Once more unto the breach, dear friends! A slightly shorter free trial then usual this time with Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, a modern day PC-based incarnation of the pen-and-paper game that started it all off, over 30 years ago. The free trial is available here:

http://trial.ddo.com/

It lasts ten days, rather than the more customary fourteen, weighs in at about 2GB, and involves a bit of wrangling with File Planet, and quite a bit of patching once it’s down, which makes for a bit more of a chore than most. It needs no credit card, only a valid email address, and comes in European, and American flavours, so be sure to tick the correct flag for where you live.

The City of Stromreach stands on the frontier of the wild and dangerous lands of Xen’Drik, and attracts adventurers from across the world, seeking fortune, power and glory. Beset from within by internecine factional politics and scheming, and from without by hostile creatures and malign forces, it is a city of opportunity for those skilled with a spell or blade.

You are one such, a young but promising mercenary, drawn by tales of heroism and profit, and even now, sail on the morning tide to this nexus of intrigue and adventure. You start life on the dock on the island of Smuggler’s Rest, the last port of call before reaching the city itself, with nothing but a cheap blade, the clothes on your back, and a pocket full of ambition, determined to carve a piece of this brave new frontier for yourself…

Three Good Things:

• Dice:
  Put simply, its D&D, and shows. I only have a ‘one read through’ passing familiarly with the more basic of the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, but DDO does seem to be a very faithful implementation of those rules. Certainly, Turbine have had to take some liberties with some of it, due to the very medium of an online computer game. Things like the ‘mana-bar’, and rest shrines have been added to make the basic gaming of D&D workable in a real-time computer game environment, but as far as I can tell, most of the rest of it is here, intact, and working quite well; skills, feats, equipment, spells and so on. The UI even displays little ‘d20′ rolls in one corner to show the results of various things you’d roll a dice for in a PnP game, which is a nice touch. Those with no D&D experience at all can still pick up the ropes here, but the drastically different framework may take a bit of getting used to, if WoW, EQ2, etc is all you’ve known, as many things work slightly differently in D&D, compared to the more usual MMORPG. (For this reason alone, ten days may not be enough for it to properly try to sell itself to you – there are a lot of new things to learn)

  How well and faithfully the campaign world of Eberron has made it online, I’m less qualified to say, having no real knowledge of it from rulebooks, but the city and environs are certainly well crafted things, striking a good balance between roleplaying fantasy backdrop, and functional linking lobby.

• Adventures:
  DDO does away with the more traditional ‘Combat XP’, found elsewhere, and only grants it’s xp for completing quests, and the bulk of this is given mostly for the successful completion of entire instances. This move away from grinding and into a much more rigid quest driven type of play means that every quest is a little story in it’s own right, and you’re always caving monster’s heads in for a reason, which is nice. Numerous adventures exist, and improving on early release anecdotes, it seems there are now a lot of ones suitable for soloing players, if a group can’t be found, or you just want to be with yourself for a bit. Saying that, it becomes clear from very early on, that to get the most out of this game, a group is likely to needed, and a regular and dependable one at that.

  The various instances differ in duration and team requirement, and can be re-attempted on successively higher difficulty settings, once the previous one has been unlocked, allowing for a fairly tailored, and quite episodic, gaming session. DDO has some nods to the more usual overland explorable zones, complete with wandering monster encounters, but in the main, this game seems to be about lots and lots of party-based instanced dungeons. I guess the clue is in the title really!

• Action:
  It uses a very novel FPS-style mechanic during actual play, which makes moment to moment fighting feel much more like a single-player action title, in co-op mode, than anything more usually found in the MMORPG category. Aiming is required, and targeting is not. If the monster is in front of you, and you swing your sword, you’ll hit it. If its out of range, to behind you, you won’t. Everything also moves much faster than typical, and position becomes far more important than elsewhere, with many of the monsters deliberately jumping about and trying to outflank you.

