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D&D Online: Stormreach Preview (Page Two) |
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The tutorial and early quests require that you solve them by yourself, but they’re easy enough to where this shouldn’t be a problem. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in the port city of Stormreach (hence the game’s title), and you’ll discover that the city has a massive problem with kobolds. You’ll find numerous quests to drive kobolds out of warehouses and sewers, to escort people safely to some places, and to rescue people from other places. However, unlike the early quests, the Stormreach quests are longer and more difficult, and you pretty much have to group together with other characters to solve them. Regular groups can have up to six characters, and special “raid” groups can have up to 12 characters. DDO does not look like a game you’ll enjoy if you only want to solo, although I did have some success grouping with just one other person for most quests, and so you don’t necessarily have to fight your way through a crowd, either.
Experience works differently in DDO than in any other MMORPG that I’ve ever played. You don’t “grind” to get experience. In fact, you don’t get experience from killing enemies at all. The only time you get experience is when you complete objectives in a quest, or when you complete the entire quest. That’s an interesting approach, because it means that it doesn’t matter how you solve a quest as long as you solve it. Sneaking past enemies, for example, won’t cost you any experience. The downside is that if you fail to complete the quest, then you might not get anything, and you might end up wasting an entire night without progressing through a quest or advancing your character. In fact, since you can lose experience when you die, you might end up worse off at the end of a night than when you started.
That is, DDO isn’t an especially friendly game. It also seems a little low key. You won’t zoom through character levels (10 is the maximum level right now), the equipment isn’t all that exciting, there isn’t any player versus player content that I know of, there isn’t anything to do besides quests, and the early quests all feel about the same, since they almost all feature kobolds, sewers and warehouses. There is also a fairly serious lag problem. The game creates instances of all public areas, which should cut down on lag since it means you won’t find five million people all hanging out in the same tavern, but the solution doesn’t work very well. Using a dial-up connection, I often had trouble just running from one end of Stormreach to another. Thankfully, though, during the quests themselves (which also take place in instances) I rarely had any trouble.
I played DDO for something like 20 hours over a two-week period. I started with a rogue, gave up on her after a while, and then created a cleric and had much better luck with him. During that time I made it to level 2 and saw most of the level 1 and 2 quests, so while I have no idea what the high level content is like, I think it’s safe to say that the low level content didn’t wow me. But if you’re looking for a cooperative MMORPG, and if the lag issues can be resolved, then DDO has some potential. Look for it on store shelves starting on February 28.
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| Article Details |
| Previewer Steven Carter
Previewed D&D Online: Stormreach
Published 02.18.06 |
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