So it's no secret that I got back into Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) recently. When I tell people this, they often ask something like "Is it good?" which in my opinion is a rather complicated question. In an effort to make an adequate response to this question, I thought I'd make a "the good, the bad and the ugly" blog post about it. But yet again, I came across things that fall under multiple categories. So let's go through things one at a time.
Classes
I love the class system in DDO. The game takes a fair number of the classes from pen and paper and buffed them in many ways, most notably "enhancements". These changes do a few things, first of all they change the balance between the classes. This doesn't create a perfect balance between the classes, while many of the weaker classes in pen and paper 3.5 were buffed more then the stronger classes, it merely changes the paradigm so that new classes and builds are the ones that are "the most powerful". Furthermore, continuing changes to enhancements continually change the balance between the classes. The change also very notably grants players bonuses 5 times per level (4 enhancement points and 1 level up). This is great, because it gives players bonuses regularly, instead of having to wait for a full level to gain a bonus in an MMO where the level cap is 30 (it used to be 20!). It is also good since leveling in pen and paper 3.5 left some things to be desired, specifically many classes had "dead levels" -> where they gain nearly nothing besides more HP and maybe some BAB or saves improvements. With the enhancement system, you always want the perks of the next level, every single level, even if it's just to get those 4 enhancement points per level.
It's also interesting to note that while DDO is based off of D&D 3.5, A fair number of the enhancements (and a couple of feats), remind me of D&D 4e. Can you seriously tell me that an enhancement that allows you to make a shield bash dealing 3[w] damage and increasing your resistance ratings by 6 for 12 seconds with a 6 second cooldown doesn't sound 4e to you? However if 4e was "too much like an MMO" then taking some ideas from 4e, in an MMO can be a good thing right? Personally I like this, and think it makes playing a melee character much more fun and exciting. (Side note, there's also a couple feats like this too).
The second notable system with classes in DDO is that they use pen and paper's system of multi-classing. I've played a few MMO's, and in all of them you pick a class and stick with that class you picked up to level cap (although ESO also has an interesting twist on this). In DDO you can be a level 10 fighter, 2 rogue and 8 barbarian, to get a fighter who has evasion and can fly into a rage for more fighting power. There are some drawbacks to doing this, you lose your capstone enhancement if you do, but it is interesting to think about what give/take taking how many levels in each class will give you. In an MMO, MMO's have always had a healthy amount of min/maxing involved, and by allowing multi-classing it adds to the decisions that you have to make while leveling in a fun way.
Thirdly there's the number of classes in the game. There are currently a respectable 9 free classes in the game, 3 classes that can only be played via buying them in the store (for money) and 2 that can be unlocked through play (although they require you to buy adventure packs to get enough content to unlock them). This, in my opinion is a respectable number, even if you're restricted to the 9 free classes, that's a fair number of options, especially since each class has 3 "expected" builds that function differently. Furthermore, it does not appear that the classes that are locked via a paywall are very much (if at all) more powerful then the ones that are free.
In summery, I love the class system in DDO because at it's core, it feels like I'm leveling up a character in D&D, from allowing multi classing, having many options, as well as spending skill points and feats, it feels like D&D and it's very rewarding.
Quests
While DDO does have a few wilderness areas where a character can run around killing enemies mindlessly to get XP, this is not the focus of the game. There are fairly few of these areas, and the correct way to play the game is through quests. Quests are instanced dungeons where you join in with just a few friends (party size is capped at 6 for non-raids), and you work together to complete them. Let's go over some advantages and disadvantages of doing things this way.
Everything is instanced - so you're in a quest with 6 people that you've partied up with. You will never find someone else in your quest, there's no-one who can pk you, no one can steal meaningful loot and you all get rewards (loot/xp) via working towards the same goal. This is great for most purposes, as it rewards cooperation and teamwork. Furthermore, by instancing all the quests (and for that matter all of the wilderness areas as well), re spawning mobs are not needed, and indeed are very rare. I like this since in my opinion, re-spawning helps break immersion, so not having it in the vast majority of quests is refreshing. Furthermore, it's nice to know that if you kill something, it stays dead, and even if you die to the next guy, you have one less enemy to kill once you've been raised.
