Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach Comments by Egon Superb

That's not your real name :)

Interesting review, have played Guild Wars quite a bit. I'd heard the beta of this was bugged to death, have they really sorted it all out?!

Unfortunately, a game that forces you to group is always going to make the player suffer for sharing the server with lots of low skilled, inept people. At least if you can solo, you can occupy yourself with something when the quality of your party is less than desireable. I know this from the beta test. If this changes after retail, they may get my money.

Perhaps in the real DDO world rather than the beta world there will be more people at your playing level

Kroms, what part of 1st comment occurs 20 minutes after mine? O_o

I will give this a try. Always been a fan of Turbine so I guess I want to see what they have done with the DnD world. I would have liked something more daring though... a Ravenloft world for example.

"Kroms, what part of 1st comment occurs 20 minutes after mine? O_o"

I guess the kind of people that do 'OMG first pots!1' also have trouble counting to one...

Well I'll be damned. This actually sounds good. If I ever get to upgrade my PC I think I'll be giving this a whirl.

Quality captions

Sounds cool. They can always add more solo designed missions later but pushing player interaction isn't a bad thing.

Finally, an MMORPG with a proper combat system where skill counts for more than the ability to form a 40-player raid! This is so getting bought tomorrow. I tend to solo in MMOs unless I'm actively forced to party (or until the endgame), but I actually really like the idea of having to party for the length of an instanced dungeon or two, with no loot-stealing or grinding (since XP is awarded for finishing quests rather than killing things). And, looking at the screenshots, it's teh pretteh.

I'm gonna get and play Oblivion, then once finished/bored i'll give this a go when the bugs have been ironed out.

If i buy this first and then get Oblivion, i'll be paying for a subscription i will be hardly using.

This does sound really good, I'm glad they've remained faithful to the dnd heritage - well, from what I'm lead to believe. No more MMORPGs for me for a long time, and I'd also be weary about the heavy slant on grouping. Don't get me wrong, grouping's great and it's where these games excel, but waiting for x amount of people to be online and ready for action before you can achieve anything in it is a frustrating mechanic.

This review seems to ignore some key points.

No PvP: Thats not a bad thing but its something people have come to expect in MMOs

A monthly fee for an instanced games like Guild Wars which is free

Repetitive gameplay, maps and monsters: The Sewers, Basements and Catacombs look pretty but after few weeks you've seen all the variation your going to see and there are 27 mob models in the whole game.

Loads of performance issues: Drop your settings to low and it still strobes in areas like the marketplace, the starter areas are pretty much unplayable

Crap character modeling / skining (leather armour looked like skintight latex, upgrading to plate just changed the skin)

No dragons

I'd give it 6/10

The whole premise with the grouping/solo slant is of course a throw-back to original Pencil and paper Role Playing like Dungeons and Dragons.

Think about it: You never played D&D by yourself did you? Groups was the 'point' of PnP RPG.

This game is not WoW, and shouldn;t be viewed as such.

Bah, i don't want it to be WoW, i work in a office full of people who have all hit level 60 and now just carry on playing to get extra equipment, i mean, how dull is that?

It has taken grinding to a new level (level, geddit?).

DDO is really not deserving of an 8/10. Unless it has improved considerably from the final beta build then it is an awful game. Souless, poor graphics, poor design and the "interactive combat" system is both badly designed and horribly dull. You end up just using auto attack in the end.

The forced grouping would work if it wasnt for the fact that the game is almost completely instanced. Rather than playing you tend to spend most of your time waiting in a city trying to get a group.

I would only recommend DDO if you have a group of friends you are regularly going to play with. But even if that was the case I would recommend most other MMOs!

So much potential wasted, lets hope they do a better job with LOTR.

I find it interesting how many people really have it in for this game. It's not just a couple of the comments here, but comments on other sites where this game's been previewed.

2 in Metacritic so far. Both saying 90+.

Thats the odd thing, I am both an MMO fan and a D&D fan. This game should appeal to me. However it didn't. I really could not recommend this game to anyone. The graphics are sub standard by modern MMO standards, the gameplay is dull, there is little or no sense of community due to the whole game being instanced. The new combat system just doesn't work very well.

I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, however I just couldn't. In it's current state I wouldn't give it more than a 5/10.

Freki, wasn't the downloaded beta test LOW RES only and only the box-product contains the high res models and graphics?

That was my understanding.

Also, loads of content was not available for the beta test too right?

Thats the odd thing, I am both an MMO fan and a D&D fan. This game should appeal to me. However it didn't.

I'm in the same boat, I was really looking forward to being in the beta and realised it wasn't what I wanted to play after all.

The DM narration was a nice touch though and the more interactive nature of the quests was good but it just didn't grab me though.

I think it was a mistake going for Eberron as well, I know the Realms have been done to death but I'm not a fan of the setting.

Looking at the released screenshots that is the game I was playing. It is possible that it will look nicer, but even then it wont take away from the deeply flawed game design.

