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!

© Posted by Kaldeem for Im Talkin Games with No comments on 12/04/2009.
Posted in: Featured, Impressions, Opinion, Reviews Tags: DDO, Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberrron Unlimited, Turbine

Ravious of Kill Ten Rats has even gone as far to call this feature the potential future of the MMO landscape, and while that may be a bit of hyperbole, he’s on the right track.  Repeatable, variable, scalable encounters with lots of rewards and story-driven content tied in aren’t new in and of themselves.  The old missions of City of Heroes were something akin to this.  But once one plays a Skirmish in LotRO, they’ll see the difference between the two is stark.

Skirmishes are closer to the dungeon content in Turbine’s DDO than anything else on the market.  Each one is heavily story-driven and ties into the overall narrative of the game.  They can be played solo or by a full raid group of 12.  The enemies, objectives, and content changes each time you play them.  There are daily quests tied to each Skirmish.  Rewards gleaned from the system are some of the best rewards obtainable in the game outside of the raid encounters.

In short, what it looks like Turbine’s done is create truly meaningful and dynamic content for everyone and anyone that’s not gated by party size, hardcore or casual play-style, or any of the normal divisive factors that split people of the community into small sects.

I recently had the pleasure of being walked through one of the Skirmishes by Aaron Campbell, and I left wanting to reload the very same encounter to see how it would change.  I wanted to play it solo, with a small fellowship, with a full fellowship, and in a raid to see how it evolved depending.  I wanted to change its difficulty setting, its level range, and go in and play.

It’s a remarkable system, and one that I foresee will be used in the future for the game’s Epic Quest series.  Right now there’s a fairly big problem of old Epic Quests being skipped because they require groups, and Orion (designer for Turbine) is currently going through the old books and making them more solo-friendly to help alleviate this.  If in the future the Epic Quests were handled via the Skirmish system, there would be no need to worry about such issues.  If the Skirmish system isn’t the future of MMOs in general, it’s certainly the future of LotRO.

- JoBildo

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with 2 comments on 11/19/2009.
Posted in: Commentary, Opinion Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, RPG, Turbine

Last night, thanks to a welcome back weekend promotion and my own lack of ability to keep money in my wallet, I resubscribed to LotRO.  The good news is that I was given the wrong options when I bought Mines of Moria recently, and was unable to take advantage of the $9.99 monthly pricing that the accounts page said I should have been able to.  I sent this complaint to Turbine’s account support, and this week I got a reply e-mail saying I’d been credited a 3-month subscription and will receive Siege of Mirkwood as a free bonus.  So while I might not have received my work bonus this year (long story…) I at least got some little gaming stimulus from the folks at Turbine.

I got to start my adventure last night, and while my own experience wasn’t as disorienting as Keen’s, I must admit… I feel a little lost.  So many changes have happened to the game in the time I’ve been away that it took me a while to figure out what all the new doo-dads were for.  You can now track quests with map-markers that pop up showing you the general direction of your objective, you have two different slots for appearance armor and clothing, you can buy a house, work on oodles reputation rewards, get a hobby like fishing, and several zones have been completely reworked to provide a better questing experience.

My level 37 Champion had been logged out for so long, and I’m not sure how the rest experience works, but when I killed just one bear I went from level 37 to 39 and I have no idea where a trainer is to get any new skills that might entitle me to.  Playing the Champion is a little easier than getting acquainted with all the new features I’d been missing though.  My hotbar setup came back to me in no time, and I was killing bears, bandits, orcs, and wargs like a pro soon enough.

I remember quitting LotRO because I felt the solo content stretching thin in my upper 30s, but when I logged in yesterday I found my quest log filled to the brim with solo quests appropriate for my level.  Maybe I was delusional back in the end of 2007?  All I know is now I’m having a blast.  Maybe I just needed an extended break.  I’m nearing the appropriate level to start Angmar and work my way to 50 and the Mines of Moria too.

But I’m finding myself very tempted to start a Warden now that I have the Mines of Moria expansion, and level him up.  Champions are a lot of fun, but quite squishy and not exactly easy to solo with in some cases.  The Warden’s mix of DPS and tanking might be more up my alley.  I think I’ll split my time between the two.  I hear the starter zones have been reworked completely, and so have places like the Lone-Lands, so I’m anxious to see how some of the old world has been changed.  Plus on top of all that, Skirmishes come to the game in just a couple weeks, which will add yet another way to play.

