So last week I talked about DDO from a billing model standpoint, and how impressed I am with it, and went on and on about how it’s the best thing since sliced bread.  Well this week I’m going to talk a bit about the game itself.  And for the most part I’m going to treat it like a new game, even though it’s been out for quite awhile now.  This is because when Turbine went back and redesigned the game to better support an F2P model, they also took the time to address a lot of the original problems with the game – streamlining quests, shortening long instances into shorter ones, and adding a great deal more solo support.  So what’s the story with DDO…

First, if you decide to go play DDO, I would have to begin with a warning.  I hate to do it, but it’s important.  And the warning is, be aware that there are some seemingly small, but fundamental shifts to what I would say has become the convention for selecting and interaction.  And this is quite likely to break the game for you.  Don’t let it.  What I’m talking about, is that in DDO, you right-click an object to select it, and left-click an object to interact with it.  And left-clicking on nothing results in your swinging your weapon.  The net result of this is that you, along with everyone else running around newbie island, will spend the first few hours of the game constantly swinging your sword at every NPC you try to talk to and every player you interact with.  The other thing that may cause you to feel like the game is broken is that there is no “hold down both buttons to run” mode.  So as soon as you press the left button (with the right button) to run, again, you’ll just stand there and swing your sword.  Don’t let it bother you too much, just embrace the change, go with the flow, and chuckle at yourself and everyone else that’s running around going SWOOSH SWOOSH SWOOSH all the time.

In fact, “embrace change” should be your mantra if you’re coming to DDO from WoW, or Aion, or even Champions Online.  Because it’s quite a different beast in gameplay and mechanics than your standard MMO fare.  For instance, the game is actually quite a bit more action-oriented than you might at first suspect.  And by “action-oriented” I mean requires you to get off dead center and move your ass around while fighting.  Attack is left-click, as I said before, and targeting is automatic.  You hold down the right mouse button, which puts you in mouse-move mode, put a little round cursor over the thing you want to attack, and left-click as fast as your equipped weapon speed will allow you too.  And mobs move around a lot in DDO.  Spell casters leap away from you, trying to put distance between you and them so they can cast their spells.  Ranged mobs stop and run away, or find better positions to fire from.  And positioning is important – flanking bonuses on your “to hit” roll are granted to you when attacking from behind, and to mobs that attack from your behind.  Certain abilities, such as a rogue’s sneak attack activate automatically when “a mob is unaware of you”, and that is often dependent upon positioning.  The net result is that in large combats, you will often find yourself circle-strafing and running about and clicking like a mad-man (or woman) – moving and running much more often than you ever do in your typical WoW pve combat (where movement typically breaks 90% of anything you’re trying to attempt).

In DDO, all of the gameplay – the fighting, looting, etc, takes place in interior or exterior instances.  In this way, DDO is very reminiscent of Guild Wars.  The only common areas where you’ll find non-party member players are in the cities, which have all the shops,vendors, and quest givers.  Accepting a quest points you to a door, and that door leads to an instance in which you and your party members are the only participants.  And once inside these instances, you’ll find gameplay that again is signficantly more interactive than your standard MMO de jour:  Hidden rooms and secret panels you have to actively search for, using a skill, to be revealed; Indiana Jones style traps, spiked floors, and flaming pits that require either the brute strength of a fighter to endure, or the trap detection & dismantling skills of a rogue to disarm;  out of the way locations that require nimble leaps from rafter to rafter to get too; and all sort of puzzles to solve that having nothing to do with fighting.  In fact, while in an instance, killing mobs doesn’t grant any experience at all.  All of your experience is doled out through quests and sub quests, with bonuses given for various accomplishments during the instance.  Finish the quest without having to re-enter, get a bonus; Smash all the crates (there is a lot of crate smashing in DDO!), get a bonus.  Kill a random named boss mob, get a bonus.  There are often quests given for killing X number of mobs, where X is a suitably large number, so there is still plenty of reason to inflict wanton destruction upon the wildlife.  And I actually find it liberating – in that if I’m in a party and the stupid fighter is up there one-shotting waves upon waves of mobs while I try to disarm the trap he’s standing in, I know I’ll still get some credit for those kills. 

