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big question!!!
last_exile
Member Posts: 196
is this game open world of big instances like gw?
Comments
It's been 8 months since I played, and I'm using a hotel computer, so I don't have the my info with me here.
But this game is a VERY large city with about 6 zones to it, the first zone is called the Harbor, and you can't leave this zone until you finish a quest in a dungeon called Waterworks, but it's very easy to find groups to do this quest as everyone will be doing the same. It's like a lv. 3 quest.
After you finished the quest you can now leave the Harbor and will be free to enter the 5 other city zones. You have to load into each zone but they are NOT Instances. All zones of the city have many dungeons for all level ranges and yes dungeons are instances.
Just a few updates to this: you no longer have to finish the waterworks quest in order to leave the harbor. Simply bribing the guard with 20 gold (a pittance) will get you to the marketplace, where you can enter all the other main zones
Also, there are a few more zones, now, outside the city of stormreach. There is the Black Loch, which is a pirate haven that is hidden in caves beneath Three Barrel Cove, which is an explorable area, for example. There aren't a whole lot of these types of areas outside the city of Stormreach, itself, but there are a few.
The actual quests range in size from the cellar of a tavern to an extra-dimensional vault, and nearly all of them are great fun. Some are ridiculously hard, like The Proof is in the Poison or Devil Assault (both claim to be level 6 quests, but Proof can destroy an unprepared group under level 8, and I still haven't found a group to beat Devil Assault with - a balanced group of five in the levels 8 to 11 range still couldn't beat it), but even then, you will usually have a great deal of fun.
The content is instanced although the story and direction of the dungeons and quests are far superior. DDO has some amazingily well directed dungeons experiances and it's one of several strengths of the game.
Character building in DDO is night to day in comparison to Guild Wars and WoW. I believe DDO has one of the most dynamic character building processes currently availble in an mmo, next to EVE Online.
the game has a mix of public areas, most notably stormreach and instanced open areas where you can travel to quest dungeons that are instanced as well for your 6 man party or 12 man raid. At the lower levels many of the quests happen in the city and the open areas are basically areas available directly from the city walls. Some of the higher level outdoor areas are accessed via a safe like a town or encampment that sits inbetwen Stormreach and the outdorr adventure zones and quests. These areas provide rest and repair and quest givers for the quests in the accopanying outdoor adventure area. There is no travel to these different outdoor areas you simply talk to an NPC and you are teleported to the safe zone from which you can enter the outdoor area. Or in the case of the zones directly attached to the city simply click on the gates and you are outside the city walls in an instanced private outdoor area. These areas don't go anywhere but are self contained adventure zomes containing random roaming mobs and randomly spwaned rare named mobs, as well as quest entrances.
Each zome has 3 ways to gain xp, one is explorer points find that point and gain xp, slayer which is achieved by slaying mobs and gaining xp at numbered intervals(ie kill 10 get 200xp, kill 20 get 400xp), and rare random mobs which each have xp value the first time you kill them(every time you enter the instance it will spawn a number of rare named mobs from a larger list).Each zone has a lvl range although characters above the lvl range can enter they take an xp hit comensurate with how many lvls they exceed the top level in the range.
the adventure zones are as follows
1.Cerulean Hills
2.Searing Heights
3.Three Barrel Cove
5.Tangleroot Gorge
6.Sorrowdusk Isle
7.Ateraxias Haven
9.Menectauran Desert (accessed by safe area Zawabi's Refuge)
10.Gianthold (accesed by safe area Gianthold Tor)
11.Orchard of the Macabre (accessed by safe area Necropolis)
12.Vale Of Twilight (accessed by the Twelve )
13.Subterane