  It all makes for an experience that romps along with a carefree abandon, certainly at the lower levels at least, and is quite unlike anything else to be found in today’s crop of MMORPGs. It does add a certain FPS skill requirement to it all, beyond that normally found in an MMORPG, which can take a bit of getting used to for the new player, but seems sufficiently fresh to be worth that extra effort on the learning curve, and its nice to be doing more than playing the usual and often abstract game of hotkey mashing found elsewhere.

Three Bad Things:

• Spoilers:
  The various instances are not randomly generated, but usually handcrafted and painstakingly designed ‘D&D Modules’, complete with ‘DM Voiceover’, hidden traps, scripted events and all manner of secrets and surprises. While this is good thing in itself, and makes for a much more involving dungeon than is usually found elsewhere, such surprises are only surprising the first time around, and even two or three goes through the same dungeon myself, saw me starting to remember where all the bits and pieces were. These instances seem to become ‘self-spoiling’ very quickly, and ideally, you should probably only do each of them once, ever. I’m not sure if this is that practical, given level progression only comes from dungeon completion.

  This problem is particularly compounded in pick-up groups. Its hard to apportion blame for this really. Many of the PUG folks I grouped with were most likely on character three or four by now, and there seems to be only enough dungeons for one common path up the levels, rather than the different starting areas and lands given to different races in other titles. People can’t help but remember past goes at it all, and with the best will in the world, are unlikely to keep silent about important or dangerous dungeon features up ahead.

  It all makes any attempts to ‘keep it a surprise’, or ‘discover it for yourself’, all the way up, quite hard work and a deliberate rationing exercise, and I can’t help but feel that the game is enjoyed at it’s best, in a small, regular group of RL, (or long-time online) friends, who all agree to only play at the same times, and not go off on individual side-trips – working through the game in a more deliberate manner than most of us MMORPG players are accustomed to; a kind of Tuesday n00b Club type of affair. (It even has built-in voice chat, which would probably help there) This isn’t always practical for everyone, but with a certain amount of resignation about the ‘newness’ of it all, there’s still a lot of fun to be had with the basic combat gameplay anyway.

  One noticeable effect of all this is in groups. The first timer will tend to feel harried by those who have done all this before, and perhaps not get the chance to see it all properly, as intended. On the other hand, those who have done it all before several times over, can get quite understandably impatient and cross with dawdling virgins. ‘no rushing plz’ is often seen in the text descriptions of parties advertising for extra members, hinting that this disparity of pace isn’t just me, and I think it probably pays to make your expectations of the upcoming dungeon clear to the rest of the group before you get started, rather just just sign up and plunge in like elsewhere.

  Other MMO dungeons and instances suffer from this to some degree as well, but since they’re often more generic and bland experiences on the first go anyway, there’s generally less to actually ‘spoil’, as such.

• Imbalance:
  Something that caught me out a bit, in DDO all classes are not created equal, and judging by the descriptions, some of them being a lot harder to play than others, is in fact�working as intended. This ties into the grouping quite significantly, and means that a lot more thought than ‘I always play a Wizard!’ needs to go into the initial choice. In general melee classes, and the Cleric, seem not to need a group nearly as much as the ranged, casting and utility classes do.

  Rather than picking whichever you want for purely RP reasons, or for the particular coolness of one over another, things like solo viability, melee survival and overall difficulty need to be considered first. The difference between being a Rogue and being a Barbarian, alone and in the exactly same dungeon, at the same level, was quite immense in terms of viability and pure enjoyment.

  This is fine if you know that there’s always going to be a Fighter to keep you safe, or a Cleric to patch you up, and indeed, the more ‘difficult’ classes still seem very useful additions to a party. Those with more solo tendencies, or who rely more on randomly composed pickup groups to get things done, are likely to have a much easier time of things if they pick a melee class to do it with though, which can curtail some of the original ideas of what they wanted to be.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with picking ‘difficult’ on purpose, mind you, and I suppose this one is more a warning than a criticism, per se. Read the class descriptions carefully…they actually mean it here.