What’s to Like

For me, there’s actually quit a bit to like.  If you play with a  small group of regular friends, this game is tailor made for you.  And since the revamp, even if you play by yourself, it’s now quite playable.  The main thing I like is that, in much the same way that Guild Wars and City of Heroes did, the game play is doled out in easily digestible 30 minute chunks, each with a start, a middle, and an end.  This is ideal for my lifestyle.  I have almost never participated in raiding in any MMO to any lengthy extent, because I simply have never had the time to spend three to four hours at a time, two or three nights a week, in a single play session.  But allow me to log in, get something productive done in 30 minutes to an hour, feel like I’ve made progress, and log back out?  And you have me hook line and sinker.

I’m also a huge fan of the increased interactivity and the ambience of DDO’s dungeons.  A disembodied Dungeon Master voice describes rooms, smells, sounds, etc to you as you enter different areas, and I find the effect absolutely entertaining.  And actually being asked to do things to finish missions.. to solve puzzles, to jump from rafter to rafter, (okay a little of that goes a long ways, but still), is a refreshing increase in brain power and gameplay over the “right-click and wait on progress bar” that describes the entire depth of interaction that you have with the game in most MMO’s.  Mind you, I don’t want my MMO to turn into a platform or console game, but swinging the pendulum back towards more gameplay a little bit is a nice change.

What’s not to Like

Despite all the fun stuff I’m finding and how much I’m enjoying the game, there are still some hurdles to get past.  First of all, there is, as I mentioned above, the slight change to the “core MMO control scheme” that you have probably come to know and love, and readjusting your brain to wrap around that can be harder than you might think.

Additionally, DDO’s level mechanic (derived from Dungeon & Dragons itslef) is kind of wonky.  In pen and paper DDO, you level up rather infrequently.  The designers of DDO, in their attempt to remain faithful to the P&P game, kept the relatively slow leveling curve.  But to make life more tolerable as an MMO player, between levels you get “ranks”, with 4 ranks per level, and at each rank you get some enhancements, which are essentially tweaks to your existing feats and skills.  It’s an okay system, but ultimately not as satisfying personally, as just a straight level-up would be.  What’s interesting is that it really is largely just semantics – the frequency of “leveling up” (gaining  ranks) is about what it should be for a modern MMO, and the stuff you gain when you gain ranks is the equivalent of those dreaded “odd” levels in WoW and CoH, where all you got was crummy slots or ranks, instead of actual cool powers.  But to me it just goes to show you you that semantics matter, and you should call a level a level dammit, and not bandy about with terms to satisfy some arbitrary design mechanic.

Also, DDO’s heavily instanced, hub-centric gameplay suffers from the same problems its cousins Guild Wars and CoH do.  The world is just going to feel small.  There are exterior instances, and those certainly help to open the world up a bit, but when you spend the first 10 to 20 hours of the game running around first a small island, and then a small part of a city, and are most doing small to medium sized interiors off of that world, well it just doesn’t have the open world feel that you get from traipsing around Elwynn Forest or Ered Luin.  And by the twentieth time you’ve seen the sewers’ tileset for an instance, you’re already wanting something else.  Now I will caveat this with saying again, I think they’ve made this much better than it was when the game originally launched, and with the release of low-cost content packs offering a variety of content, I think there is plenty of potential there to change things up a bit if you desire.  But if you don’t do anything, and just muddle along forging through the stuff they give you as they give it to you, well I think it will become repetitive.

Finally, though soloing is far more viable now than it was when the game launched, I don’t think this game is soloable all the way throughout.  I’ve already encountered at least a few missions that essentially require a group.  While I could skip these, it’s usually relatively simple thing to find a pickup group to do them, and I suspect that the further I get into the game, the more prevalent this becomes.  So I would advise that you should go into the game expecting to eventually group.  And admittedly, for many, this may ultimately be a reason they walk away.

Overall

Overall I’m really liking this game.  I spent my first money in it just the other night – I bought a pack of points that allowed me to unlock the Drow race (cause I’m all about the purple skinned elf, duh!), and to buy a low level content pack, which I haven’t tried yet, but will hopefully soon.  And still have a bit left over for some healing potions and maybe an experience potion.  If i walk away next week, I feel like I got my moneys worth.  And if I stay longer, I almost certainly will get the subscription to cement my stay.  But given my gypsy nature, DDO is a game, and a billing model, that fits me to a tee.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Post ‘em up, you know you want too!