(DDO) Impressions Part 2
I played a little Dungeons and Dragons Online over the weekend, making level two and doing some duo-play in addition to solo.
Some other thoughts thusfar:
- The narrator voice is both cheesy and cool. It's clear they were going for D&D atmosphere when you enter a room and get text as well as voice saying "You are drawn to the ledge on the far side of the murky waters" or somesuch. A video game should probably use the show, don't tell approach, but adding that in is a cute little throwback to tabletop games.
- Overly instanced! That's personal opinion, mind you, some people will like it. There's something like half a dozen world servers. Additionally, towns can spawn different instances that you can manually switch between (as seen in Guild Wars) - I ended up leaving a shop before a party member and thus ended up in a different instance of the town until figuring that out and switching. Pretty much all "adventures" are instanced, where you talk to a questgiver, then access a portal (door, etc.) nearby that puts you into the adventure instance with your party. Out-of-town areas are instanced per-party too.
And that's where the opinion comes in. Some people will be fine with this. Me, I actually like non-instanced worlds. I'm sure instancing is easier on hardware, but an MMORPG world does not feel alive to me if I walk outside of town and suddenly there's just my character and his/her party. For every kill-stealing asshat I've seen in WoW, I've had several incidents of on-the-fly grouping to put down a hard quest objective, or trading of buffs, or any number of other helpful actions from strangers.
- Progression feels strange. Each level (1-20) is broken up into five ranks. At each rank, you get an Action Point. These can be spent to get little abilities like +1 to a stat, or temporary bonuses to skills, or (in the case of the cleric I've been playing) something like proficiency with long swords until your next rest. At each level, you can multiclass, and get hit points and skills, and so on. I'm sure they did this to stretch and smooth things out while retaining the general feel of D&D levels.
I have yet to decide whether the overall scheme is good or bad. Progress feels slow, but I suppose I shouldn't expect to reach a level cap after a weekend or something.
XP is not gained from directly killing things, from what I've seen. Most outdoor areas have an automatic quest associated with them that's "Kill X things in the zone," and quests occasionally seem to have a bonus for killing everything in the instance, but you primarily get XP for completing quests and the sub-objectives thereof.
- Gearing is very D&D style. I hit the capital city and made my way to a weapon/armor shop... only to find out 1) I couldn't afford full plate and 2) that was the only thing that looked like an upgrade. I have since found a quest reward of splint mail +1, but that was equal to the half plate I walked off the starter island with. I suppose that's good for a second-level character, but it seems clear any upgrades are going to come randomly on quests, as opposed to anything you can plan for. There is an auction house, but it's sorta clunky and the prices (even for +1 items) seem astronomical to my early-game eyes. It looks like free accounts can only put up on item for auction at a time.
- I don't like the chat channel layout. I read something about free-account limitations on chat, so maybe that's the issue, but as it stands, you have your different channels (General, Party, Combat, etc.) as totally separate tabs. To avoid General chat spam, I often switch to Combat, but then I don't see anything on the other channels unless I switch back. You only see one at a time.
- As I said before, combat is more interactive, but not necessarily more active. You have action bars as usual, but in most actual combat I find myself holding down the left mouse button (to attack) and angling with the mouse to maintain proper facing. And that's about it. Sometimes I may press Shift to block with my shield, but there rarely seems reason. Very rarely, I may click my Cure Light Wounds, but usually that (and other spells) are things I do outside of actual battle.
With no auto-attack and the option to block, I feel involved. But I don't feel I have to think about it nearly as much as in WoW, or even GW, where I have more in-combat abilities to call upon. I could mix things up with a Trip or a Sunder, but... again, there doesn't seem much reason to.
- I may have to reconsider my thoughts on movement. While I love the climbing animations, some of the rest like the jump (and the dance emote) seem a little stiff. I may give the "trophy" back to WoW - while the overall look is less realistic, the movements seem to fit well and feel more organic somehow.
You can, however, fall off stairs and take damage in town even. Or get up onto rooftops. You can move wherever - as long as it's within the bounds of the area/instance you're in. I've seen a few areas where you mysterious can't walk any farther "that way" just because it's not on the map, rather than because of geographic features preventing it (this was most noticeable in the intro area).