• Deceptive:
  I think the biggest problem I had over the course of the trial, is that DDO is a master of disguise. It looks and feels so much like a more traditional MMORPG that it continually lulled me into all manner of false assumptions about was actually going on, versus what I thought should be going on, and the sudden coming to terms with a novel FPS style of gameplay in an MMO didn’t help matters much. Throughout, I found myself having to learn new things, which isn’t bad in itself, but also having to unlearn other things I thought I knew off by heart, and in most other MMORPGs, are taken as read. Quite irritating for a mechanics obsessive like myself, and I suspect this is likely to cause difficulties for other MMO Tourists as well.

A practical example of this can be seen all over the Harbor, with new players constantly making sudden and gratuitous swipes with their weapon. ‘Swish!’ There are no monsters here, and its not just showing off. LMB is select, and RMB is attack. I and, (by the frequent and random ‘Swipe!’ noises I kept hearing), many other players, seemed to instinctively assume that RMB would rotate the camera about, I think. Oh yes…trivial, I know, and just a quick poke at the Keymapping screen to fix, but this kind of thing crops up all over the place, and it took the full ten days for me to get to the stage where I felt comfortable enough in my character and the world around them, to stop fighting the game, and start concentrating fully on fighting the monsters. Usually it’s a much quicker process, I’ve found.

This all makes me a bit of a hypocrite I think, I who bang on about my yearnings for a ‘different’ sort of MMO all the time. Its not so much that DDO is a genuinely different take on it all; it is, more that it does such a good job of appearing to be an MMORPGs of the more classical school. Still, given time and determination, these things can be gotten used to, I’d imagine. Just not sure ten days is quite long enough to unlearn so much. I do give Turbine the benefit of the doubt over it all though. I don’t think that they’re being deliberately different to wind me up on purpose. I think that most of the differences are just a result of keeping so closely to a set of rules designed for Pen and Paper gaming, rather than purely for online play from the outset.

All quite broad and nebulous things, I agree, but to it’s credit, I didn’t see any of the more specific and mundane things broken, and on the whole, DDO, circa Aug-07, is a nicely polished package – certainly for the first few levels anyway.

I reached the end of the trial impressed at the ambition, and indeed, execution, of the idea – a real and working attempt at bringing D&D to the PC, with friends. Mind you, I can’t help wondering if DDO is actually really aimed at us at all. By us, I mean the Wow/EQ2/etc/(see sidebar)/et al. veterans of several years standing, bored and looking for the next in a long line of MMORPGs. For us, Turbine humbly offer Lord of The Rings Online instead, which by all counts is something of a “World of Warcraft 1.5, with Hobbits”, and stuffed full of the more familiar aspects of MMO gaming, which would cause us…or me at least…somewhat less conceptual difficulties.

We can learn this other thing, of course, with some effort and grit, but it seemed to me to require a bit more work for it all than I’m used to putting in to my games; patience, restraint, understanding, and more of an open mind than I’m used to displaying.

No, I suspect DDO is mostly for actual D&D players really; a small and friendly regular group of long time compatriots, looking to try an entirely new kind of Module or Campaign Book. From what I gather, PCs have long been a part of table-top gaming – laptops with rules and tables on for quick reference. Perhaps this is another step in that evolution, rather than one in our own. Whichever side of it all you’re coming form, I suspect that ten days isn’t going to be quite long enough to assimilate so many new things though.

As for me? Well, I’ll probably give it a miss for now, but who knows? Maybe that Perfect Group will come together in my life some day, and we’ll all sign up and do it properly, some ‘DDO N00b Club’ of the not too distant future perhaps… For just the soloing and PUG work though, it wasn’t quite catchy enough for a subscription on that basis alone, I thought. Despite all this, it did strike me as quite innovative in a lot of ways though, and perhaps MMORPG Designers of the Near Future could learn a thing or two from it, for subtle inclusion into more familiar future titles.

Final Verdict: Interesting and ambitious treatment of the game that started it all. Worth a look, but possibly not to most MMO gamer’s habitual tastes. Works best with a regular group.

So that’s that then. Three trials, six weeks, and a lot of interesting and novel sights, sounds, and styles, that I’d somehow missed, ignored or simply not gotten round to before. Time to settle down for a bit I think, but probably some follow-up ranting to come still I shouldn’t wonder…