RabidHardware

Monday evening I was sitting around the house idling on MSN when a good friend of mine popped on. Being that my WoW subscription had just expired I really had nothing to sink my time into that evening (apart from the hundreds of hours of coding I have been putting off for months) so I started chatting with said friend about misk. He mentioned that at the time he was installing Dungeons & Dragons Online and was about to immerse himself in this fantastic new world of awesomeness that Turbine had promised the D&D community.

So being the weak willed person I am, and excited at the prospect of playing a brand new game with a good group of friends, I immediately rushed out to Walmart and picked up a copy of the game. Needless to say I was impressed with the $48 CND pricetag and excited by the promise of “Immersive, and groundbreaking online group play.”. Already having peed myself with excitement I rushed home to put on a new pair of pants and install the game.

The feeling of glee subsided when I began installing the game. Like many other MMO’s these days DDO comes on 4 very pretty looking discs. The install process was fairly simply, but it choked on Disc 3 a couple of times for whatever reason. Once I cleaned Disc 3 a few times it seemed to get past it’s issues and installed the rest of the game. Time spent installing? 2 hours.

Now if you think I’ve been a bit on the negative side so far, just wait. Consider this a warning to all those D&D fans out there, although I’m a huge fan of Turbine I think they shit the proverbial bed on this game.

[h2]First Impressions[/h2]

Now I definately don’t have the fastest and/or greatest gaming rig these days (upgrade coming soon) as I’m still a member of that barton 2500+ w/ radeon 9xxx series and 2gb of ram gang, so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot graphically out of the game. That being said I also wasn’t expecting the giant graphic lagfest on even the lowest settings at 1280×1024.

Once you load up the DDO launcher screen, which is eerily similar to the WoW prelaunch screen (you know, the one where they advertise everything and you have to click the play button), you are asked to select a preferred server. There are no explanations as to what each server contains, the player count or the response times of each server, and when you do select a server there is no indication that you’ve picked it other than that it highlights your selection (ie; no check box or anything else). Once finished with the server selection you are allowed to load the game world and create your character.

Once you’ve waited through the lengthy load times the first thing you experience is the long but fairly entertaining cutscene that explains your background in the game world. The jist of it is that you were at war with someone in a far away land, the war is over and you’re looking for something to do so you fall into being an adventurer. Hmmmm, sounds kind of like most generic fantasy introductions to me. The cutscene continually switches back and forth between rendered and ingame footage and lags accordingly.

By the time I was finished being mildly entertained by the content and laginess of the introduction I was faced with the daunting character creation screen. For a non hardcore D&D player such as myself this screen can be fairly scary, I found the interace to be very clunky and lacking some of the basic explanations you would expect for certain things.

There are the standard sets of D&D player classes as the game is based on the D&D ruleset, but there is no real explanation of each attribute, skill, or feat other than your basic statement of the obvious. For example, a skill such as Power Attack was accompanied by an outstanding explanation of “A powerful attack that causes more damage than a standard attack”. Wow! What an awesome statement of the obvious, I bet they had to work really hard on that one!

Anyhow, once you’ve selected your character class, in my case a fighter, you’re given the opportunity to define his appearance. This interface is even clunkier than the last! I mean what ever happened to being able to define the height of your character (within limits of course) or use something like EA’s game face technology to at least come out with a face that isn’t completely generic. There was such a lack of real combinations that you end up with an avatar that is fairly laughable. But once I’m through the character creation screen I can finally play this wonderful game! Wrong. You must first sift through so me more bullshit on your way to what is perhaps the worst part of the game, the game world itself.

[h2]Gameplay[/h2]

I want to say something nice about this game, really I do. It has a very unique combat style and some fairly neat requirements as far as party strategy are concerned when in battle, but the engine is such a hog that it nullifies all of these positives.

Sluggish game engine problems aside, the gameplay [i]is[/i] quite refreshing. The questing in this game isn’t what you see typically in other MMO’s in that it doesn’t seem to be a huge grindfest. In some quests rather than fighting your way through huge hordes of creatures in order to defeat some ominous final boss you fight your way through a few groups of fairly skilled creatures and are encountered with very classic D&D style traps or puzzles to realize the final goals of the quest.

The combat system is another refreshing plus that DDO offers players. Rather then the typical *click* …wait… *click* structure that you see in most modern MMO’s, DDO throws back to the days of a D2 style direct interaction combat system. This definately helps to add to the excitement factor as once again clicking my mouse button actually directly and immediatley effects the battle at hand.

Another nifty element that Turbine managed to throw into the mix, that I’m sure most of you D&D folk would most definately appreciate is an ambient Dungeon Master. I call it an Ambient DM as the sound content is static and you can’t actually interact with the DM but the voice is there to give you hints about your surroundings. The voice actor they chose to do the DM was absolutely spot on, he adds an ambience to the game that as a player you definately learn to appreciate. Whether simply describing your surroundings or dropping subtle hints about varioust traps, secret doors, or other nifty game elements Turbine has an excellent feature on their hands that I hope to see them continue to build on.

Unfortunately, although Turbine managed to incorporate a fairly exciting combat system, a unique DM element, and other fancy features it almost seems as if they forgot about certain character classes. The first thing you will notice with any basher type of character is that there is a staggering lack of skills/feats for these types of classes. I realize that there is only so many things that a person can do while swinging a large, blunt, object at another piece of flesh but for gods sake you’d think a team of professional game designers would have the ability to add some sort of variety to the situation.

Although some of the gameplay elements have been fairly well done I think the largest gaping hole left in the entire game is the complete lack of PVP. There is no possible way that this feature didn’t cross the design teams mind. What modern, popular game nowadays that is worth a damn doesn’t afford the players an option of shooting, maiming, torturing and oblitering their fellow players? I do realize that for the D&D purist PVP was never in the ruleset but a good DM should’ve been able to incorporate PVP elements if desired. In DDO it’s as if they simply ignored PVP or perhaps pretended it wasn’t an option.

I guess the only way to really sum up the gameplay in DDO is with a big giant question mark. I’m really undecided as to whether or not I should’ve enjoyed the experience or felt cheated by some of the gaping holes that Turbine left in the game I think for now I’m just going to pretend that it didn’t happen.

[h2]Graphics / Sound[/h2]

Now earlier I managed to rant pretty hard on the incredible slug that the game engine seems to be. The hardware that I used really isn’t [i]that[/i] pathetically out of date and yet it managed to bring the system to a grinding hault. The fact that it did happen would lead us to the obvious conclusion that with some really modern hardware the game should really kick some serious ass in the graphics department. As dissapointment seems to be the flavor of the day I’m going to have to say no to that one as well. One can browse through screenshot galleries from various different gaming websites and still not see anything out of this world. If I was to compare DDO’s attempt at graphics to another popular MMO I would have to say that the game it most tries to resemble is EQ2, and I think it’s safe to say the EQ2 does a better job anyhow.