- Appearances look fairly standardized overall. You can change your facial features starting out, but you're almost never looking at your character's face. Rather, you're looking at their armor, and if there's any aesthetic difference between (for example) chain mail and chain mail +2, I haven't seen it yet. And while there are a number of item slots on your character, the only ones I've seen that are visible on your character are armor, helm, weapon, and shield. We'll see if this changes at all.
- Quest length varies. You're told at the beginning if something is Short or Long. I've had one very long quest at the end of the starter area. I wish I timed it, though I was waiting at one point for my partner to reconnect. I've also seen a quest as short as less than two minutes (walk into a room and kill three scorpions that spawn, protecting an NPC).
- You're usually encouraged to smash everything you can in an area. Sometimes you get coins or items out of them. I saw one quest, though, that actually fails if you break 10 sarcophagi in a crypt you're clearing out for someone. Interesting twist, though I didn't get what the log entry meant until I'd failed it once.
- Dragonmarks aren't all they're cracked up to be. Ooooh, awesome, inheritted abilities. "*gasp* Your character is of the bloodline, seek out Fred the illithid to activate this power within you." So, naturally, we did. Then it turns out Fred (his real name being unpronouncable) is just the feat retrainer guy and dragonmarks are simply feats. So to get a dragonmark, you have to give up another feat, one that may well be more useful. The greater dragonmarks give abilities that would probably be considered above normal feat levels, but I suspect they require the lesser versions and a certain level. Meh. My cleric doesn't need to be able to Dimension Door once a day that bad.
- Mirrors? Neat. I saw a room with a mirror on the opposite wall showing a reflection (albeit fuzzy/unclear) of my character and the NPC they were with, along with the room itself. It wasn't perfect or clear, but that's still a neat touch you generally don't see in video games.
Some other thoughts thusfar:
- The narrator voice is both cheesy and cool. It's clear they were going for D&D atmosphere when you enter a room and get text as well as voice saying "You are drawn to the ledge on the far side of the murky waters" or somesuch. A video game should probably use the show, don't tell approach, but adding that in is a cute little throwback to tabletop games.
- Overly instanced! That's personal opinion, mind you, some people will like it. There's something like half a dozen world servers. Additionally, towns can spawn different instances that you can manually switch between (as seen in Guild Wars) - I ended up leaving a shop before a party member and thus ended up in a different instance of the town until figuring that out and switching. Pretty much all "adventures" are instanced, where you talk to a questgiver, then access a portal (door, etc.) nearby that puts you into the adventure instance with your party. Out-of-town areas are instanced per-party too.
And that's where the opinion comes in. Some people will be fine with this. Me, I actually like non-instanced worlds. I'm sure instancing is easier on hardware, but an MMORPG world does not feel alive to me if I walk outside of town and suddenly there's just my character and his/her party. For every kill-stealing asshat I've seen in WoW, I've had several incidents of on-the-fly grouping to put down a hard quest objective, or trading of buffs, or any number of other helpful actions from strangers.
- Progression feels strange. Each level (1-20) is broken up into five ranks. At each rank, you get an Action Point. These can be spent to get little abilities like +1 to a stat, or temporary bonuses to skills, or (in the case of the cleric I've been playing) something like proficiency with long swords until your next rest. At each level, you can multiclass, and get hit points and skills, and so on. I'm sure they did this to stretch and smooth things out while retaining the general feel of D&D levels.
I have yet to decide whether the overall scheme is good or bad. Progress feels slow, but I suppose I shouldn't expect to reach a level cap after a weekend or something.
XP is not gained from directly killing things, from what I've seen. Most outdoor areas have an automatic quest associated with them that's "Kill X things in the zone," and quests occasionally seem to have a bonus for killing everything in the instance, but you primarily get XP for completing quests and the sub-objectives thereof.
