a real writeup about it. I'm ambivalent in the real sense - of two minds.

But both minds agree that February is too early to release.

[HaemishM]

My most concise thoughts about DDO:

I want to like it, but I am frustrated to apathy about it.

You cannot solo early, unless you are a barbarian.

The combat system is great in theory, and not too bad in practice. It feels a little clunky at times, but I think that's mostly related to the really rough UI (which I hope has changed since I last played).

This game is not ready for a end of February release. For a number of reasons, but the most obvious being balance and content.

There is not going to be enough content for this game at release, 1 month after release or 6 months after release. One year after release, it will have enough content to maybe be "worth it." If they had 6 more months of beta/development time, it would equal the same thing.

Music is good.

Graphics engine is good, graphic style, not so much. It's ok, but nothing that stands out.

Repeating quests in a game that is supposedly based on hand-crafted, player-oriented design is fundamentally wrong. It shouldn't be an option, much less thought to be required in order to level. But the farming, min-maxing retards must be catered to.

[Samwise]

You cannot solo early, unless you are a barbarian.

I'd just like to comment, before Haemish twists everyone's mind with his propaganda, that I've tried six different classes (rogue, ranger, fighter, barbarian, wizard, bard) and with each and every one of them I've been able to solo all the way to level 2.  Generally without dying even once.  And the very first class I tried (and still my favorite to date) is rogue. 

But then I have leeter skillz than most.   

[HaemishM]

You cannot solo early, unless you are a barbarian.

I'd just like to comment, before Haemish twists everyone's mind with his propaganda, that I've tried six different classes (rogue, ranger, fighter, barbarian, wizard, bard) and with each and every one of them I've been able to solo all the way to level 2.  Generally without dying even once.  And the very first class I tried (and still my favorite to date) is rogue. 

But then I have leeter skillz than most.   

You are not normal. Average gamers like myself will be gimped to fuck and back.

[Samwise]

So really, the statement should be "you cannot solo early, unless you are a barbarian and/or have better hand eye coordination and/or spatial awareness than the average MMOG player".   

[HaemishM]

No, that's not it. Really, it isn't. Before the 3.5 changes, I could solo with the almost exact same rogue. Something changed, something I've never quite been able to grok. The slower combat actually made it harder to hit with that character. Since I'm not a munchkin number cruncher, I never did much in the way of scientific tests to figure out why. That's not my job, it's the job of someone at Turbine in charge of balance. I can only give experiential evidence.

Basically, my experience went from an interesting game to a frustrating one, and I couldn't figure out why. Switching character classes just bummed me out, because the difference was night and day. I had also burned out on the newbie content; I felt the anti-desire to go back through quests I'd already finished or attempted twice. I am very much a once or twice content kind of guy; anymore attempts to make me consume the same content gives me gas.

Since the average MMOG player appears eager to consume the same content eleventy billion times until their eyes bleed, they may be ok in the content aspect. But I don't think so.

[Samwise]

Har, you said "grok".

I dunno what the 3.5 changes might have been, but I'm almost certain that they didn't change the to-hit chances for the various classes.  They did scale up some of the quests around then, though, in horribly broken ways (Miller's Debt, Osgood's Basement, and the Lighthouse come to mind), which would definitely break the newbie soloing experience if those were the quests you happened to hit first.  I just ended up avoiding them after they were changed.

I am also not a fan of repeating content, but I'm hoping they make good on their promise to crank out a bunch more after release (and I do buy their explanation of putting all their resources into core gameplay pre-release so that content generation post-release will go faster).  If they don't, I'll unsub and maybe come back in a year.

[JoeTF]

I have read somewhere, that combat system is retarded, because attack spaming&bunnyhopping is way more effective than bothierning about shield. And because shield is useless against multiple enemies, it suck.(...) You can play with blocking, but spammage will get you next lv 5 times faster. Or something like that.
Can you test if that still hold true?

[Samwise]

The latest patch imposes a -4 attack penalty for attacks made while moving, which is gonna cut down a lot on circle strafing.  I'm not sure yet how I feel about that, as I kinda liked the circle strafing.

"Bunnyhopping" was never a viable method of fighting since you can't attack in midair, which is usually what bunny hopping implies.  And I don't even know what that retard meant by "attack spamming".

My guess is he was just annoyed that pushing the Auto-Attack button and going to make himself a sandwich wasn't as viable a strategy as he had hoped.

[Margalis]

My impression of combat is that it's basically the same as any other MMORPG game except that you have to move around to keep enemies in front of you.

True, the mechanics are different like rolling, using shield, etc, but while it kind of LOOKS like an action game combat system it really isn't.

For the most part you stand there and click attack as fast as you can, while moving sometimes to keep enemies in front of you. Shield is pretty hard to use effectively, so is rolling, and circle strafing is being nerfed, which is good because circle-strafing is a retarded non-strategy.

