More Dungeons and Dragons Online over the weekend, and I’m now, if anything, even more confused than a week ago, rather than getting the hang of it all, as one would expect. Two very different kind of session, showing me two quite different sorts of game really.

Last time saw me grumbling about being in a group that didn’t really need me, and so to avoid similar kinds of frustration, I took the initiative a bit, and did something I almost never do in my usual online wanderings, and that’s start a group of my own. The party window is a very powerful tool, allowing you to put up an extremely tailored ‘classified ad’, with level restrictions, class requirements, and even the specific adventure you’re looking for help dealing with. No need for generic ‘LFG’ spam here – its all integrated into the game in a very efficient manner, and after loitering on the docks for only a few minutes, soon had a decently balanced party, all of my own level, raring to go. A Rogue (me) for the traps, check! A Fighter for the front line, check! A Cleric for healing…two of those turned up – bonus! I’d have liked a Wizard or similar, for the back row fire-support, but it looked solid, and so we set about a range of level one solo/party quests, in Normal Mode, mostly as a warm up.

They went well, but then given the vast jump in difficulty between levels one and two in DDO, something spectacular would have had to have gone wrong for this group to fail. Well, they went well from an Objectives point of view at least – we ticked off the tasks, found treasure aplenty, and no-one died. Once again though, I’d found myself in a group made up mostly of people who had done these quests before.

Random Other Non-Rogue Party Member: ‘trap here’

Me: ‘gee, thanks’

Not that they were bad people, as such, but it’s a difficult situation. Consider:

You are a member of a traditional dungeon crawling party. You’ve been here before, and the Rogue hasn’t. Ahead, is an archway that you know to contain a trap powerful enough to kill all of you instantly, if triggered. Do you warn the group, to stop a potential catastrophe ruining it for all of you, or do you keep silent and allow the Rogue to maybe discover it for themselves for the first time, and not spoil the wonder and surprise of their chosen craft?

Tough call, and not necessarily something done out of spite. One of the Clerics did this most of the way through, not to ruin my fun I guess, but out of concern for all of us. I didn’t have the heart to tell them to stop doing it, and anyway, even one level up with Action Point enhancements, my Spot skill isn’t guaranteed. Perhaps sometimes, we’re meant to get hit by the odd trap or two. It’s part of the challenge.

They were nice enough people, although somehow I’d managed to assemble a group in which I was the only native English-speaker, which caused some fun and games in itself. Lots of umlauts going on, and many more ‘o’s with strokes through them than I normally like. A difficulty somewhat unique to EU servers, I find. Europe is a melting pot of cultures, most of whom are very proud of their mother tongues, rightly so and I accept that, but I know very little Scandinavian, which made life a bit more difficult than it would have otherwise been.

Things proceeded somewhat faster than I liked again, and I still don’t know if was me, them, or the game itself, or what. For much of the romp, they all seemed to be playing a particularly spirited game of “Half Life with Swords”, while I was trying to play a very methodical version  “Thief: Deadly Shadows”, and the two styles simply didn’t work together. Maybe I should have started getting harsh with Orders, “Sit!”, “Stay!”, “Come!”, that kind of thing. I’m not sure that would have helped matters though, so once more found myself mostly a kind of Ranger, rather than Rogue, and the whole sneaking ahead to scout out the enemy thing fell by the wayside very early on, as I just legged it along behind, trying to keep up, and maybe land an arrow or two before the three melee types mashed the poor Kobold into the flagstones.

Perhaps that is the best way – charge on through and brute-force the way to the end. At any rate, we did well, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, which is the main thing. Emboldened by our success with had a crack at a Level 2 adventure, marked on the journal as ‘long’ in duration. I’m not quite sure how long Turbine think ‘long’ is, but we barreled through that particular sewer, and eliminated the target pair of Kobold bosses in about fifteen to twenty minutes of concentrated mayhem. The healing power of two Clerics did make up for a lot of sloppy coordination though, particularly since in DDO, and�unlike pretty much everywhere else, the Cleric is actually a fairly respectable plate-wearing melee juggernaut, as well as being the main healing class. No robe and wands here!

Mind you, the Rogue on the other hand, is a far flimsier creature in DDO than found elsewhere, and I still managed to get myself beaten to death in one of the end boss fights, mostly due to an overcompensatory urge to be seen to be ‘pulling my weight’ in combat. I didn’t mind that much…we did win after all, and they even brought me back from the dead to have my turn at the big treasure chest at the end, which was nice of them.

