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Looking for replacement for DDO
Shakesphere
Member Posts: 26
in LFGame
A group of 3 friends and I have been playing DDO casually (once a week at most) for 2 years now, and are now looking for a new MMO to play.
The one feature that we really liked about DDO were their dungeons. We never knew what we were going to be getting when we entered a dungeon quest; the traps that we had to be careful about, the occasional puzzle that would need to be solved, having to search through a large multistoried room to find the switch to open up the next section.
Is there any other MMO at there (F2P or P2P) that have similar dungeons?
Comments
As far as I know, DDO is the only MMO that does the whole "compelling" dungeon experience. With the puzzles and narrative and stuff... I would say WoW with it's instances, though they're not as engaging, per se.
From the same makers of DDO. LOTRO will be your best bet.
I have to agree with this responder as I know the dungeons not many that will give you the puzzles and such of DDO but for engaging dungeons I would say WOW had decent back story though not so much what you seem to be looking for and while I like LOTRO the dungeons there are not very similar to DDO either.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Age of Conan might be worth looking into. No promises, but I read some of the new stuff is along those lines, but I have no first hand experience of it.
Out of all the MMOs I've played, I can't think of one that compares to DDO's dungeon design. That is probably it's most unique feature that sets it apart from the rest. I think your group might be better off just trying the trials of a couple of the most popular MMOs right now and finding something new.
WoW is a good one to try if you haven't played it already. There's a free 10-day trial on the main website. It's one of the biggest for good reason. There's a recently added looking-for-dungeon tool that allows you to queue up anywhere in the world for any dungeons applicable to your level (starting at level 10), and then it starts looking for what you need to fill out the group, i.e. if you are lacking a healer, it will search for a healer that also queued up and put you together. The dungeon tool then let's you know the group is ready, and allows you to instantly transport to and from your last location in the outside world. It's a great system, and revived a lot of the low level dungeons for players to do more often, so you could literally level entirely from dungeon runs nowadays. There is a very similar tool in place now to level up from pvp battlegrounds.
You won't get that same activity in lower levels in many other MMOs because the population has either dwindled and is too widely spread, and/or it's top heavy and most players are just doing endgame content. WoW promotes playing new characters by offering a couple bind-on-account armor and weapons that you can send to any new characters once you have one max level character, so veterans can level up another class easier and it keeps the lower levels a bit more active overall.
I think the only thing AoC will give you is a similar combat system. It's more action-oriented then based on your typical slower mmo combat, but I think the quests and dungeons might feel a little bland in comparison to DDO. They're not terrible, but that just wasn't much of a focus for AoC unlike with DDO.
EDIT: Wanted to add a similar remark as the last poster - I haven't played the new content so I don't know if AoC has gotten better in that area. I just know when I played it up till the mid-30s about a year ago, dungeon content was pretty bland by comparison to DDO.
I guess a very loose comparison could be made to Guild Wars too. All of the roleplaying areas are instanced like your DDO dungeons, with only the main city hubs being a meeting ground for people and place to pick up quests. So GW can be similar in some respects to DDO with the 'dungeon' content outside. It allows the world to be changed and specific to what stage of the story you are on. You can also farm the same content as much as you want by entering a town to reset it and going back out similar to DDO content. The combat also feels quicker then most MMOs, so it's closer to the action-combat approach of DDO.
I never considered DDO a true MMO. But what they do with dungeons is something I've always wanted in an MMO. You won't find it in an MMO, though. The reason being that everyone considers it a waste, since after the first players solve/find the answers they post it on the net somewhere for all to read. I dissagree with this thinking, but that's what they say.
Persoanlly, I don't care if everyone knows where nto find that hidden lever, or how to solve the puzzles. I want them in my game world. I want the interaction with the world. And I'd hope that such a game would make some very deep and hard to solve puzzles for discoveries. I'd love to see a puzzle that doesn't get solved for years, and when someone does finally do it it's big news. Not just puzzle board type puzzles, but gather all the clues type puzzles and then figure it out.
Once upon a time....
WoW was my first thought too.
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Lots of dungeons. And if you stay away from all the walk throughs you'll find posted on the Internet, and if you do them at the proper level they can be very challenging.
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There really is no reason to play a game other than WoW except for maybe Eve.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Oh, how I wish players looked up a quest before they tried to solve it. Most players just jump in, and start doing idiotic things even after you tell them what to do.
Two comments.
1) So?
2) I think you need to find a group you can play with that listens better.
Other than that, given the nature of social gaming in these single-player-turned-massive MMOs, I know it's not quite that simple, but hopefully doable.
