Jul 9
I’m Sorry Turbine
Last week Cameron got to talking about Dungeons and Dragons Online, and it made me a little misty-eyed.
DDO … is all about the dungeon crawl with friends. It can be summed up as follows: kill monsters, disarm traps, break stuff, and loot chests … I find the combat in DDO much more satisfying than in NWN2. It also captures the “adventure with your friends†aspects of D&D much more convincingly than NWN does, in my opinion. It mimics the tabletop version much better in this respect. My biggest complaint about DDO so far is that the fun is directly proportional to how many people you can get playing in your group. Solo play is alright, but gets old fast (and only certain classes can do it well). Duoing is lots of fun, but you’re still pretty limited depending on the classes. Either monsters will be tough or traps will be tough. Once you get up to 3-4 people it starts getting really fun because you have such a wide variety of skills to draw on and can tackle the hard mission setting … As always, and especially in DDO, grouping with your friends is far more fun than grouping with strangers. I still intend to do a full write-up of my impressions on it eventually and detail what I like and don’t, but I want to play out the trial first, at least.
Y’see, lo these many months ago, the party of adventurers that have now taken their characters all the way to just-shy-of-level-40 in EverQuest 2 were going to tackle Xendrick in Turbine’s DDO. We made characters, and Katie and I logged in to begin our first night of adventuring with Brian. I was going to do Cleric, Katie was going to be our Fighter, and Brian was slated to be a Wizard.
We never even made it to the tutorial rooms on the docks.
Brian’s computer kept crashing, over, and over, and over again. We were really looking forward to DDO, because the idea behind the MMOG-play in the first place was that it would partially take the place of the weekly D&D game we’d been playing with Brian for quite some time. But the DDO client just refused to work on Brian’s system. He’s a system administrator for a living, so when I tell you that he troubleshot the crap out of his system, I mean it. Cards were reseated, drivers reinstalled, FAQs consulted, support systems referenced … but still Eberron refused to play well with Brian’s machine.
He never did get it working, and our interest in playing together before the idea died led us to Norrath. Katie and Brian got EQ2 core installs on the cheap, Brian’s friend John joined us, and off we went.
Brian and Katie accuse me of having MMOADD, and it’s posts like Cameron’s that make that thing in my head go off. As much fun as I’ve had in EQ2, a part of me really wishes we’d been able to give Turbine’s under-appreciated D&D title a proper go. I still wish those folks a lot of success. Here’s hoping they’ve found their niche.
All the same: Sorry we never got to be friends, Turbine. I think it would have been cool.
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Well if you can spare a month, that is about all it will take to experience DDO’s content. It is highly suggested you play it with new players, as the veterans will just ruin the experience for you by standing at every trap, secret door, etc. demanding you move faster.
I don’t see how Cameron can say DDO is better than NWN. NWN2 is pretty ratty for online play, but it still has better tools for PC D&D than DDO. Honestly, D&D 3.5 just doesn’t gel with video games; especially multi-player online games.
I’ve been called out on that a few times, actually. Most people seem to disagree with me when I say that I think DDO’s system is more fun than NWN’s system. Hrrm. I’ve retyped this paragraph a few times and it keeps getting really lengthy, so I think I’ll just take it back to my blog and explain why I prefer DDO to NWN for group play.
I am playing it with new players, so yes, we’re going through the content slowly in our pre-defined group. I’ve been playing it casually (well, not-so-casually, actually) for 10 days with no sign of slowing down. I do agree that playing with strangers ruins a lot of the mystique. My brother will be rolling a rogue with high trap skills, and we absolutely don’t want someone telling us where the traps or secret doors are. I love when it’s my 3rd or 4th time running a mission and a find a new side quest or a new secret door on my ranger.
Anyway, I had no problems getting it to run. Installed, and I was up. Sorry, Michael. I highly recommend giving it another try sometime. The 10-day trial doesn’t cost you anything but time, and in the worst case scenario you’ll get bored and uninstall it. :)
Dungeons & Dragons Online was the best game created to date if you
A. Love less button mashing and more strategy.
B. Got in a group with all newbies to that instance.
C. Could overlook that serious lack of content at release
D. Had a decent connection to use the in game voice chat system.
While there are many more things they ‘could or should’ have done with that title and license, can’t we say the same about most games in the genre. DDO while not my first nor my last, did leave me with some great moments in MMO enjoyment.
I remember going in to an instance in the Docks ward that was a level 3 instance, We had a level 3 Fighter, a level 2 Ranger and myself and level 2 Bard (non healing spelled). We made it through with out a single death, or anyone having to leave the instance and come back in after healing up. We just made it through by the slimmest of margins in health and power, but we did make it alive and safely to the end. It probably took us twice a log as other groups, but it was much more enjoyable to take on such a instance and come out alive.