What the combat really needs is to feel more like an action game rather than look like one. In theory you can attack, see your enemy winding up and block, but in reality the recovery on your attack is so slow and the enemy attacks so non-descript it's hard to really do that. Also the feel is wrong, the length of your weapon doesn't seem to match how far you can hit, etc.

What they should have done was made it like PSO combat but with blocking and with misses based on die rolls.

[Samwise]

Clicking attack as fast as you can is a less than optimal strategy if you're moving in and out of threat ranges, since then you lose the ability to time your attacks, and you only get an attack every few seconds at most anyway.

The next time I roll up a rogue or similar dex-monkey character I'm going to see if rolling is more effective than it used to be, since by rolling you can circle-strafe an enemy (and get a nice AC bonus as you do) but still be standing still as you attack.  I had the tumbling circle-strafe pretty well down before I discovered that doing the same thing running worked just as well and was much easier.  Now that attacking while running imposes a to-hit penalty, though, tumbling might actually be advantageous.

[Margalis]

I never found that moving in and out of range really worked very well.

[Samwise]

Depends on what you're fighting.  For relatively slow things like zombies it works GREAT because you can sometimes take a swing and then get out of their reach before they can swing back.  If you're just spamming the attack button while you do that, half your swings end up hitting air.  It also works on bad guys that have big windup times, like elementals and minotaurs and so forth (the types of things that hit you really hard when they connect).  Kobolds, not so much.

[Margalis]

I never got far enough to fight any of those enemies other than Zombies.

[HaemishM]

I'd rather see them emulate Jade Empire's combat system if they were going to go for an Action RPG feel. The timing of special attacks in DDO always felt so drawn out.

[Strazos]

I'm not even sure I didn't anything "wrong" with my rogue and it seems impossible to solo....but then, I'm going with weapon finesse, which I need level 2 for.


Having to "level" 5 times just to hit you next "real level" just feels dumb.


I also don't get the whole hate on Eberron. I've only experienced FR, and never seen Greyhawk. I personally couldn't care less which "universe" the game takes place in. If you have a good game, I don't think it would matter.

Unfortunately, this feels a bit meh, when I wanted to love it.

[5150]

Yes, most older D&D Players prefer Greyhawk and ones slightly younger than them prefer Forgotten Realms.

Is it too late for me to vote for Dragonlance? 

[Merusk]

Yes, most older D&D Players prefer Greyhawk and ones slightly younger than them prefer Forgotten Realms.

Is it too late for me to vote for Dragonlance? 

Only women like Dragonlance..unless you're referring to the books.  In which case I'll revise it to, women and 13 year-old boys. 

To be honest, I left DL, Raven-whatsit Spelljammer and Planescape off because it seems like they never really took off.  When you talk to folks about D&D they make references to FR or GH 9/10 times with that last 1/10 divided among the rest. Again, unless you're talking about books.

[Shockeye]

I wouldn't mind Dragonlance.

[schild]

Dragonlance at the very least had a fully realized world. Eberron, Forgotten Realms, etc are great places for campaigns but terrible places for games and books. They're just placeholder medieval fantasy lands. My world for a company to buy up the Planescape License and have a world that answers questions for itself like - "why's everything instanced" and "what's with this lack of continuity" and "why does one place have dinosaurs while the other place is a Lovecraft ripoff" and "why is this game fun?"

[Samwise]

Upside of a Planescape license would be extremely varied monsters and environments and so forth.  Downside is that all that variation means a lot more development time.

[Samwise]

I'm not even sure I didn't anything "wrong" with my rogue and it seems impossible to solo....but then, I'm going with weapon finesse, which I need level 2 for.

Hm... I went the "swashbuckler" route with my rogue too (high dex, Dodge at 1st level, Weapon Finesse at 3rd), and I did okay.  I'm wondering if they changed something between now and then, since that was before the last wipe.  I'm tempted to roll up a 1st level rogue, solo as much as possible (maybe even exclusively) on my way to 2nd level, and post a journal of my experiences.

[HaemishM]

They did change something between the last wipe and this one. I could solo with my rogue before the last wipe and he was almost the same character.

[sarius]

Dragonlance at the very least had a fully realized world. Eberron, Forgotten Realms, etc are great places for campaigns but terrible places for games and books. They're just placeholder medieval fantasy lands. My world for a company to buy up the Planescape License and have a world that answers questions for itself like - "why's everything instanced" and "what's with this lack of continuity" and "why does one place have dinosaurs while the other place is a Lovecraft ripoff" and "why is this game fun?"

Funny thing is that from a registered DM's perspective, early Planescape, and even after the boxed sets came out, seemed like nothing more than a means for min/max folks to level their characters to return as mini-dieties within the campaigns I helped coordinate.  However!!!  In a MMO setting, they're the perfect way to keep folks always on the path to new content in settings that pretty much require massive groups at some point to take on the heavy hitters.  The myriad of instancing possible in a Planescape setting would draw me to pay $15 a month much more than the current DDO makeup.  As it is, I'd do it for one month with my regular group until every got inevitably bored and moved onto the next shiny.