Later on we lost a Cleric, but gained a Wizard, and tried another suitably leveled adventure – library under a lighthouse this time, where we had to steal a book from a scholar. Things went bad and we then had to fight our way out through a variety of traps (‘trap here’), undead (‘turn them!’ ‘what?’), and assorted other difficulties. Wizards seem quite fun, and I must have a go at one before my time is up.

The breakneck pace did all get a bit much in the end though, and I found myself having to give up for the night, long before I usually turn in.

The next day, refreshed, I spent a much more relaxed afternoon, soloing instead. This went much better, seeing me basically picking off any ‘solo/party’ level 2 adventures, listed in a handy ‘Adventure Compendium’ window, in Solo mode. There certainly does seem to be plenty of them with these two different modes in there, allaying fears of a lack of any real solo content. You get less out of the treasure chests, and the monsters are fewer, and not as difficult, but most importantly for me, you get to set your own pace. They’re the same dungeon as the group version would see, only toned down a bit.

The next few dungeons went a lot more like Thief. I could skulk, creep, assassinate and do all my own discovery of traps, secrets and interesting and surprisingly diverse underground architecture, without any of the constant anxieties that accompanied any pick-up-party I seemed to join. These dungeons took much longer, but I was enjoying myself, and I do wonder if the whole party ought to be traveling at the speed of the sneakiest thief anyway, rather than the more customary rampaging I’d seen to date. Trap here? No problem, just blast on through it and chug a Potion of Light Heal on the other side! gogogo!!! I prefer a more elegant approach, personally.

I still found problems to grumble about though, proving it’s not just Other People that are the problem. The very speed of the game is a very confusing thing too. One moment, you’ll be creeping along, keeping to the shadows, sensing for danger and seeing what’s ahead. Then you’ll spot a monster, line up the bow, let fly and if you’re lucky, you’ll kill him stone dead there and then. If you’re unlucky, it’ll survive, and come at you, and all hell breaks loose. The melee combat in DDO is a bit of a nightmare for me. It’s essentially FPS action, of a sort. You need to aim the swings, or arrow or spells. Having the mob targeted helps, but doesn’t then guarantee a hit, and you still need to be facing it, and in range. The mobs leap about all over the place, on purpose, and are shooting off all sorts of spells, throwing spears and generally being a very difficult to hit. There is no auto-attack, you don’t automatically turn to face the target, and you don’t automatically run to the right range for the weapon.

It makes for an almost Planetside-like experience in some ways, and mouse-look mode is a must. Trouble is, in Planetside, you aren’t also trying to keep three banks of hotkeys going with various traditional MMO special attacks, an inventory and a chat window as well, let alone keeping an eye on the other party members health, etc. Well, okay…bad example – in PS you often are, but that’s the point! It’s Planetside!

I spent most of those moments frantically tumbling about the place, hoping to get far enough away to get a few arrows shots in before they mash me to a paste. Either that or desperately running backwards, backpedalling while I fire arrows madly. Maybe I’m getting old and slow, but it’s a lot more hectic that any other MMO combat I’ve played, including Guild Wars.

And then suddenly, and assuming you survive, it’s back to the painstaking stealth and creeping along tunnels, and I just wish I could get a handle on the pace of the game – wish it would make it’s mind up. I’m just about starting to get the hang of the somewhat bizarre and unique default keymappings it has, but the combat looks like it’s going to take me a long time to get competent at – longer than ten days, certainly. This whole slow, fast, slow, fast, slow gameplay does become a bit wearying after a while, and I found that I honestly can’t play the thing for more than an hour or two at a time, much as I’d like to play it more.

Trouble is, it looks and even feels just like any other traditional Fantasy Based MMO, and it’s a very difficult thing to get out of the accompanying mindset – the conventions, the expectations and the false familiarity of it all.

Still a few more days to go, before the end of the trial and the big review roundup thing, so hopefully there’s time for an ‘ahhhhh!’ moment or an epiphany. At present though, it’s all just making me very confused. Still, on the plus side, it did all remind me what an excellent game Thief: Deadly Shadows was, and afterward, I promptly reinstalled that for another go!

