I am a sucker for MMOs. I try to beta test the ones that interest me and at worst sink a free month into ones I genuinely think I can spend a lot of time in. I spent 6 months playing Star Wars Galaxies, a year playing Guild Wars, and two years into the obsession machine that is World of Warcraft. I’m almost a year out of my Warcraft phase and have been looking to dip my toe back into the MMO pool, cause while it is a massive time sync I enjoy the experiences. A couple of months ago we reported that Dungeons and Dragons Online was going to debut a free to play model. Now, there are plenty of free MMOs out there, Free Realms is one I enjoyed for about a week before abandoning it, but none are full MMO experiences. Dungeons and Dragons Online USED to(and still can)cost money to play, so it has a full fledged MMO experience at it’s heart. So why is it free? Cause no one plays it? Cause it sucks? Well today I spent two hours in the starting area with a Elf Sorcerer and found the experience to be if not better, then on par with World of Warcraft.
Now it does lack in a couple of places, first the UI is not nearly as elegant as WoWs, and I’m not sure if there are mods for DDO, but it isn’t even as good as World of Warcraft starter UI. I could tell that everything was meant to be clickable from the get go in WoW in DDO I wasn’t sure what was what, it wasn’t very intuitive. However I will say that once you get going it’s easy to find your way. Also it doesn’t look nearly as good, I had the settings cranked pretty high, and while I got a really good frame rate, it just didn’t look as pretty as WoW.
Comparing MMOs to WoW is kinda cheap and easy at this point so with those two comparisons out of the way, I want to tell you that everything else about the game is spectacular. First of all the game plays exactly like a pen and paper game of DnD. When you enter instances or start quests a dungeon master does a voice over guiding you on the path. Corpses don’t drop loot, you pick up loot out of a chest when you complete an instance, you also don’t earn your XP until the end. The combat is fun and relies on an on screen dice roll, when you level up it fills in your character sheet like a real DnD character. Also of note is that the instances have four difficulty settings the lowest being solo, which makes the game great for people who don’t have friends who are going to play the game or just have a limited amount of time to play. I did every instance in the starting area in under 30 minutes solo.
I guess I should mention the “premium” features or at least what I think they are cause I couldn’t really tell. First of all some of the classes and races are restricted to you. You can buy them, but I didn’t even bother to check out how much that costs. Also it didn’t appear that I could buy potions from the vendors it looked like I would have to buy them with actual cash money. Now what doesn’t make me outraged about this is two things. First, potions are in the chests you will find scattered about the instances and you sometimes get them as a quest reward. Second, you will come across shrines and by sitting near them your health and magic points will be replenished. You can also spend real money on flashier gear, but I didn’t really think it was necessary. You can also decide to just pay the $14.99 a month any time you want and get access to everything. Which is probably part of the plan. It will be interesting to see how many free players upgrade and how many premium members downgrade.
I played in just the starting area and as I am about to venture out into the game proper things could change. So here is my advice to you. Dungeons and Dragons Online is free, no strings attached, you don’t even have to put in a credit card number or buy the game. Everything is free. I suggest checking it out, it’s a lot more fun then I imagined it would be, and I highly recommend it to former or current players of the pen and paper game. If you have never played an MMO this would be a good place to start, as it’s a full fledged online RPG. This isn’t Free Realms, Guild Wars(which is more PvP oriented) or god forbid Runescape. If you are a current MMO player, you might be surprised by what this free game has to offer you. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you give it a try, and if your a current player what do you think this will do for the game? I’ll be sure to let everyone know what I think as I move into the game proper.