- Gearing is very D&D style. I hit the capital city and made my way to a weapon/armor shop... only to find out 1) I couldn't afford full plate and 2) that was the only thing that looked like an upgrade. I have since found a quest reward of splint mail +1, but that was equal to the half plate I walked off the starter island with. I suppose that's good for a second-level character, but it seems clear any upgrades are going to come randomly on quests, as opposed to anything you can plan for. There is an auction house, but it's sorta clunky and the prices (even for +1 items) seem astronomical to my early-game eyes. It looks like free accounts can only put up on item for auction at a time.
- I don't like the chat channel layout. I read something about free-account limitations on chat, so maybe that's the issue, but as it stands, you have your different channels (General, Party, Combat, etc.) as totally separate tabs. To avoid General chat spam, I often switch to Combat, but then I don't see anything on the other channels unless I switch back. You only see one at a time.
- As I said before, combat is more interactive, but not necessarily more active. You have action bars as usual, but in most actual combat I find myself holding down the left mouse button (to attack) and angling with the mouse to maintain proper facing. And that's about it. Sometimes I may press Shift to block with my shield, but there rarely seems reason. Very rarely, I may click my Cure Light Wounds, but usually that (and other spells) are things I do outside of actual battle.
With no auto-attack and the option to block, I feel involved. But I don't feel I have to think about it nearly as much as in WoW, or even GW, where I have more in-combat abilities to call upon. I could mix things up with a Trip or a Sunder, but... again, there doesn't seem much reason to.
- I may have to reconsider my thoughts on movement. While I love the climbing animations, some of the rest like the jump (and the dance emote) seem a little stiff. I may give the "trophy" back to WoW - while the overall look is less realistic, the movements seem to fit well and feel more organic somehow.
You can, however, fall off stairs and take damage in town even. Or get up onto rooftops. You can move wherever - as long as it's within the bounds of the area/instance you're in. I've seen a few areas where you mysterious can't walk any farther "that way" just because it's not on the map, rather than because of geographic features preventing it (this was most noticeable in the intro area).
- Appearances look fairly standardized overall. You can change your facial features starting out, but you're almost never looking at your character's face. Rather, you're looking at their armor, and if there's any aesthetic difference between (for example) chain mail and chain mail +2, I haven't seen it yet. And while there are a number of item slots on your character, the only ones I've seen that are visible on your character are armor, helm, weapon, and shield. We'll see if this changes at all.
- Quest length varies. You're told at the beginning if something is Short or Long. I've had one very long quest at the end of the starter area. I wish I timed it, though I was waiting at one point for my partner to reconnect. I've also seen a quest as short as less than two minutes (walk into a room and kill three scorpions that spawn, protecting an NPC).
- You're usually encouraged to smash everything you can in an area. Sometimes you get coins or items out of them. I saw one quest, though, that actually fails if you break 10 sarcophagi in a crypt you're clearing out for someone. Interesting twist, though I didn't get what the log entry meant until I'd failed it once.
- Dragonmarks aren't all they're cracked up to be. Ooooh, awesome, inheritted abilities. "*gasp* Your character is of the bloodline, seek out Fred the illithid to activate this power within you." So, naturally, we did. Then it turns out Fred (his real name being unpronouncable) is just the feat retrainer guy and dragonmarks are simply feats. So to get a dragonmark, you have to give up another feat, one that may well be more useful. The greater dragonmarks give abilities that would probably be considered above normal feat levels, but I suspect they require the lesser versions and a certain level. Meh. My cleric doesn't need to be able to Dimension Door once a day that bad.
- Mirrors? Neat. I saw a room with a mirror on the opposite wall showing a reflection (albeit fuzzy/unclear) of my character and the NPC they were with, along with the room itself. It wasn't perfect or clear, but that's still a neat touch you generally don't see in video games.
So, rate it. Is it worth it? How 'D&D' is it? From what you're telling me, I'd hate the combat system. The instance thing is nice. I'm not sure about the action point thing.
ReplyDeleteIs it worth zero money? Sure! I'll get more play out of it than NWN 2 (which I bought), most likely. So it's worth something. Would I pay $15 a month for it? No, I don't think I would. It seems very D&D to me. Maybe too much so, though I haven't reached that conclusion yet. It is Eberron, though, so it's a little "advanced" in some ways. So far, I think I've really only seen that in the semi-trivial use of magic (magic lights, buildings that levitate over the harbor, etc.). The setting reminds me of the cosmopolitan nature of Sigil from Planescape, but without being so extreme. Rate it? Hmm. Below WoW. It has points I like over GW, but I can't call either a clear winner in my book at this stage.