Oh, just noticed! 400TH POST!!11 w00t! +1 lolz

So moving on from the contemporary masked vigilantism, it’s back to basics with Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach. Of course, the first stage was getting a trial at all, which proved to be a bit of an adventure in itself.

“You have followed the link given to you by the DDO trial webpage, and now find yourself gazing at the terrifying visage of a File Planet login page. Vile and unpleasant banner ads crawl about the screen in all directions, clashing wildly and threatening to overwhelm your resolve and send you off to find a Matrix Online trial instead. You swallow your pride and create yet another spurious login and password, having long since forgotten your last one. The sound of other disgruntled adventurers ahead tells you that you may have to queue for quite some time.”

Yes, somewhat unprofessionally, the free trial link on the DDO website just sends you to File Planet to get the thing, which weighs in at about 2GB, and takes around 4 hours thanks to File Planet’s wonderful 1940′s valve-based server technology. Oh! I pay mun-eh, I can haz fast serverz? Took three goes in the end, and even then, I ended up with a self-extracting exe that just made my little ‘I’m busy, go away’ cursor do that little spinning circle thing indefinitely, and required a hard-reboot to get my desktop back. In the end, I had to go off and find this proprietary 7-zip super-zipfile extractor thing and do it myself.

That got me to the pre-patch phase. Patching itself took another four hours, and at one point, I was encouraged to go and get an optional 3.3 -> 4.0 launcher patch (500mb), from File Planet again! I’m not sure using File Planet as a primary file distribution mechanism quite fills me with confidence to be honest.

Actually, just stepping out to a more general point for a moment. If you’re going to offer free trials, as complete downloads of multiple gigabytes, taking hours to acquire, for god sake, make sure the damn thing is up to date! I’m not a network architect or QA manager, but how difficult is it to delete MyBigassMMO_ver1_0_0.zip out of the�place you download the big ass MMO from, and replace it with MyBigassMMO_ver1_345_211.zip instead? The work of minutes, I suspect, but would save hours for the rest of us.

If I’ve got to sit there and successfully not get bored and give up, for the requisite hours it takes to drag the client kicking and screaming out of the netherworld that is the internets, the least I could expect is that it’s broadly the right version. I don’t mind being a few updates behind, but having to sit there while every file in the archive is completely replaced does tend to make Van Hemlock sad. I know I’m paying you nothing, but it’s possible I might be persuaded to at some point soon.

NCSoft are quite good about this. Guild Wars, Auto Assault and City of Heroes all just download a tiny little executable stub thing, a few hundred kb, and that then goes and gets the latest version direct. Been a while since I last installed an SOE game, so not quite sure how they’re doing it at the moment.

Annnnnyway, got there in the end, and in we go. One suitably vague, but�well done,�cutscene later (which probably accounted for at least two of my eight hours of download), it’s character creation time… again. After CoH, this was a bit on the rudimentary side, but I did like the little movies it plays to explain what each of the classes is about. The options here are quite formulaic really, but then again, this is Dungeons and Dragons we’re talking about, so you’d expect the very standard line-up of usual suspects – Warrior, Cleric, Mage, Rogue (Because calling them Thief is kind of frowned on these days), Bard, Mage, etc. The races are more limited, with only Warforged being something new. These seem to be fantasy-grade robots of some kind – constructs, and whose main feature seems to be that they have trouble being ‘healed’ in the normal sense and need repair kits instead.

Also listed, but greyed out, are everyone’s favourite renegade emo bad-ass race of spider-fanciers and all-round BDSM fetishists, the Drow. That’s dark elves to you and me. I’m not sure quite what happens to make an otherwise somewhat effeminate race of frail flouncing decadent poets into this force for Awesome and Cool, aside from giving them black skin and white hair, but I blame R A Salvatore. In any event, it’s all a bit academic, as you need 500 ‘Fame’ on a normal, boring and frumpy raced character to unlock them, making it some kind of Prestige Race of sorts I guess. I went with a Dwarf Cleric for the time being, but intend to give each of the main archetypes a go, if I can. One of the nicer things about the 3rd Edition Rules of D&D is that they’ve dispensed with race/class restrictions, allowing any race to be any class, which is always nice.

