Dungeons and Dragons Online

[Blackdog]

Anyone else play this? About a week to go till my pc arrives and i have to say this is what i'm looking forward to the most. Graphically its good but couldn't compete with GW2 (the game is nearly 6 years old) however it's been consistently updated with new quests and lead the way in the industry as far as showing how a f2p model could be supplemented with a micro transaction store/ subscription service (around a fiver/month will unlock everything for you).

The game has 20 levels and since i last played a year or so ago five "epic" destinies have been added. Although this seems to be much lower than competitors in sheer number of levels i find the character creation process unrivalled.A first play through
will probably take a new player a few months to cap. The game also offers the ability to "true reincarnate" a character upon cap back to level one, while retaining all the loot, and some bonuses from ther previous lives. This can make for some really powerful characters with multiple complimentary past lives.

As a table top rpg player i like complex builds. I like the fact that ddo has no "generalists" right out the box: each class has its own weakness, barbarians have massive damage but little to no defensive/healing capabilities - this encourages smart tactical team play, which is premium for me. That said, with a bit of knowledge MASSIVELY diverse "jack of all trades" builds are a real possibility, and as the game evolves, more players will make character discoveries to fill different roles.On that note the grouping system for the instanced quests is fantastic, with players congregating in huge explorable communal areas to trade/chat/level up & drink mead.

Turbine are a good company who play an involved role in the active community. The quests they have released in the last year all look great, and they have recently released mid-high content for f2p players.On that subject i think it would be possible to level from 1 - 5 without paying any money for the game at all, and never feeling gimped when questing/raiding with twinked out VIPs.

I think the smaller number of player encourages a more interactive experience, and the loyalty of fans to the game and the franchise breeds a lot of community activites on the forums and in the form of themed events. (Right now there is a f2p halloween "Mabar" event that involves instanced raids and awesome loot for all players.

Anyway i wondered if anybody else had played this and thought i'd recommend it to anybody that fancies a seriously good fantasy mmo, for literally zero dollars.Plus imho it blows wow out of the water, but thats just my taste.

Here's a Totalbiscuit gameplay for anyone interested

[video=youtube;v-YnAIKYbVE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-YnAIKYbVE[/video]

 

[Blackdog]

And if anyone is interested Dave Arnesson & Gary Gygax (creators of tabletop DnD) both voiced Dungeon Master excerpts for their own quest series within the game, and have sadly since passed away. The element of narration really added to the feel of the game and is worth a look in for that reason alone.

 

[pr1s0ner]

Sold, I'm going to install it and give it a go this weekend

 

[Blackdog]

Winner! When you pick your server go for Ghallanda, its got the most EU folks - happy questing!

 

[sted]

Ordered this last night, in need of something else to play, and my current pc can actually handle it apparently. And so it should being a six year old game! Just hope I can get into it, if not no big deal as it was a very low price.

 

[sted]

Having a problem with getting into the game. The page to register your username and whatever is not working and when I try to launch the game it says it can't connect to the remote server.

 

[NilSatis]

Hello mate, not sure what is up here; this should be working fine; no firewall on or anything like that?

Its done by Turbine, who do the Lord of the Rings Online game (which is excellent by the way) and uses a similar free to play model; also available on Steam. The servers are almost never down for long, so something isnt right!

How did you get the game? You mentioned it was a very low price etc. but this game is free to play, with content you buy in the game paid for with real money in the form of Turbine points. You shouldnt have needed to buy it at all, the client is available to download free from Steam, then you can register either in the launcher that comes up via launching it through Steam, or you can do it without Steam and download the client from the main website, where you can also register your username and password. Any form of physical game box etc version of this will be pretty much useless as anything other than a box, due to the game being free to play; unless it includes things that are available in game. Of course you can subscribe to it, but this is a subscription on the free to play base model where by you will get various things included in the subscription, and therefore not have to purchase them through turbine points in store.

This is a good game worth exploring, but as with many free to play models, there are some downsides to this; you need to play it for a bit to find out what exactly; and it depends on how much money you want to throw into it. Lord of the Rings Online is another game they do as mentioned above that imo gives you a lot more for free; especially if you could be interested in the Tolkien lore.

I have tried both this and the Lord of the Rings; and for me the Lord of the Rings mmo was the better of the two by a mile, and has actually enticed me to spend a little money; for a lot of hours content. This game; although different from the standard mmo games; as in it has a bit of trap dodging/puzzle solving/action combat; requires a lot of thought into rolling a true d & d character, and also almost requires you to team up with people to do certain missions etc. which; as good as that is, may be difficult when there are not often people to find at the same point/level as yourself. That said, it is still a good game, and it works perfectly fine from the Steam launcher version of the client. Im not sure if like Lord of the Rings it was handed to different publishers at some point in time making the codes given with physical copies worthless (as Lord of the Rings versions are made by Codemasters....the dvd codes and offers with them simply do not work anymore)

If you are trying to use the free to play model and it is still giving you problems, then the problems may be your end assuming the servers are up on the game. The website is here; you can download the client or check your user settings via this:
DDO homepage

This game also can use dx11 and if chosen, becomes quite demanding to run for older machines graphics wise if put on maximum settings. Needless to say your future beast will tear it up, but anything much older may be problematic. Choosing dx11 and max settings on an overclocked 7970 3gb makes the card quite warm for me, the snow effect at the start of the game being the worst offender. It is worth pursuing at least to see what you think of it, and I would also recommend their other title above. Turbine support are actually quite good aswell, i had a problem buying something from the store (you can tell it is a free to play game when one of the first quests gets you to "buy" something from the store using turbine points) and they sorted it out very quickly; so if you still have problems try sending them an email. Good luck!

 

[sted]

Thanks for the reply! I happened to buy a different one; stormreach, which says the remote server is down or some such thing. I downloaded the free one earlier, played around with it a bit but couldn't really get into it, so I've uninstalled it partially for that reason. The other reason being I am very low on hdd space. doubt I'll be going back to that lol. I'll stick to NWN for now. Thanks again for the reply.

 

[NilSatis]

Ah, no worries! If you like Neverwinter Nights (am doing a run through of that at the moment strangely enough) I could recommend you plenty of others to tide you over; and of course look out for the remake of the Baldurs gate series; should be fantastic if they dont butcher it. You would like Divine divinity on Steam; and possibly Sacred Gold too. Ive just picked up Drakensang complete saga on Ebay for about 5 pounds which uses the Dark Eye ruleset apparently; of which I wouldnt have a clue or an interest about, but is quite a good game, in the same style of dragon age origins (of a much lower budget and a different ruleset ). Give us a shout if youre in need of any other ideas when you get your hard drive freed up. I wish id gone for a 2tb caviar black on my latest rig, the 1tb fills up too fast these days