I guess what I’m saying with this long and meandering post is that it feels like the perfect time to resubscribe to LotRO if you’re at all curious as to what’s changed in the game since you last played like I was.  My article at MMORPG.com should be going up today, which talks about a great deal of the changes coming to the game in December.

One of the most important ones?  The combat system has been reworked so that the auto-attack no longer keeps your special skills from triggering.  It will run in the background as it does in WoW or WAR, making the action far more fluid and reliable.  That little facet alone would have been enough to get me playing again, but all the other new things like Skirmishes, mounts, and the like are just icing on the cake.

Look for me as Begud on Silverlode.  I’ll be around.

- JoBildo

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with No comments on 11/17/2009.
Posted in: Opinion Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, RPG, Turbine

I’ve tried to get back into the game in the past, but starting new characters always left me kind of feeling “meh”, as I missed my 38 Champion.  I was playing on my ex-father in law’s lifetime account and just couldn’t get into it.  But there are some base changes coming to the game’s combat system, namely that the auto-attack now runs in the background to the skills/spells much like WoW so that when you trigger a skill on your hotbar said skill goes off immediatel instead of delayed and waiting for the next auto-attack.  It makes combat much more tactile and gives it much more feedback, giving it that smooth feeling that few games really capture in the traditional combat model.  This alone is enough to make me eager for the new expansion… but I’m missing something crucial first. 

I never did get into The Mines of Moria expansion, and now seems the perfect time to buy it.  Not only is it just $10 to through Turbine, but I believe it comes with the $9.99 a month subscription plan too.  After seeing LotRO last night, $9.99 is easily the biggest steal in terms of subscription pricing on the market.  This might be the very best MMOG in terms of value and features, and I’ve been letting it slip by my view for some time now.  I feel sheepish.

I remember getting a little bored with LotRO around the time of the Evendim content patch, because content was a little thin for a solo-oriented player.  But Aaron Campbell, the live producer of the game, assures me that Mirkwood not only adds a bunch of new content to the end-game, but the staff as walked through the majority of the game’s early content and added new quests, streamlined the experience, and really plugged up any holes there might have been in the leveling process.  It’s his job to say things like that I know, but from what I can tell on various forums across the web, this much is true even without the Mirkwood expansion.  I was miffed that I never got my Champion to level 50, and that alone is a big part of the reason I skipped Moria. That’s going to change tonight I think. 

With the Siege of Mirkwood you have a real change in tone of the game.  Where Shadows of Angmar was about the early stages of the fellowship’s quest and the real thematic ties to the books kept the developers from exploring too much in the ways of the strife and battles between armies (and also kept the game focused primarily on boars and bears out in the wilds), Mines of Moria delved closer to the more dangerous things in Middle-earth, and the Siege of Mirkwood goes even further east and marks the first time players will really start to see the struggle between the free peoples and the forces of Sauron.  In short… things are about to get real hairy in Middle-earth and it’s no longer all about delivering pies in the Shire.  If my short session with Aaron last night is any indication, Mirkwood will be just the beginning of a new and darker LotRO as the story really starts to heat up. 

And one final note if anyone reading this is now intrigued about Turbine’s undersung beauty of a game?  If you’re a current subscriber and buy either a multi-month subscription or the Adventurer’s Pack (a sort of upgrade to your account that gives you more character slots, a shared stash for loot, a special cloak and a special mount) you’ll get the Mirkwood expansion for no additional cost.  Additionally, if you’re a lifetime subscriber and you order the Adventurer’s Pack, you’ll also get the Mirkwood expansion for free… basically saving you $10 and getting you some killer bonuses on top of it. 

Consider me convinced.  I’ll be upgrading my account tonight, and posting more thoughts from a returning player as I go along.  Look for my full walkthrough/preview article on MMORPG.com in the next week or so as well, in which I’ll cover all the new hotness that the expansion is bringing to LotRO.

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with 3 comments on 11/04/2009.
Posted in: Analysis Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, Turbine