Apr 30 2006
There are few institutions in gaming like Dungeons & Dragons. From humble beginnings as a pen-and-paper RPG, D&D has proven to be one of gaming's most enduring franchises. There was a time when you simply couldn't get your geek papers without playing it. Not only has it been directly adapted into countless video games, but it could be considered the mother of all RPGs, so it's not surprising that a MMORPG based on this dearly loved classic has raised a lot of interest.
Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) stays acceptably close to D&D 3.5 rules for a real-time game. D&D fans will be in familiar territory, but even if you're new to RPGs it's not difficult to adapt to, and the community is usually helpful. The DM has been replaced with bits of audible "DM text" and the computer handles all the dice, so the pace of gameplay is brisk.
Technology
The graphics in the game are excellent and they've managed to capture the essense of D&D in a believeable way. We've come to expect these games to look terrific, and DDO lives up to this expectation with a complete array of visual bells and whistles.
The engine allows your character to jump, fall, and climb, giving you more freedom of movement than some games of this kind.
Because of the instancing system and the fact that Stormreach is itself broken into numerous zones, loading screens are a way of life. During quests the game runs smoothly, but running across city zones can still cause extreme lag and irritating crashes to the desktop.
Despite the heavy use of instancing, players are spread over more than a dozen separate servers. I was sort of expecting a more unified system like that of Guild Wars, where no server selection is required.
DDO includes integrated voice chat, which seems destined to become a standard feature in online games. Voice chat always presents some problems, but this version seems to disagree with about half of the microphones on the market, and has poor sound compared to Teamspeak, Ventrillo, or any number of other games with voice chat. It works, but there is room for improvement.
You might also find that teenagers burping into the mic doesn't necessarily enchance the roleplaying experience, and very few players are willing communicate by keyboard when voice is an option. Refusing to use it will inevitably make finding groups a little more difficult.
Living Constructs
They've used the city of Stormreach from the Eberron campaign as a setting. Subsequently, there is a playable race called Warforged that are a combination of machine and magic, which is something a lot of people don't expect to find in a D&D game. They are a central part of campaign's lore, and while they are a bit peculiar, many games have far stranger playable races.
The current level cap is 10. These are broken into 5 ranks each to bring progress more into line with what people expect from a MMORPG, and I suspect that the cap will be bumped up to 20 in conjunction with future content releases.
The Instance Factor
As I mentioned in my beta impressions, there are no large persistent areas in DDO. Taverns and city zones serve as meeting areas, from which parties of up to 6, or raids of up to 12, depart on instanced dungeon crawls.
There are advantages to the heavy use of instancing. Different parties doing the same quest cannot interfere with each other, and there are no line-ups to kill boss monsters. Puzzles, traps, and dynamic environments can be offered that would be impossible for everyone to experience in a persistent world.
The downside to instanced content is that being in your own private copy of a zone is a long way from "massively multiplayer." Even though large-scale events in persistent worlds don't always go smoothly, they tend to be some of the most memorable occasions people have in these games. 12 player groups, even with busy taverns to congregate in, is much closer to Neverwinter Nights or Guild Wars (which don't describe themselves as MMORPGs) than it is to EverQuest or World of Warcraft.
To gain experience you must complete these instanced quests; you can't progress simply by sitting in one spot and grinding mobs. Apart from a few early dungeons, soloing is not a viable option in DDO, and there are no NPC henchmen for hire. The game does have a good search system that makes finding a group quite easy. I usually have a group within minutes of logging on, although it can get more difficult if you don't play during peak hours.
D&D was never meant to be played solo, and you have to wonder why people in a MMORPG would want to solo when there are plenty of single-player games available. The answer is that they don't want to solo all the time, they just want the option to solo between groups, or to experiment with new skills, and so on.
