Individual Entry: DDO
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April 19, 2006

Games : DDO

I've been playing "Dungeons and Dragons Online" (DDO) of late. This is the 4th Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) I have played, and it is by far the best. For those not familiar with the genre, you essentially create a character which you then control in a game world populated by all the characters created by all the other players who have the game (actually, they tend to be divided between a small number of servers, but you get the idea). You log in and get to meet and interact with characters run by 1000's of other players. While details vary, the game then provides a series of challenges which you can overcome either alone or together with other players who are logged into the game at the same time. As you complete challenges, you get to make decisions about how your character improves based the experience gained in the challenge, allowing you evolve characters that specialize in certain skills and activities. While you are only able to log in as one character at a time, these games allow you to create multiple characters so you can explore different options and career paths which the game provides.

Beyond those rather generic details, these games tend to vary a great deal.

Before DDO I played Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), City of Heroes (CoH) and The Matrix Online (TMO). Each had certain virtues which were worthy of praise and certain limitations.

The original SWG provided a wide variety of options in how to evolve your character, including many which were non-violent in nature. I had a great time playing as a doctor/pharmacist, healing those wounded in combat and only adventuring into the wilds (and fighting off creatures) to collect plants I needed to make medicines. On the other hand, all of the challenges were essentially unstructured and randomly generated (there were a few more structured encounters at high level, but the gaming experience was dominated by random content).

CoH (where you played a comic-book style super-hero) had a mix of structured/scripted and random challenges. The scripted challenges were good, but the variety was limited. On the down side, while the manual made it look like you had a lot of character options, most were not sensible, so it didn't take long before you started seeing other heroes who were very similar to yourself.

TMO also had a mix of structured/scripted and random challenges; but to be honest, the scripted challenges were downright boring to me. It did however have the nifty feature that skills were all "downloaded" into your character's brain (if you have seem the Matrix movies, think "I know Karate"); but depending on your level of experience, there was a limit to how many skills would fit at a time. So, you could eventually buy a whole lot of skills, and then download the subset you needed to complete a specific mission. The result was that you could explore all options with just a single character.

One feature which all of these games had in common was that you were able to do pretty well playing them solo. People did form groups; but it was just as common to encounter 1000's of other people all working on their own missions alone. In CoH, the difficulty of missions did increase slightly faster than your character's abilities, so you eventually needed to start to find help; but I found that proved to be difficult because people just got used to playing alone through the lower levels. There was no "culture of teamwork" to draw on. I'm told TMO was like that too, although I didn’t play it long enough to find out. I have to admit, the whole idea of going on missions alone within a "massively multiplayer" game always struck me as odd.

Which brings me to DDO.

There are two big differences between DDO and all of the other MMORPGs I have played. The first is that all of the content is structured/scripted, and quite well written at that. It is clear that an effort has been made to create a collection of adventures which are both interesting and different from each other. Some are straightforward combat scenarios – go into the sewers and kill all of the spiders. Others are more subtle and require more finesse to complete the mission, often requiring different combinations of skills to make it all the way through.

Which brings me to the other big difference - DDO is very much a team game. After the first five "training" missions, pretty much everything requires that you form a group with other players if you are going to be successful. Missions are designed to require many different skills, and no one player can be successful doing many missions alone. There are some missions designed to allow specific skills to shine (for instance a heavily trapped the headquarters of a group of thieves which requires someone good with locks & traps), while most tend to require some kind of balance in the group.

So, a typical session playing the game is you log on and turn on the "LFG" (Looking for Group) signal to let everyone else know you are available, setting your "LFG Comment" to describe any specific missions you are interested in. You then either wait to be invited into a group or start looking at the list of other characters that are online and try to form a group of your own. Once you have 3-5 other players, you start doing missions until folks need to log off or the group breaks up for other reasons. I have generally had quite good success with these kinds of pick-up-groups, with only a few bad experiences with other players. A good team has a balance of skills, stays together, communicates with each other, and gives time for the specialists to do their thing. The few bad teams I have been a part of become obvious at the first intersection where everyone heads off in a different direction and dies quickly, complaining about how no one else helped them.

Anyway, I've started to reach the "been there, done that" point with the current DDO content. I'm going to keep my account open for a bit to see how fast they add new content (the first content update went in about a month after the initial release with 15 new missions). I'm now looking at "Auto Assault" (MMORPG set in your classic post-apocalyptic wasteland) and debating if I want to try it.

Posted by Steven at April 19, 2006 06:09 PM