It does however mean that you're not going to run into people who you didn't group up with before running a quest, so there's less possibility of randomly running into someone that you really like (and form a friendship with), And there are no zones where you can run around and pvp (if that's the sort of thing you like to do). (PvP taverns do exist, but are a side-thought at best).
Fully 3D - I've played that MMO which has beautiful character models and vast landscapes, but can't deal with a 2 story house in the same instance. Not DDO - In this MMO you can have archers on a balcony shooting at you, and you can walk under that balcony to stop them from shooting at you. There are quests where you can fall 3 stories and (assuming the fall damage doesn't kill you) have you climb or fight your way back to the top via rooms that have the same XY (but different Z) coordinates. There are quests where the map is confusing, because a 2D map can't adequately give directions in a 3D world. I like this, this is how all games should be. In newer games this is becoming more common, but there are still far too many games where this doesn't happen.
More then just Hack and Slash - Here's that tag line from paper and pencil D&D, and it does exist in DDO. Given that the majority of the quests are just hack and slash -> you can complete the quest by running in with your tweaked +1million damage character, kill everything that you're allowed to attack, smash everything breakable and loot all the chests to complete the quest and get the rewards, but not every quest is like this. There is a sprinkling of quests, both in paid and free content, that break from this mold. Three are quests where some enemies aren't allowed to be killed, or the quest is failed. There are quests where stealth is the optimal method of completing the quest. Some quests have diplomacy options, from reducing the amount of enemies fought to granting additional XP rewards for using the diplomacy options (sometimes both at the same time). There's a couple escort quests and even a set of challenges where you direct and protect miners (and buy upgrades for them).
There are also a lot of quests with puzzle solving or platforming sections to them. And also most quests require party members with a specific stat or skill selection (usually a rogue's skill selection) to get optional objectives for bonus loot/xp.
There are even a couple of quests/raids which require teamwork from multiple people to complete.
And quest rewards are independant of killing everything. There is a bonus for killing x number of monsters, but that bonus is the same size as disarming x number of traps, or discovering x number of secret doors. Wilderness areas also give XP for exploring them, as well as for killing.
That being said, the majority of the content can be finished with brainless kill and smash tactics, easily enough for someone who doesn't like tricky quests to ignore the "hard" ones, but it's nice that there's a sprinkling of interesting quests through the game to switch things up.
Storylines - Every quest has a story-line, and nearly every quest has a storyline that's more interesting then "I need 10 rabbit ears for a soup". Players can, if they want, ignore most of the story lines and text, but if they take the time to actually read and/or listen to all of the dialogue there are a few genuinely interesting story-lines out there in the quests. Especially in some of the paid quests.
Traps
DDO does traps right. I have never seen another MMO that does traps even remotely close to how well DDO does them. Sure, the majority of traps in DDO can be boiled down to spikes in the floor, vents that spew harmful substances at you and dart traps, but there are also a few quests with swinging blades (of every kind) and crumbling floors. Traps can be disarmed by rogues, sometimes the rogue has to disarm the trap before it's sprung, sometimes they have to go through the dangerous trap before disarming it. Traps can be timed, so you can jump over the dangerous part of the trap, run through in the second it's not dangerous or navigated around, or if the trap does some sort of elemental damage (such as fire), you can cast a resistance spell and run through it. Traps can also be very punishing. On the highest difficulty (elite), most traps will kill most characters in one hit. This means that rogues feel useful when they disarm a dangerous trap, and it feels good to run through a trapped gauntlet avoiding all of the traps. Traps are also common (prominent in perhaps 50% of quests, perhaps more), which is a great way to show off and revel in how well traps are done in this game.
The World
I've never been a huge fan of Eberron, and DDO mostly takes place in Eberron. I'm not a huge fan of warforged, and artificers, and these are definitely prominent in the game, however I also don't mind them that much. I do however love a campaign setting where I can fight against dragons, Medusa, vampires, giants, driders, beholders, inevitable's, wraiths and devils and it felt pretty good talking to Elminster once I got to Forgotten realms. And these are in addition to many more common enemies like kobolds, orcs, oozes, elementals, skeletons and zombies. This is by no means an exhaustive list, there are a lot of enemies.
Even for people who aren't a fan of D&D lore, DDO has a good variety of enemies with different attacks to be wary of, resistances to different elements and types of attacks and some require different tactics to fight. Beholders will kill you if you're not ready for them, it will happen. For fans of D&D lore like me, it's a great bonus to know "this quest has a Medusa at the end, isn't that cool?"
