Dungeons and Dragons Online: Hands On With Turbine’s Reinvented MMO

Dungeons and Dragons is definitely a cool game that is free to play. The starting zone is simple and instructional in the basics of playing the game, but fun enough to keep you interested. You start out ship wrecked on the Island of Korthos, and a rogue named Jeets (who isn’t necessarily there to help anyone as much as he is their to pick up floating loot and treasure) starts yelling at you and asking you questions and proceeds to give your first quest. You have to follow him up a hill to his friends camp site, where you get a weapon based on your class. Next you are asked to find Cellimus in the Grotto, your first of many instanced zones.

The really nice thing about DDO is the PVE is great! I’ve never said that about any MMO I’ve played before.  The graphics are stunningly good for a non AAA MMO and the game has a Voice over of each NPC (hoping SWTOR’s will be like this) and a Narrator that will often voice out what a major NPC is saying; mainly in dungeons. It’s a really nice feature that (for me) keep me really immersed in the game play. Here’s a video on the starting zone just after you meet Jeets. There’s more here as well.

Once you go through the Grotto you come to the Village of Korthos where you have bunch of instanced dungeons waiting for you. Now the best/worst part of this is that while the game dungeons have 4 different modes (solo, normal, hard, elite) it’s good that you can solo all the stating-Korthos Island dungeons on the first to settings of solo and normal.  You can repeat them for a little xp boost in the beginning with the exception of the Grotto and Shipwreck shore, as these are not repeatable quest lines. The bad thing here is that you don’t have to get to know anyone in the start zone because of this feature. I played through all of Korthos and never even said “Hello” in general chat.

Combat:
Combat in DDO something reminiscent of the current MMO market infused with that musty ancient practice of rolling a 10/20 sided die from the late 80′s and early 90′s RP-games. Think original Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire: The Masquerade, with pencil and a character sheet and some dice.

As far as the combat is concerned, its not to much different then what we are used to now. In most MMO’s you never see the numbers behind the actions. This is known as RNG (random number generator) which is essentially what rolling dice is in real life. You have your set rules of  plus(+) or minus(-) and x (being a stat) + numbered die = hit/miss etc. In games like World of Warcraft we rarely ever see the action of these numbers in a visual sense other than the which would be “CRIT” or something in WoW. Well in DDO you have an actual virtual dice that will roll as you manually auto attack? Yes, manual auto attack or commonly called “slashing” in DDO, a dice will roll while you Left click your mouse to slash, determining weather you hit or miss.

General UI/Stats and abilities:
The Action bars have your buffs, abilities and spells that you can use to make more powerful attacks or boost your stats to help you get more: hit, dodge or health and mana. Here’s a look at a friends Character sheet just so you can get an idea. Basic stats are your: Strength,Dexterity(agility),Concentration, Intellect, Wisdom and Charisma(outlined in red). Next at the very top (orange box)of the Character sheet you have 5 tabs where you have access to your Skills, Feats, Spells, and Enhancements. Below that (yellow box) is your basic Character name, class, level, path, Alignment, and gender. There in blue we have your stat layout optimizer which shows you how much of + this or – that you have to an particular stat. In green at the very bottom of the CS is were you can see your damage reduction and resistances.

Every thing is pretty well organized and easily found. Mousing over any of the abilities or spells and stats will give you brief description of what they do. There is an also a neat tab off to the side of your CS labeled “Bio”. This was something new to me as I have never been involved or had wanted to be much of a role player, I decided to check it out.

When clicking on Bio tab, its just a blank space where you can type in stuff about your character. This is a neat little feature to help you feel immersed in the game and invested in your character. To view a bio on someone else you simply just right click them and press Z. This will bring up the inspection window. The inspection window isn’t as well laid out or done up the way I thought or would have liked to see it. There is no layout of the character your inspecting or his/her gear, talents or spec(path). Instead its very simple information on the class, level and bio.

One interesting thing about DDO is their option to Multiclass or really pull some nice features form other classes and mix then with your class. Here is a link to the forums on Multiclassing and general discussions. It looks really interesting, but I’m not sure how useful it is in the lower tiers of leveling.

Leveling:
In leveling on DDO, you will notice that as a level one you have the word “rank 1″ right next to “Level 1″, along with xix bubbles to the far right. Once you reach 1/2 through the 5th bub, you can seek out your trainer and ask to be advanced to the next level.

The Xp seems to be a bit on the low end for single killing mobs in a zone or instance, but if you group a lot or have a few friends and can run through multiple instances you can level pretty fast.

Questing:
Is pretty much all instanced zones at this point. I just finished Korthos Island, which seems like an open area, but is a large instance leading to other adjacent instances.  You enter Korthos Island by clicking on a gate.  You then load to a new instance and you are immediately granted 3 quests. As you wander around you will come upon an additional quest giver and some dungeons that quests from town have you going to.

In some dungeons you will have little puzzles to solve, much like a game of aligning pictures/blocks to get the full image or allow a path of energy to flow to something. It’s a really cool feature and something different than just kill X mobs.

DDO Store:
It’s not like what I’ve heard of other games/MMO’s doing micro-transactions at all. I have yet to set up my account or buy anything, but once I do I will write about that experience.

Final thoughts:
Its really been a fun experience so far. I’ve never actually enjoyed the pve content from Wow or Warhammer, but in Dungeons and Dragons it “feels natural” to quest and instance. I just reached the 2nd zone called Stormreach harbor. Which is a very nice huge sea-ship town. Lots of NPC’s and players running around all the time and beautiful scenery. Well thats all for now, hope you can try out this amazing F2p game, and enjoy it.

As far as the PvP is concerned, I tried a small 1v1 with my friend, and the concept-seems- great!!! We did a CTF (capture the flag) match and although it was just the 2 of us, the map was great, big and fun to explore. I have read on the forums that pvp is dead, but I believe that’s mainly because a lot of Pve players are drawn to the title of Dungeons and Dragons… hopefully I can stir up the pot a bit and get some good matches going. Hopefully is key word here.

Game On!

~Kaldeem

P.S Here’s some pics of random instances and places… enjoy!