Also the "all instanced content" actually makes it harder to meet and group with people which is a flaw for a group oriented game. The whole world feels completely souless. It seems that a lot of the games longevity will come from the fact that most of the time you are waiting around for players rather than having fun playing the game.

I really was painfully unimpressed with the whole game. To then see it reviewed with 8/10 was pretty much astounding from my experiences. I know that experience from beta changes quite a bit when you go live, however the Euro beta was more a tech thing for network stability and the build we were playing on was close to finished.

"Dungeons & Dragons, with its Live Action Roleplay Heritage"

Eh? Think you'll find that's pen and paper heritage, me lad. /pedant

And incidentally, why is EG so ashamed of this review that it's under a dumbass pseudonym?

and in "useless 1st paragraph o-vision" too! :-)

Wha? Did somebody delete my comment? That was weird. I can't remember saying anything offensive.

Hmm. After my enthusiastic post this morning I've had a bit of a read around the game's forums, watched a couple of videos etc, and I'm liking the sound of this less and less with everything I read. It's a shame - it ticks all the boxes for things I've been looking forward to an MMO doing - real-time combat, no PvP, dungeons with puzzles, low maximum group size, quest-based XP to avoid kill-stealing, a proper LFG interface and so on. In practice it looks like they've taken out the magic of exploring a huge world full of people to meet and things to do in favour of a heavily-instanced (I'm entirely in favour of instanced dungeons, and lots of them, but neglecting the overworld is madness), hub-based questfest, with nothing much to do except delve into dungeons over and over again.

"Fighting isn’t simply ‘hit the auto-attack button and occasionally buff your character’"

Hehe, spot the Paladin...

I hate grouping only games. Some players are poor team players whislt others are cocky and impatient if you're not up to their standard.

Ouch, this game was really bad.. The only saving grace was the nice big colour advert for NWN2 on the back cover of the manual..

Stop saying "pen and paper" as a excuse for the grouping.

D&D roots are from tabletop stategy wargames, playing solo with that would be pretty boring with D&D being a group centered game because people would be playing in groups (since cases were there would just 2 people would be pretty rare).

But you have to remenber "tabletop D&D" groups were not random people grab at comic/book shops ... no, they were friends (or would be) and people played as a group at the same time.

Now with MMORPG you get strangers and if you happen to show up when nobody is online (played WoW and GW at graveyard shift) ... well too bad since if you dont have a clan member (who could possible be doing something else, another issue with MMORPGs vs tabletop D&D is that everyone in a D&D tabletop group is advancing for the same quests as in MMORPGs its "every man for himself") you are going to grab who ever you can.

So dont compare tabletop D&D (or any RPGs for that matter) groups to MMORPG groups, even clans are not close to then.

My experience after the beta test and a few days into retail:

The retail client does have higher quality textures than the beta, though the character models are still of questionable quality- some of the armour/helmets/etc are very dorky. Still it does look good on high settings in a fight and lag issues I had in beta seem to have largely gone away on my moderately-chunky PC. Haven't seen too many bugs since release, either. One or two instances where quest items can disappear if you lose a party member, which is immensely frustrating.

The players I've played with span the usual range of 'tards to great people- too many seem to just rush through the same instance repeatedly for the loot and XP, though I've found many players willing to play as a group and tackle things intelligently. Too many of the levels out there now let you just rush everything that moves and there are usually XP bonuses for 'aggression', though, and the box-smashing was a mistake IMO. Clerics and rogues are hard to find, as you may expect.

Combat is a lot more fun than the old auto-attack, and I've never been tempted to use the auto feature even after hours of right-button abuse. Some While much of the fighting is just a click-fest there's definitely potential to approch situations intelligently if you're in the right group and dungeon. I've seen a few quests where you have to prepare carefully to survive some mobs, and tactical use of eg. high ledges on the landscape can get you past some of the big guys, which seems intentional rather than an 'exploit'.

I really don't comprehend the amount of ranting about use of instances- as the whole point of the game is to have a good dungeon crawl the last thing you'd want would be some fool pulling trains on you and camping the best loot. Use of traps is a case in point and many levels will require you to have a thief or suffer a lot of pain. No big world to explore, no crafting either, but I can't say I miss that much personally.

Lack of new content will be what makes or breaks this game- current amounts of content and the current level cap of 10 will mean powergamers run out of stuff to run through fairly fast, and it looks more geared towards those who put in a more limited number of hours. Having said that I've heard nothing about the amount of content in the pipeline. Some of the current quests are very weak and hopefully the quality will improve. If not then they will lose a lot of players after their 30 days.

I'm glad it's not another game trying to be WOW, though a lot of players can't seem to get over it. Comparisons with GW seem odd as you could level that in no time at all and get on with the PVP, which was the whole point, wasn't it?

Overall 8/10 is pretty fair, though that may need revising in a months time. It's a shame they got some pseudonym in who knows little about the original game to review it, though...