The Community
In my experience, the community is in general very good. Most people are willing to help out new players and teach them tricks/tips to help complete the quest or on any other subject. The majority of players are willing to learn from advice you give them and are willing to take a hit for the team if it would help out the others in any way, and the worst thing I can recall anyone intentionally doing was leaving a group if they died in a quest.
I find this is pretty common in games without PvP, like DDO, but you know, having a good community is a good thing for a game.
Newgame+
This is essentially how I explain DDO's "true resurrection" model. In DDO, a character can use a "true resurrection" once they reach level 20 to set their character back to level 1 with a couple of small, permanent bonuses. They retain all of their gear from their old character (which they can use once they're a high enough level to use it), and also retain some of the permanent bonuses that they earned such as tomes. Essentially, it's a newgame+. Furthermore, since the release of epic levels, they have a version of newgame+ for epic levels, where they reset your character back to level 20 with a similar set of small permanent bonuses. This has a number of upsides and downsides.
First of all, this means that endgame content isn't the main focus of the game. In most other MMO's I've played, it's all about getting your character to max level, pimping out their gear and running the end game content to your hearts content. The endgame content is usually the best made, most interesting and challenging content of the game, and includes most or all of the game's raids. In DDO, the focus is not on end game content, it's on the whole game. Some players are constantly starting their characters back at level 1, for the bonuses, and running through the content from levels 1-20 again and again, so they're spending most of their time playing this content, not the level 30 content, thus que developer's time in making the level 1-29 quests interesting and rewarding, and not just a stepping ladder to wait for the game to start at level cap.
This also means that there are a bunch of veteran players running around at low levels. This is a two sided argument, in that they're mostly friendly and willing to group up with and walk through new players through the quests, teaching them the ins and outs of the game. But at the same time, it means that people who have the best gear at level, know exactly how to do each quest and have up to quite a few small, permanent bonuses that new players can't even possibly have are grouping up with new players, capable of easily soloing quests that are extremely challenging for a party of new players to complete. It can make the new players feel really small and weak.
It's also worth mentioning that having newgame+ as such a predominant feature is nice for new players, because you don't need to have an optimal build to get to 20, not even nearly. And once you get to 20 you can true reincarnate and then the only things that mattered about your character are what class you were (there are no real bad choices here) and what loot you got (you can pick up whatever loot you missed in your second life, or your third life, etc.
Power Creep
Which brings my to my first point that I was going to firmly put under the "bad" heading. DDO is not a new game. Not in the slightest, and with games that have new content released on a semi-regular basis, there is usually power creep. There are reasons why power creep happens in these games, essentially new content releases items/builds/classes that are better or worse then what was available before. If they're worse then they're quickly forgotten, if they're better then power creep.
With DDO how this happens is that during the course of the game nearly everything that could possibly be useful for a character has slowly been added to the game in a form that's accessible to most or all characters. For example, you can get items for any character to cast feather fall on yourself, therefore you don't have a wizard (who can cast feather fall on the party) or a rogue/monk (who can reduce falling damage by a large amount, due to jump and tumble skills) to complete any part of quests that might have a deadly or very damaging fall in them. Now all characters, if they have the content, can get deathward, freedom of movement, feather fall, greater heroism, remove blindness, remove disease, remove curse, blur, pretty much everything they ever needed as an item that can cast the spell for any character, an item that permanently gives the character it while equipped, a potion that any character can drink or a scroll/wand that any character can use if they have enough Use Magic Device skill. This means that characters no longer need that cleric to cast "remove all ailments" on them once they've played the game long enough (enough newgame+'s) or for a healer to heal them, since there are so many ways to get self-healing in many classes/builds.
Basically, it's possible to make a self-sufficient character who doesn't need party members, because they've got all of the loot in past lives that they need to replace what effective supportive party members can do for them. This, in addition to making new players feel like they're weak or doing something wrong when they group up, also means that a player can solo most quests without need for a party, so why is it a multiplayer game? Only for the people who are new and want to work their way through a quest with a balanced party which hasn't turned themselves into zero-weakness gazillion damage gods? Or is it so that the zero-weakness gazillion damage gods can effectively power level the new players?
