In this article I will explain some issues I have with DDO. This isn’t an attempt to slam the game as I enjoy it and play fairly often. I’m just a grumpy git so this is kind of my reverse-review.

I tend not to play in big groups and rarely play with a full party unless it’s a raid, epic or I’m just in a good mood.
I preffer to run alone or with the girlfriend and friend in America. I actually like the challenge of using hirelings to do the dirty work while I try my best to stop them running into traps and the like. So this review will focus on more fundamental aspects of DDO.

StormReach

Dungeons & Dragons Online takes place in Northern Xen’drik with the main game area being the city of StormReach. “The Marketplace” leads to the separate “houses” where you will find the majority of available quests.

While the communal areas look stunning they are very small compared to nearly all other noteworthy MMOs, even Trubines’ own LOTRO.

You can argue that DDO is an instanced MMORPG and not a persistent world or that including the quests maps would make up for the main map being small, but I think it would be nice to have more than one city to explore and interact with other players.

Making the main city much bigger or creating a whole new city or similar area would, in my opinion, reduce lag and add a huge amount of value to the game.

I hope the aquisition of Turbine by Warner Brothers will allow for faster expansion of the explorable world as it’s one of the least developed areas in the game.

The Map

The mini-map in DDO is generally fine and works very well, however, it is next to useless in quests that are split over several floors or levels.
The map is 2D in every sense. If you go up or down a floor the map doesn’t change in any way to show the new floors accessible and inaccessible areas.

The quests in Dungeons & Dragons Online are created in such a way that means each floor runs partly, or completely, over the lower and upper floors. This doesn’t sound too bad, but after crossing the map to find a corridor blocked by crates or come to a dead end because your on the wrong level can get frustrating!

It has to be said that quests like “The Pit” or “The Coalescence Chamber” are a great example of how annoying this can be.

A possible fix could be a layered fog of war which changes on different levels. The current map system leaves a lot to be desired, so I don’t see any simple fix that wouldn’t have large overheads.

This is a small annoyance for some people but a total nightmare for others and I know it would take a lot of work to fix…. But I still hold out hope

DDO Store

Without the DDO Store there wouldn’t be a free-2-play Dungeons & Dragons Online game at all. Fact.
You can buy nearly any in game item through the DDO store and many that can’t be found in game.

Everyone likes being able to get out of a tight spot if the need arises, but some gamers seem to use the store as a first resort.
It seems great at first glance; “Woow, I can buy some SP pots so we don’t wipe”. In my experience, this kind of attitude is applied way too much.

This is a fairly small complaint but can become annoying at high levels when the players have more invested in the game.
God mode, easy button, insta-win, pay-to-win… There are many terms associated with the DDO store and not many are positive.

The simple solution is to remove some of the crap. What idiot buys +1 items when the drop out of any quest over level 2 or spends 1995 TP Heart of Wood?

What’s next? In game adverts?…. Fuck… You mean, the’re actually thinking about it?

I know it’s Turbine’s main source of income, but it feels insulting to have it forced in such a way.

Epic Difficulty

Epic difficulty is for characters at level 20 only.
It is designed to be a real challenge for maximum level toons, and it is.
Enemies won’t die nearly as often from insta-kill spells like Phantasmal Killer and Destruction, they have a lot more hit points and deal a lot more damage with attacks and spells. Traps on epic difficulty are a lot tougher to disable and deal a lot more damage. So far so good.

But that’s where I have a problem. Everything is exactly the same but with more hit points while dealing more damage.
It would be nice to see a bit of variety. Instead of only being able to use a shrine once, why not remove all but one set of shrines? Perhaps two bosses instead of one. Mob spawns in different locations…

It feels like they turned the enemies up to 11 added a few tokens and yet more collectables and said: “It’s finished. Enjoy!”

It isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great. It’s just more of what was there.
You will only struggle if your character is gimped or if you get an elitist party (which is fairly common on epic difficulty).

The past few updates have added better loot and tweaked epic quests a bit, which seems to be a move in the right direction so fingers crossed.

PvP

Player Vs. Player in Dungeons & Dragons Online consists of bar brawls. These can be one on one or in groups, but is a very limited section of the game and feels very tacked on and under developed.

I don’t actually play PvP much at all in DDO.
I love DarkFall Online, which is PvP centric, so why doesn’t DDO’s player vs. player interest me at all? Simple:

• No risk or reward.
• Greatly unbalanced.
• There is no variety in fighting style.

Fairly major drawbacks, huh? I thought so too!

Collectables

The amount of collectables in DDO is insane and not worth the effort.
There are currently about 153 items which are called “Collectable Items”. These can be turned in to various NPCs to get a random reward or used in item crafting but the effort really doesn’t seem worth it.

So, 153 collectable items plus quest related items, spell components, ingredients and gems. Some of these items even create other items. It quickly fills your bags with, mostly, useless crap.

The only use I have found for the collectables, so far, is with my Pale Master Wizard.

There are rumours that the whole system may be replaced with a similar system used during the Mabar Endless Night Festival. I would welcome this, but don’t think it will be implemented soon if at all.

Crafting

“Crafting” in DDO is one of my top annoyances.
The current crafting system, to me, seems completely against D&D’s ethos.
It essentially means repeatedly running “The Shroud” raid to collect items (yes, more collectables) which can be turned into a usable item, weapon or piece of armour.

There are other uses of “crafting” in DDO but the term is used in the loosest possible sense.
I would like to see a more realistic approach taken but a complete overhaul of the system doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.