Once moderately happy with the choice, it’s out to Smuggler’s Rest, a small island on the way to the big city of Stormreach, where the main game takes place. This is chock full of the usual pop-up hints and tutorial NPCs, all explaining how the WASD keys work and the like. Some rebinding may be required, as RMB makes you just swing your weapon at whatever is in front of you. For some reason I was expecting this to rotate the camera, which probably made me look like a very aggressive dwarf indeed for much of the time. The UI is fairly familiar, from a dozen other games of this ilk, and initially, it’s hard to see what makes this game that special or different from the rest. You run about, talking to people, picking up quests and so on, and it’s not until you reach the first dungeon – a kind of training room thing in the back of the local Inn, that you start to see what DDO is actually all about, and that seems to be Stories.

The Inns and docks, and streets of the main city beyond, mostly exist to hang various quest instances together in a meaningful way, and throughout the place are the doors, sewer hatches, row boats and similar, behind each of which, is a..well…D&D ‘Module’, I guess. The first one was a fair introduction to the kind of thing one can expect.

The Innkeeper has set up a challenge for new adventurers, which consists of finding five Wizard Stones, in various chests. As soon as you step into the instance, you’re greeted by the Dungeon Master’s disembodied voice-over. Delivered in classical ‘You gaze around the dank cellar…’ style, and with a fair degree of voice-acting proficiency, this chap follows you throughout the, well, adventure, describing each room for you, stepping in when events happen, and so on, and it’s a bit strange really.

Back in the day, I had brief and generally unsatisfying goes at the pen and paper stuff. For me it never quite worked, partly because my imagination was never quite up to the job of detaching from the table and charts and dice, and actually going on these adventures, in my head. Wait ten years or so, and the paper-based spreadsheet exercise was finally, and perhaps inevitably, taken over by computers, and here we are, with the modern MMO, not needing to imagine anymore. So hearing this quirky and odd throwback to those computerless days is at once odd, and comforting. The DM’s running commentary does actually work. The textures and polygons are still there, of course, just like in any other MMO, but just having that bit of audio embellishment enhances the experience in indefinable ways. And of course, with it, you know you’re playing a game of D&D, of a sort.

Shortly after that, you learn that the instances are a lot more detailed than we’re typically used to. Levers, doors and chests are nothing new, but one room involves mantling, climbing ladders, breaking open pots and crates, and a great deal more acrobatics than is typically required of the genre. Later on, there are traps, and quite possibly, riddles!

There’s also a somewhat unique and more considered pace required too. DDO has a tricky line to walk, between the frantic mob-massacre of WoW, EQ2, GW and similar, and the painstaking ‘And now we go to an Inn and spend the next three days recovering, learning fresh spells and waiting for Gorod’s ribs to mend…’ ignorance of time passing, more in keeping with pen and paper.

From what I’ve seen so far, they’ve not done a bad job. A new mana bar has cropped up from somewhere, and the spells, while still needing to be prepared/memorised, are powered from this. Most crucially of all though – health and mana do not ‘just come back over time’, making the careful rationing of resources a new and difficult thing for the typical MMO gamer to have to learn. Compromise exists in the appearance of ‘Rest Shrines’ in strategic points through the dungeons, allowing one-time recharges of health and power, and a rejigging of memorised spells if needed, but you can’t just stop anywhere and hit the ‘Camp’ button, as in Neverwinter Nights.

But go too crazy in the early fights, and you might not have enough mana or health to make it to the end. And of course, unless you get to the end, you don’t get seem to get any xp, which means you can’t just duck in the door, beat up the first ten kobolds, bail, rinse and repeat. There is no grinding, as such. It’s good in theory – Adventures and Stories, rather than Improvement and Levels�for their�own sake. How well it actually works, remains to be seen.

Graphics, Noises, Performance, Latency, all that technical jiggery pokery, are comfortably acceptable, but then again, I only tend to notice those at all if they’re dire, which I suspect ought to be the point.

I’m now in the city of Stormreach itself, which is a well detailed and interestingly different type of magio-mediaeval port city, and very three dimensional; steep streets, stairs, multiple levels. It’s also home to an awful lot of Citizens In Distress, which is handy, and lots of Adventures to be had. So far I’ve only had a go at one or two solo ones, (The Wavecrest Tavern basement one – the first ‘real’ adventure you go on, was very well done) and have yet to join a group. Something tells me that grouping is likely to be a lot more important here, than in other games though, so that’s for next time.

With any luck, I’ll even get a Ranterbury Tale or two out of my ten days in Ebberon!