DDO

I was excited to hear about this game when it was announced. That excitement was on a pretty steady slide the more I heard about what was happening with the game. This is a pretty sober, non inflamitory opinion of what is wrong with the game several weeks after release from a poster at the Fires of Heaven message boards. I'd link to there, but half the crap there is typical board babies screaming at each other.

Like I said earlier, I'm playing this game right now and find it pretty fun.

It really needs about another year of development effort before it could be considered "release ready" though. Why?

- Extreme lack of content. There's about 150 quests total right now, which don't give enough xp to level all the way to 10. Re-running quests is mandatory.

- Lack of solo content.

- Lack of player advancement outside of gear. There's no crafting system for example.

- Difficult character creation process. The player is required to know way too much about the rules to be able to create a character. With no respecs, this is a very bad thing indeed.

- Reliance on instanced content. There is simply no outside world; all the dungeons are instanced, with instant teleportation from the city to the dungeon. The world feels tiny.

Here's the big problem though; the DnD ruleset isn't really designed for an online mmorpg. Many of the decisions that Turbine has made with this game are because of the traditional "flavor" of pen & paper DnD, and that just doesn't translate well into a computer game.



I will say this for DDO ... it's made me want to play the pen & paper version again.