Maybe it’s just me but combining Lammanian Lily Petals, Green Brier Twig and Glistening Pebbles to make GreenSteel Goggles seems a bit retarded.

Payment

Turbine’s store accepts credit cards and Paypal, both of which have their problems.
Firstly, it seems stupid that only one DDO account can be funded by one Paypal account. If you want to buy points for more than one account you will need to use another Paypal account or a credit card. Many people have several accounts.

Secondly, I decided to use a credit card for my girlfriends account…. And what a mistake that turned out to be!
Turbine tried to charge my card three times for one purchase. My bank suspected the transactions as fraudulent activity and I removed my card details as a result.

I know Turbine aren’t against multiple accounts, so why turn down business in such a way? Maybe it’s yet more evidence of a badly coded system.

Rant Over

Well, that’s it… Inane ramblings over with.
Feel free to comment. I care, even if Turbine doesn’t

However, there seems to be a curse on 3D RPGs. Some bad ones of note include Neverwinter Nights, Might and Magic, World of Warcraft etc. All have fallen well short of the mark set by earlier games.
I know their not all RPGs in the strict “D&D” sense. But they aim for the a similar attachment to characters and involved storyline and always seem to fall short of the mark.

This is where Guild Wars comes in!

It’s a very good leap from the older MMORPGs and, in my opinion, a much needed improvement over World Of Warcraft.

The designers of Guild Wars aimed for the mid range PC when creating the game, so it should run on most computers… With a little tweaking.

The game isn’t an internet hog and runs perfectly on my mobile phone / modem (115kb/s down – 6kb/s up!).

Guild Wars takes the traditional role of RPG’ing and gives it a little twist. If you are expecting high leveling for you character and endless amounts of “farming”, well, you have found the wrong game. Guild Wars caps at level 20, which is quite easy to get to. Within a week of casual game play, you will reach the full potential of your characters abilities.

Guild Wars characters come in all types: male and female, large and small, and in any of 36 combinations of the six professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, and Necromancer. You have over 150 unique skills per character, which sets your character apart from the other classes of characters.

You can create up to four heroes per unique Guild Wars account. New heroes can be deleted and created at any time.

If you like Player-versus-Player competition, Guild Wars is your game. In addition to building up a character by undergoing missions and quests, you can choose to create a character from the beginning that starts out PvP’ing. Although that character can never enter into normal missions or towns and can never get the weapons like a full played character, you will be able to jump straight into PvP’ing if you don’t like the grinding. The game is made to reward player skill and teamwork, not endless grinding, so you won’t need to spend tons of hours leveling up your character to compete.

The game includes integrated support for guilds, with the ability to create special guild emblems, to play for sigils which give you guild halls, and to keep in touch through in-game guild messaging like Asherons Call had. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder while in PvP’ing zones. These zones are only for PvP’ing, there is no PvP outside of these zones anywhere else. And since it is “Guild” Wars, you play PvP in groups, not alone. This game doesn’t have a one on one type of play to it like other rpg games. You get a choice of 8 skills to put in your gaming bar that defines what abilities your character will have. So two characters going head to head could possibly not be balanced even in the slightest. I really didn’t like this part of the game. I love the aspect of being able to play solo sometimes and not having to wait for 5 others to log on just to start a match. You can randomly pick others you don’t know and can even choose “henchmen” that are nothing more than bots that have ingame AI. But their AI goes only so far and in the end they are more a henderance sometimes more than help.

ArenaNet’s streaming technology eliminates the concept of patching a game. You no longer have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. But at the same time you don’t see this happening a lot unless there is something wrong.

This game is NO PAY TO PLAY. There are no monthly fees!!!

BUT, they don’t spend time creating new content. They have stated that they will use expansions for that. This is one of the reason that many are playing this game. No monthly fees. Areanet has also stated that if you don’t plan on getting expansion packs, you would be left behind as they introduce more content. Your PvP’ing experience will stay the same and you’ll still be equal to those that purchase the expansions.

Creating a character is pretty quick. You choose a gender, appearance, and character class, and you are done. The games character design is actually decent. You can chose hair, face and body designs. At this point you either choose a role playing character or a PvP only character.

On the role playing side of the game, you encounter many missions and quest that can keep you pretty busy for awhile. The levels and quest are also played with groups. You can choose the henchmen (which all have levels equal to the levels of enemies you will be facing on the next mission or quest) or you can group up with those around you that also want to enter the mission you are trying to. These missions take you to your own zone. You will never be competing for a loot drop from hundreds of players, because you are only in a zone with the group you went in with. The only zone where everyone will be will be towns or beginning of mission zones. They seperate zones into “districts” if the town gets to many people in it to keep from flooding you with lag because of the people in the zone.

The missions are pretty straight forward and there is really no hard thinking into figuring out how to finish it. You cant jump or fall off ledges, so you really dont get lost on the path that is set for you.

The game boots up and quits out instantly, downloads software updates quickly and automatically. If you want to just log out, click the X button and you are instantly out of the game and back on your desktop. Your character is also capable of instantly teleporting between all the cities and towns you’ve ever visited, at any time by going to your map and clicking on the marked spot.

I really enjoyed playing this game and personally found the graphics to be pretty stunning. You are able to tone graphics down enough that even the lesser computers can run with minimal lag.

I would give this game a 8.9 I think it still has some bugs to work out as far as game play is involved, but I do believe it is one of the best RPG’s out right now if you don’t have 7 hours to play a day.