Given that I’ve been spending so much time playing D&D in the real world, I decided it was finally time to give the Dungeons and Dragons MMO — er, not that D&D MMO, the other one — a try.
Dungeons and Dragons Online is one of the few well-known MMORPGs that I had not played up until now. The badly dated graphics coupled with a poorly regarded free to play model left me with the impression of a low-budget, low-effort sort of game, and I was intimidated by its reputation as an unusually complex title. But since D&D has been on my brain so much lately, curiosity won the day.
DDO is a very odd game. Playing it feels like I stepped through a portal into some alternate reality where MMO design evolved along entirely different lines.
In some ways, DDO is a staunchly traditional RPG hewing very closely to classic tabletop mechanics. Character creation involves not just the usual racial, class, and visual options, but also rolling your stats and picking feats. And this commitment to old-school character building and intense mechanical depth continues throughout the game. Some of the item tooltips are practically novel-length, even at low levels.
There’s also a greater richness to quest mechanics that harkens back to older RPGs. In addition to combat, there’s also simple puzzles, as well as hidden rooms to sniff out and traps to dodge.
But then you also have the fact that this is actually an action combat game, or an early ancestor thereof, so in that sense it feels quite modern. There’s no auto-attacking here; moment to moment combat feels more like Diablo than traditional CRPGs.
You do have an action bar, but there’s not the same reliance on rotations of active abilities you’d expect from an old school MMO. At least as a paladin, my active class abilities were few in number and very limited in their use, with the focus of combat on simply swinging my axe. The action bar is therefore as much devoted to consumables and swapping weapon sets as it is to class abilities.
Most of my time in DDO, my attention was held simply by how unusual the game design is compared to other MMOs. As a student of the genre, it’s fascinating.
I do also admire the commitment to staying true to D&D mechanics. I didn’t have to look up what stats do because I already knew from table-top, and my paladin had much the same abilities as her pen and paper equivalent.
However, for all the ways DDO is unique, I ended up drifting away from it for much the same reasons most MMOs fail to hold my attention.
One is that the game is simply too easy. Going in I was worried such a group-centric game would be too punishing to the solo player, but I spent all my time killing enemies in one or two hits from my axe, while never in the slightest danger of dying. The addition of cheaply available (and seemingly quite overpowered) NPC followers makes the quests even more braindead.
DDO does have a variety of difficulty settings for every quest, which is a design I very much admire, but as non-subscriber, I was only ever able to do each quest on “normal” during my first playthrough, and “pay to make the game not suck” is never an enticing business model.
The other issue is that the story is very bland. The dungeon master narration in each quest is a nice touch of ambiance, but it fails to entirely cover the fact that there’s very little plot here. In my time with the game I encountered no memorable NPCs, and ultimately most quests are just of the blandest “kill ten rats” fare.
There are other issues, too. As mentioned, the graphics are painfully dated, and the game is just straight up unpleasant to look at. Leveling is very slow (probably another F2P restriction), and I don’t know the Eberron setting very well, so I felt little connection to the world.
If you’re a fan of MMO game design and the history thereof, DDO is probably worth checking out at least in brief. It’s very unique, and it’s fun to fantasize how MMOs might have evolved differently if DDO had been more successful. Otherwise, though, I’m not sure it’s worth your time.
Superior Realities 
You need to play the game above the starter area to get a real feel for it. But there’s nothing anyone can do about the older graphics.
I got past the tutorial island. Actually I felt it got less interesting at that point.
Speaking as someone who just started playing relatively recently, I think the main draw of the game is the D&D system…or what resembles the D&D system. To be honest, the combat feels very similar to WOW. If you are melee, you just hold down the mouse button and occasionally hit hotkeys for a few special attacks. That’s not much better than vanilla Skyrim to be honest (at least Oblivion penalized you for attacking enemies who were blocking).
The slow movement speed also really kills enjoyment of the game. At low levels you have to make do with temporary speed boosts, but having to recharge boots constantly is annoying.
