Yet another take of DDO beta

warfarin

I posted deep in another's post about my early impressions of the beta run I had and it was not good.  But as I played I realized the game is not aweful as I first feared.  I really wanted to like it so I kept try to make it work.  So here are some highs and lows you don't see talked about in too much detail in other posts.

Loot/rewards - great way to give you that Christmas morning feeling.  Everyone opens the chest gets the loot reserved for them.  They choose to sell it, give it to party members, trade it, whatever.  No random rolling, or need before greed, or whatever.

Combat - I hated it, turned me off right away.  But I was coming from City of Heros where it is all click and move this idea of BLOCK was a foreign concept.  It is a powerful and needed tool to play DDO the defense and tumbling are most important.  But on flip side to that it means you better be patient in your fights.  You only got limitted HP so make them last and be smart and choose your attacks wisely.

Quest - These are fine but there are only so many you can do that are level 1 - actually just barely enough to get out of level 1 without repeating them really.  They can be accomplished with a group of two but it is hard, you really need 3 or more and be prepared for resting a lot.  All-in-all Questing gets passing grade for innovative play options but the NO MANNA REGEN gets a failing grade for making you have mega downtown.  Even just to exit and run back to the taven is annoying.

Minor things needs tweaks -like finding the darn mission,  Just light up the active mission on the map.  Let the leader choose it and light it up on your map so the group knows where to go.  Sounds simple but I was always wondering , do I have this quest, where does it start, wheres the door?  ARMOR GRAPHICS - when i get boots I want to see the boots on my guy - same for gloves and bracers and cloaks.  The base armor changes and helmets but just limited graphics changes.  Thats pretty lazy and you end up with all these races in the same clothes. 

I hope the manual explains the feats better too becuase I wondered why bother with some of them, I really doubt many were as worthless as I thought so I must not have understood there signfigance.

The bottom line is the beta did change my mind - after a night I was sure the game would never make it my harddrive now I am thinking give it some time and see how it goes.  It does seem expensive for what you get but a few fixes to the buggy things and adding more content so the game does not seem so linear with everyone doing the same thing then maybe they got something special on there hands.

I think the people that post that it sucks dont bother did not give it a far try.  Sure you need friends to play with, at least one, hopefully two. And you need to be patient.  Also have no desite for PVP and not care to craft.  Outside of the haivng built it teammate i think that could describe a lot of people that could give it a good try.  Point is the instancing is fine and the combat system can be learned and the other annoying things most likely will be fixed or can be overcome.

Am I gonna buy it preorder or when it first comes out - NO.  IF a major content patch comes out with updates to quest and I hear about some good gameplay tweaks - I may just pick it up a month after release.

Gabriel_Kfg

I agree. I played beta one week, about 10 hours and only i can say this is one of the worst play i ever play.

Bad grafics, crazy item and doubts...