Power creep invalidates a number of interesting builds (mostly supportive/healing builds) and tends towards making the game more of a single player experience, where you might happen to be chatting to a few other people who are doing the same thing you are, especially at higher level play or when you've gotten a fair number of good items.
DPS is king
This also ties into power creep. With the power creep and players who have no weaknesses, supportive builds have fallen behind somewhat. When everyone's able to heal themselves, cast resurrection on allies, resurrect themselves, remove blindness and prevent themselves from being slowed or whatnot, the only stats that really matter a whole lot are how tanky you are and how much damage you do. And of these, damage is the preferred method, since if they're dead, they don't hurt you.
Then throw into the mix that a number of higher level quests have "dps checks" in them, basically rating you on how much damage your party can do in a certain amount of time. When everything in an MMO turns into how to maximize your dps, things start getting more boring, unfortunately DDO appears to be getting to this point, especially at higher difficulties and higher levels.
Bravery Bonus and why Elite is the only difficulty
Here is another bane of the new player in DDO. Quests have multiple difficulty levels, the higher the difficulty the better the rewards. If a player starts a quest, for the first time, at the highest difficulty setting they get bonus XP, which gets better each time they do this (up to a cap of 5). This means that a fair number of players will refuse to run a quest at any difficulty lower then the highest difficulty level, which is, as mentioned before, very challenging for a new player, even with a balanced party. To add to this, the higher difficulties are locked to new players until they've completed the quest on the lower difficulties, even if they're strong enough to take on the quest at higher difficulties. This segregates the community (those that will run quests on lower difficulties and those that wont) and personalizes new players or casual players with very little upsides.
Monotization
Nearly every game has some method of monotization, DDO is no exception here. Furthermore, many "free to play" MMO's have a bad reputation of using dark patterns to get their players to pay exorbitant amounts of money for content that effectively isn't worth it at all. So let's see how DDO stacks up.
DDO has an in-game store where players can buy a number of useful items for Turbine Points, which they get via spending real money. These include things such as XP and loot boosts, pets, cosmetic items, shared banks, bags, races, classes and most notably -> adventure packs. For the most part, items bought from the DDO store can be ignored, except for adventure packs. Adventure packs unlock content which gives your character XP at levels near it and opens up possible loot for your character.
It essentially goes like this:
Levels 1-10: There are a lot of quests in this range, and the majority of them are free. You can easily get to level 10 and not care about spending any money on the game.
Levels 11-15: At this point there's a mix of free and paid content. There is still a fair number of free quests you can level off of, but you'll start finding it harder to find groups, since about half of the groups will be doing paid content.
Levels 16-20: At this point there are very few quests that are free, some levels only have 1 free quest. While it is possible to get to level 20 without buying any adventure packs, you're going to get very bored of that 1 quest at your level.
Levels 21+: At this point you essentially need Epic Destinies, which are bought in the store or via the main expansion (Menice of the Underdark). If you don't have Epic Destinies, you essentially get NPC levels, and will therefore be much much weaker then a like-level character at your level. This means those few free quests above level 20 will be very hard to complete. However the expansion gives both Epic Destinies and a fair number of quests above level 20.
Or, in more practical terms:
Levels 1-15: you can complete for free with no problems.
Levels 15-20: you want to buy one or two adventure packs in this range to complete.
Levels 21+: buy the expansion.
In terms of loot, the free quests have competitive loot to the paid quests, with some of the best items in the game coming from free quests. However, some of the best items also come from paid quests, and to make that "god" character who is completely self sufficient and solos all quests at the highest difficulty, you need to do both free and paid quests.
However, DDO does allow you to earn Turbine Points through play. Sound familiar? Lots of games do this, but how practical is it? DDO gives TP for gaining favor, which requires you to complete quests (more for the highest difficulty). So therefore, complete quests, get TP, buy more quests, complete them, gain more TP, buy more quests. But obviously it isn't that easy. Let's take a look at the Ruins of Gianthold adventure pack, often regarded as one of the best adventure packs in the game. Gianthold costs 950 TP to unlock. You might be able to get it on a sale of say 20%, so 760 TP. It grants you access to a wilderness area and 12 quests. These quests, if completed on elite difficullty, grant a total of 240 favor. Turbine, once you get past the new player benefits, gives players 25 TP for each 100 favor they gain, so that's about 60 TP. Therefore if you got giant hold at 20% off and ran all of the quests in it 13 times*, you would have paid off your purchase of the adventure pack. *note: However only the first time you run a quest on each character grants you favor + TP, so this would involve running it on 13 different characters. However, taking the newgame+ option resets this so you would count as a different character for purposes of farming TP.