ReplyDelete"You have entered the door to the north. You are now by yourself standing in a dark room; the pungent stench of mildew emanates from the wet dungeon walls." AHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!! I'm so queueing this game to download. Hello... free? It's like a trip back to my childhood.
ReplyDeleteTook a look at Wikipedia on it, and noted the differences. Hmm. Also watched a YouTube video showing the graphics and some game play (someone with two vorpal weapons using Precision to stealth kill everything). Also, not a big fan of Eberron, so I'll give this a pass.
ReplyDeleteBy 'not a big fan' I take that to mean 'you don't like it'. And what, (sarcasm on) the fact the system's been 'broken' by some hack on YouTube means it's just not a challenge to your l33t minmax skillz? (end sarcasm)
ReplyDelete:p Snark. ;) No, I don't really like Eberron, from what I've seen of it. As for the 'broken' bit, I don't know if I'd constitute that as broken, but I don't like the idea of the Prestige Classes being reduced to Feats - and Class-Specific Feats at that, for example. If I want to make a Ranger/Shadow Dancer, that should be viable (as an example), or a Fighter/Assassin, rather than having to go Rogue to do so. Just a number of little things added up.
ReplyDeleteSure, I see your point about prestige classes. Kinda defeats the purpose. With respect to the appearance and textures and general detail, I have to disagree with Redwolf. It's very far behind WoW and Guild Wars. I did like you had more control over your appearance than in WoW though. Animations were OK, but I am pretty much resigned to seeing peculiarities in animations regardless of the game. The running looks weird regardless of the game, to me. I felt like the controls were alien. I kept left clicking and dragging the mouse to try and look around. No strafe, at least not bound to what I consider the 'standard' keys. Still, even for free... I think I'd rather play Champs or WoW.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I don't know. Graphics are hard to gauge, as I'm not really seeing them side-by-side. WoW has a semi-cartoonish style, but looks darn good at it. GW looks pretty at a glance, then I zoom in and armor that looks like it should have great detail just gets pixelated. DDO, to my eye, looks closer to GW in general but doesn't seem to "fall apart" up close the same way. Then again, having just hit level 3, the areas (dungeons especially) are starting to look repetitive and the more movement I see, the less impressed with it I am. Of course, I haven't spent a great deal of time optimizing graphics on either GW or DDO, so there couple be relatively simple settings skewing my perceptions somewhere in there. *shrugs* Heh. I had similar issues with the controls and ended up binding the strafe keys myself. And yeah, I've very accustomed to the WoW camera control, which doesn't work (Keypad to rotate the camera? Really?). I find it a shame that for the tweaks you can make to your character's face, it's so hard to view it in-game. As for being "alien," I find that true with just about anything else after WoW. Even GW took some practice, and the differences still trip me up once in a while. I've also found that DDO seems to dislike running windowed on my machine more than either WoW or GW. That's disappointing to me.
ReplyDeleteI think game developers are loathe to do it but really you need to include a 'WoW-style' control set in any MMO these days. Chances are, your players are also current/former WoW players and are used to certain controls. Why frustrate them by making them customize the control set? Just make it one of the defaults templates they can choose. With respect to graphics, I think my evaluation came from the textures which were not as detailed IMO. Some components, like character ears, are composed of scant few polygons (looks like a stop sign when you get too close). I liked the extra customization you can do with your character - eyes for example. But I didn't see any... 'wow look at that' like I got when I came to Ironforge for the first time, or flying through zones in Icecrown or Storm Peaks.
ReplyDeleteI've thought that, but assume they can't quite bring themselves to put in a WoW-mimicry mode. ;) DDO skins definitely seem to hold up better than GW. Models... maybe not. Though having looked closely at the example of ears, I find DDO and GW both look rather blocky with clear polygons on close examination.
ReplyDelete