Once upon a time....
Looks like we will need to look for other features for our next MMO.
Sounds like brostyn is referring more to end game WoW raiding than DDO dungeons.
To the op: I don't know that you'll be happy with WoW and the free trial is certainly not going to tell the story as you won't be able to get to the interesting dungeons for several months if you only play once per week. There are a few dungeons (Sunken Temple comes to mind) that have things you need to solve that are out of the norm, but most of them are just run through, tank, and spank. There are some bosses for end game raids that require strategy at least, but most classic dungeons have been reduced to lowest common denominator gaming. Although the WoW dungeons look amazing, play well, and I have recently had a lot of fun leveling through these dungeons with my family, they truly do not remind me of DDO dungeons at all. I've never actually played a game that has dungeons that remind me of DDO, which is one of the primary reasons I play it.
Perhaps the answer is to just check out more of DDO's content - seeings how you only play once per week and they often release new content, it seems there may be much more that you can do in DDO, and perhaps you could reroll characters and check out lower-level content you may have missed.
That all said, WoW is a great game, maybe the best out there - but it's not DDO.
I was pleasantly surprised when I went from Apprentice to full 5 star Elite in under 2 months. I was pleasantly surprised again when I went from Elite to just barely Hardcore in 2 weeks. Apprentice, here I come!
We are leaving DDO due to frustration with the game.
The dungeon design is great, but the difficulty of dungeons swings wildly from "too easy" to "the designer must hate us" and everything in between.
This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that you only get most of your xp for completing a dungeon, and you take a noticeable hit if you have to release back to the tavern.
Another reason is the chests in the game. It seems that 99% of the time we just get junk. We have rarely gotten any good equipment from chests, having to get most of our current equipment through the action house.
This has led to too many nights were we had to quit with nothing to show for it. Very frustrating.
I understand how you feel on this but as for dungeon design you wont find another game like as for all the other comments I hate to say this but WoW dosent have that there dungeons or should say instances are good they just dont have the feel of a DDO dungeon. WoW might be the big game but please dont bring it up all the time theres alot of games out there with great dungeons from EQ1 to AoC anygame out there has some kind of instance thing now except maybe Vangaurd unless its something new they added. Other then that look around try alot of games on trials or F2P.
Sherman's Gaming
Youtube Content creator for The Elder Scrolls Online
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wow due to the new dungeon finder is as close to ddo as i can think of
I have to say Guild Wars.
Not a MMO but still just play it without using npc party members. And you will get that feeling I guess
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
To the OP:
Guild Wars is your best bet. Every environment is like its own instanced dungeon. You can progress with a group of any size and yet easily go back and help a friend "catch up". Travel is a snap, the environments are gorgeous, every "mission" quest is like it's own dungeon with unique puzzles and challenges.
I think Guild Wars is perfect in terms of what you're looking for. In fact, if DDO were more like Guild Wars (smarter and customizable henches, like in GW; better story in GW, better graphics in GW) I'd probably play DDO more.
All MMO's have dungeons but none ive played has the D&D type dungeons other than DDO. Finding traps, disarming them and picking locks are just not found in MMO's. Single player RPG games is where you find these things. Baldurs Gate, NWN, Drakensang etc.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
Man love the dungeons in this game, if I hadn't done them all a billion times, man! A ton of good times and memories.
I can remeber, just trying to flag for this raid, in a quest I knew reasonably well, not one you want to pug but easy if you knew it.
When me and a friend were duoing, and realized that the main tactic, included having a caster, to cast fireball to light torches, or cone of cold to blow them out, so that you could fullfill quest objectives, and we were not casters...
Eventually though, after brainstorming maybe wands or scrolls, but that wouldn't work not enough umd, we realized that the mobs, mephits I think, actually cast spells that would allow you to access the objective, and low and behold after kiting the right mob over to the area, it worked. Just brillant design. And that quest is already awesome without that.
These types of things are why people love this game.
As far as others with the same instances, its just not happening right now. Everything is super tank and spank oriented, 2-3 pull this set and on and on. Its funny for people to get so excited about the trinity, cause DDO as far as the these types of quests, is awesome in that you don't need a healer or tank. Except fot he raids, but luckily they have enough good ones that its not too much an issue. Main prob is having done everything to death, lack of new gen features, and the lack of alternate gameplay options.
anyways gl and sry for the rant
I was pleasantly surprised when I went from Apprentice to full 5 star Elite in under 2 months. I was pleasantly surprised again when I went from Elite to just barely Hardcore in 2 weeks. Apprentice, here I come!