How this practically boils down to it is something like: Once you get your character to level 15, finishing all free quests at the highest difficulty, you're probably rocking somewhere in the order of 600 TP. This is pretty much not quite enough to get that adventure pack you need to get up to level 20. However if you do some free-to-play TP farming and get a character to 100 favor (around level 4) on each searver, you can get about 1000 more TP, which is easily enough to pick up one or two good packs while they're on sale. Everything goes on sale eventually. This sound be enough to get characters to level 20 and starting newgame+'s (true resurrections) with them for free.
Obviously this is easier if you want to spend the money on the game. The best for value money you can spend is pretty much on the Menice of the Underdark expansion pack, which adds not only level 21+ quests, but also a set of quests in the level 7 range, as well as in the 18-20 range. It also gives enough TP for an adventure pack.
As for the other things from the store? If you're a huge fan of warforged, they're pretty effective and only accessible via the store. 3 classes are purchase only, while 2 require you to buy packs to unlock, or can be purchased via the store. The drow race is easily unlocked without spending money. Any race is viable and human is considered one of the best, any class can do elite content with a balanced party and the paid ones aren't much more powerful if at all. You can get bye easily enough without paid races or classes.
A shared bank is very useful as it allows you to transfer items between characters. Pick one of those up from the store with the Free TP. You might have to grind a little for this, but it's not too expensive.
Lag, Bugs and Disconnections
DDO has problems with all of the above. Any player of online games is no stranger to Lag, however DDO sometimes has instance wide lag (or perhaps server wide). This appears to happen more often on the more popular servers so it might be due to that, but the fact remains that DDO is prone to lag, and not just due to the client's bad connections. This being said, I'm often amazed at how well I can run the game while stretching my wireless internet to its maximum range.
DDO is also prone to having bugs. This is no Bethesda game level of bugs, but there are a fair number of bugs in the "known bugs" thread, and a few which are known but never made it into the official listing. These include things like certain non-important crates being indestructible, specific enhancements that provide no benefit (Vanguard's shield specialization) to feats that don't work as intended (whirlwind attack while using weapons). DDO has a great wiki which will point out all of these bugs, but the development team is quite slow at fixing them (likely the team's too small to make fixing bugs a priority when new content needs to be released).
And then there's disconnections. I experiance a fair number of disconnections, but nearly every disconnection I see is during the first time you log in and load up a character. If you disconnect when you log in, simply log in again and nearly every time the problem is fixed on the second log in. It is very rare for me to disconnect after I've been playing for a while, except occasionally when I try to switch characters. Not a game breaking issue, but why can't I just log in once and have it work?
Content
DDO, while the scope of the game is quite small, it focuses on events in and around one city for the majority of the game (up to level 20), and adds a second town later on (past level 20). It has a lot of content. Depending on how complex a quest is and how much trouble you're having with it, it might take up to an hour to complete a quest, and there are 124 free quests, not including wilderness areas and challenges. Including paid content, there are over 400 quests and 37 wilderness areas (still not including the 20 or so challenges). Every quest has a story line, unique loot specific to the quest, a narrator and many of them are well made and interesting. Some quests even have random encounters that might not spawn or randomly spawning end points to make replaying them interesting. One wilderness area I ran into even changes the map when you load into it (I heard someone say there's 2 possible maps for it, and it randomly chooses one each time it's created).
Graphics
The game is old. No doubt about it. The graphics were probably pretty good for when it was released, but they're not going to hold up to next gen games today. I've tried playing this game with 2k resolution on a big screen, the graphics don't blow you away. But graphics have never been a huge selling point for me. In my books, the graphics are "good enough."
And there's options for cosmetic costumes (paid stuff) and you can toggle if your helmet shows up. Two things that I actually care about in terms of graphics. Nice, annoying that the cosmetic costumes are all paid for, but oh well, there has to be some incentive to spend money.
