DDO Anyone?

[Melbosa]

Wondering if any of our members are looking into going into this or in the beta already?



If so would you like a section for it?



http://www.ddo.com/

[Shayne]

Truely a shame.  Turbine has spent a ton of time & money on this and no matter how good or how much publicity it gets World Of Warcraft has cornered the market for MMORPGs.



I suppose you could manage to see 250K subscribers if you market well, and can keep the game fresh, but to take on Blizzard, i just cant see it.



Playing WoW for a second time, this time smelling the roses and now powering to 60, i am totally impressed.  A lot of depth, a lot of thought.



I wanted into the D&DO beta, but didnt get in.  Curious to the combat system and quests (as that makes or breaks).

[Thorin]

Playing WoW for a second time, this time smelling the roses and now powering to 60, i am totally impressed.  A lot of depth, a lot of thought.

So WoW is most fun when you're top level?  I'd heard that before from someone, and it made me wonder why they bothered making people grind their way up to top level (besides to rake in more cash).



I wonder if there'll ever be an online game where the journey is more fun than getting up to the top first...  I know they exist as single-player games (or used to when I was younger).  That's where pencil-n-paper RPGs still have the advantage, if you have an awesome DM like Mr. A. who can do all the funny voices and weird personalities.

[Melbosa]

I found Asheron's Call 2 (also made by Turbine - who also tanked the game in 2 years after release) was actually fun to get to the max.  The max wasn't the biggest deal in the world once there... lots of things you could do yes, but the journey was fun.  And they kept changing the world as you went - whether it was the quests or just the mobs that were best to grind with, so it was a bit different every toon I played through as.



Never did get the same sense from WoW, although it had a nice change that each race (for the most part) started in a different area and had a different beginning. And there is usually 2 zones to play in, with different story arcs for any given level range.  But for some reason never had the fun playing up to the high lvls in WoW as I did in AC2.

[Cova]

I found WoW to be a lot of fun leveling up - the fact that I pretty much always had a full quest-log always gave me something to do instead of just sitting and grinding.  And due to instances people actually DID dungeons, instead of just sitting camping somewhere, compared to say EQ where each dungeon had 5 or 6 known good camps, and no-one every actually worked through to the end (except the odd group that wanted to stay at the end and camp the boss, which is still just camping).



On the other hand, 30+ man raiding is also a lot of fun, though it requires a large guild of people all in the same level range (usually max), and a lot of co-operation and communication.  This was the most-fun part of WoW for me (our guild was the first into molten-core on my server, and got the farthest in for the horde before various issues caused us to break up) because we had to work together to learn how to do things, and everyone had to pay attention and not make mistakes - a mistake at that level of play can easily result in wiping out the entire guild in a place with 6+ hours of work to get back to - as easy as standing too close to the wrong wall, or pulling aggro off the tank.  I have yet to see an MMO provide raid-level content for low-level characters (content that would require 30+ low level chars to complete, and that would also somehow stop regular groups of 5-6 high-levels).  EQ2 claims to offer low-level raiding content, but I have yet to play it.

[Mr. Analog]

To me the big problem with DDO is the fact that it's associated with Dungeons & Dragons, make no mistake that there is a stygma around the game as being squarely entrenched in the realm of Dorks. The World of Warcraft, while similar has a broader appeal because after all it started life as a computer gamaing phenomonon of it's own and is far more attractive than something that at least three generations of gamers have been playing...



DDO does not appeal to the hardcore pen & paper RPG gamer, but that really isn't the indended demographic. There has been a carefully orchestrated shift in the D&D property ever since WOTC absorbed TSR to make it more accessable to the large market of video gamers. This was kicked into overdrive after Hasbro acquired Wizards and we've seen the D&D core rules retooled as a more logical facet of itself. If you don't remember AD&D, there were a lot of fuzzy and/or contradictory rules that could be used or ignored by the DM on a discressionary basis. Video gamers have a hard time wrapping their brains around this, and certainly trying to branch the core rules into video games has been a monumental chore in the past. So now with the 3.x ruleset we see that the mechanics of D&D have been built into a framework system (called d20) that is portable into the world of video games and a bit friendlier to newbies.



DDO is a way for Hasbro / WOTC to attract and transition new players into the D&D universe.



My problem with this strategy is that it ill-prepares potential pen & paper RPG gamers by fooling them with the idea that the base mechanics are exactly the same between the video games and the pen & paper systems. It also locks them into linear storylines with little to no unique character development. This usually leads to a certain level of frustration for new gamers and a bit of consternation for old players as there is a bit of a "gaming gap" between role playing games and video "RPGs".



Even with our group I see some difficulty for certain players differentiating between the idea that they are't supposed to be  playing a character through a game, they're playing as a character, living a lifetime.

[Mr. Analog]

Just to clarify my last statement:



You should always be seperate from your character. The character is you, when you are playing.



Hope this clears up some confusion.