And f2p gameplay is actually quite awful. The problem is simple : the game is balanced for elite difficulty or higher, but f2p players cannot open those difficulties on their own on their first life, they have to get someone else in the party to open it for them. So most new players play the game on normal mode and find it ridiculously easy and unrewarding. You literally level 3 times as fast, or more, if you play elite mode due to all the xp bonuses.
The devs are so desperate for vip subscriptions that they dont see how the normal mode restriction is turning new players off. One thing that struck me about DDO is how desperate the devs are for money. The game is even more pay2win than korean MMORPGs than have been brought to the west….who are infamous for their gachapons and cash shops.
They blatantly sell stat boosting items in the store. Permanent +6 to all stat tomes…this is HUGE. At level 15, that’s +3 to hit, damage, saving throws, all skills, +3 hp/level, etc, etc. Not only that but paid content have “named items” with specific stats that are usually much better than the best randomly generated gear you can ever find…and these named items usually bind to your character or account to prevent you from trading them. Why? Because the devs want the OP gear to be restricted to people who have bought access to the content.
The devs are infact, so desperate for you to buy access to OP gear that at one point, they changed the crafting system so that unbound gear (which could be traded freely) costed more than 5 times as much to craft as bound gear (which could not be traded to others). People used to craft leveling gear for their friends who just started playing, in order to help them get started…but the devs didnt like that, so they took that away. Now to get good gear on your own, you have to pay them for access to OP gear or have someone feed you a lot of mats to level your crafting skills.
To give you an idea of how new paid content produces power creep…I partied with a level 10 warlock (a spellcaster) who had a full set of level 10 gear from the newest DDO expansions. And he couldn’t stop gushing about how his physical and magical defences were better than our melee classes who were using the best crafted gear at the same level. In other words, a spellcaster with paid gear from the latest expansions is tankier than the frontline melee classes who don’t have the latest paid gear. Pretty crazy huh?
You can see how bad the power creep is just by looking at how hard the enemies are in older content vs newer content. Enemies in newer content generally have more than double the hp compared to older content at the same quest level, because they are balanced for the newest, most OP gear…which is OP because the devs want you to buy access to them.
I’m kind of past caring about selling power via cash shops (well, I don’t like it, but it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker), but the difficulty issue is a big turn-off. I don’t mind paying for a game, but the baseline experience should be at least somewhat enjoyable.
I’m not sure about DDO being easy, unless it’s changed quite a lot since I played. One of the reasons I didn;t get all that far (although I did get a long way past the starting areas) was that it was too harsh an experience. I died often and it wasn’t unusual for me to fail to complete quests and give up. It always felt a more hardcore kind of MMO than most. Also I absolutely loathe the Dungeon Master. I find that kind of voice over to be the absolute antithesis of immersion.
The graphics, on the other hand, I remember as being quite attractive, albeit dated.
It’s entirely possible that it gets more challenging later on, but after about seven hours /played during which I never even got close to death, I kind of lost the motivation to keep going.
Might also depend a lot on class. I was a paladin, which is supposed to be a very hardy class.
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
The paladin is actually a great first class to explore the game with because it’s so difficult to really gimp one, Even a very poorly built paladin is a strong solo character at least into the low teens. I’m not convinced you would have had a better experience if you had tried some other class that you are nearly certain to bone your first build of, or that can’t solo it’s way out of a wet paper sack without a healing hireling. The game likely isn’t for you.
That said, I disagree about the graphics. For a really old game that runs just fine on a toaster, I think it’s overall quite pretty. Back when I was still blogging actively I even did a post about it:
random DDO screenshots
If you go into a ten + year old game expecting a lot better, you’ll be disappointed more often than not. Of course SWTOR was the last modernish MMO I spend much time in and I found it to be very pretty, so I’m the exact opposite of a graphics snob.
PS: I hope my post didn’t come across as condescending. I only mean my opinion of the graphics differs from yours. I also know that I can happily play a lot of games that others find quite fugly.
No worries. Reasonable folk can differ. I freely admit that I am a bit of a graphics snob. I just really like to feel immersed in game worlds, and I need good graphics for that.