You should front this.

[Margalis]

DDO could use some variation desperately.

[Samwise]

Planescape could actually be a really cool expansion to DDO, either to add higher level content (11-20) or just to provide some variety to the existing game.  It'd integrate really nicely; no reason they couldn't "discover" a few portals to Sigil right in Stormreach.

[Hoax]

DDO could use some variation desperately.

That is the immpression I got as well, and it really surprised me.  If anything I was expecting the combat to suck and the visuals, stories and "zones" for lack of a better word to be cool works of art.  I haven't gotten that immpression at all from what I've seen.  Too bad really.

[Cuular]

I went with a dual class ranger/rogue, took ranger first with favored enemy reptilian, ended up with a composite longbow of reptilian bane.
I added in rogue as the 2nd level, already had good hiding/sneak/spot/listen from the elf, so I dumped points into disarm traps and and some more hide/sneak.

And it made a very soloable toon.  The hiding/sneak was very useful in finishing a lot of dungeons that I couldn't solo with a fighter type do to the many numbers of things that I had to try and beat.  Being a ranger with all the bonuses to ranged combat, and reptiles as the favored enemy helped.  Being able to 1 or 2 shot the kobolds from range, helps.  Being able to take down a mob of three of them with only having one of them reach you with less then half health helps.

I played a straight out rogue who was rough, until he hit 3rd.  The above mentioned dual class ranger/rogue. A barbarian who pretty much just pummeled anything in his way.  A cleric that was  pro-turn undead.  A sorcerer, that I never got far, because in the beginning they were so gimped until they got redone in the past 4-5 patches.

Other than the Sorcerer they were all pretty much soloable, just in different ways.  The ranger/rogue combo was the easiest.  I use him as a parlour trick for my group of friends, when they are having a hard time with a mission I pull him out and we just kind of breeze through it.

I've stopped playing for now and am waiting for the release, so the newbie dungeons have a chance to drift out of the "I know them like the back of my hand" spot.  Having snuck both a rogue and a ranger/rogue through them.  You get a good memorization of all the little nooks and cranny's to go hide in and wait for things to wander by, before you pop out and get them, or continue on the way without molesting them.

[Morfiend]

Dragonlance at the very least had a fully realized world. Eberron, Forgotten Realms, etc are great places for campaigns but terrible places for games and books. They're just placeholder medieval fantasy lands. My world for a company to buy up the Planescape License and have a world that answers questions for itself like - "why's everything instanced" and "what's with this lack of continuity" and "why does one place have dinosaurs while the other place is a Lovecraft ripoff" and "why is this game fun?"

I would give my left foot for an aswome planescape mmog. The world is perfict. *drools*

[jpark]

DDO could do for non-playing fans of DnD what MTG:O did for non-playing MTG:TCG fans.

But I dunno.  A major part of the appeal of D&D is its inherent flexibility, which is removed in this medium because we haven't yet figured out how to program infinite content/fluff.

Agreed.  It is hard to imagine DnD with that absent.

[jpark]

You cannot solo early, unless you are a barbarian.

I'd just like to comment, before Haemish twists everyone's mind with his propaganda, that I've tried six different classes (rogue, ranger, fighter, barbarian, wizard, bard) and with each and every one of them I've been able to solo all the way to level 2.  Generally without dying even once.  And the very first class I tried (and still my favorite to date) is rogue. 

But then I have leeter skillz than most.   

I have an odd feeling that regardless what class Heamish plays - he plays them the same way.  He probably tries to put a 2 handed something in the hands of every class he picks and charge into melee  :-D

You're a warrior type through and through Haemish - don't piss around pretending to "play" other classes 

[Samwise]

But I dunno.  A major part of the appeal of D&D is its inherent flexibility, which is removed in this medium because we haven't yet figured out how to program infinite content/fluff.

Agreed.  It is hard to imagine DnD with that absent.

It's pretty much like DnD with a DM who only runs store-bought dungeon crawl modules, knows all of the rules inside and out, but isn't at all flexible.  Some people (not me, but they do exist) prefer that sort of thing over more freeform campaigns.

I don't see DDO as an alternative to bona fide free-form PnP with a creative DM by any stretch.  I see it as an alternative to Diablo or EQ or WoW or what have you.  The main thing that the D&D license brings to the table is the game mechanics (d20 skill/combat system and D&D character classes), which I personally prefer over those in any RPG (PnP or otherwise) I've played to date.

[Margalis]

The bottom line here, to be frank, is that the game has some promise but in it's current state isn't very good and that isn't going to magically change come February. Anything else is just details.

At this point it's not any better than Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube.