DDO Preview Impression

Before you read this, please understand all information are based on the preview beta and may not reflect the final product of the game.

The DDO Preview Event has just ended today and I figured I'd use some time to share with everyone who has not gotten the time/chane to play the game.

My very very first impression of the game is plain. After I created the character and finished the tutorial. I feel very disappointed. The first few quests were very unimpressive. My roommate who was playing with me felt the same way. The quests were simply not very exciting. This was true to me until I had a chance to try out one of the long quests. My opinion quickly changed and I started to enjoy the game more and more as I started to engage in higher and higher missions. The complex dungeons, traps setup, secret pathways and such really opened my eyes as to what DDO can do.

In this aspect, I would say that DDO really opened up a new frontier as to what mmo is. In traditional mmo where grinding and farming are the way of life. I salute Turbine for trying to shed some light into mmo genre. A lot of people still complain about soloing, power lvling, not having xp from mobs, not explorable areas. All I can say to those people is "this game is simply not for you", if you are a EQ or WoW person who enjoy the idea of getting better and better gears through constant grinding and farming, this is not the game for you. I personally hate grinding, farming and soloing. I always felt and wondered why a lot of mmo's came to be that way. Why am I paying a monthly fee to grind and farm and solo in mmo? Why not just play a single player game, their content is usually much nicer anyway. I understand a lot of times the reason why people would choose to play mmo is not the good gaming experience, but the feeling that you can "show off" your gears or awesome pwnage abilities. Well, I just want to say I am glad those people won't like this game, because it is the last thing I need.

There are a lot of times when I had players in my party who would go and try to rush through the dungeon and ended up getting killed and complain about the game. To those that complain this is all like diablo, then you really don't know much at all. I understand it all seems to be like that, but the truth is it is not. It is D&D with much faster pace. Take attacking for example, many times I have seen players fight like a mad man, swinging around big axes/sword and running around everywhere. What they don't realize is actually that when you are running around, you are constantly promoting "attack of oppotunity" which is when the enemy will get a free attack roll on you. With that much running and great number of enemy, just think about how many free attacks you will receive.

To make my points clear, here is pro/con I come up with:
Pro:
-Unique gaming experience, you are not playing to power lvl, you are playing for the experience.
-Nice character advancement by having ranks.
-Good handcrafted dungeons.
-Nice experience system with additional bonus
-Encouragement to think and be careful in the dungeon rather than rush like a mad man type of play

Con/suggestions:
-Not enough quests, you shouldn't be required to repeat any dungeon in order to advance. You shouldn't be required at all to play on hard or elite.

-Party system needs improvement. A nice quest selection option would be nice, so that party member can only enter the selected quest and give player the option to also teleport into the quests instead of running around the town and having the party waiting for that person

-A quest sharing system would be nice, instead of requring that individual to go the get the quest him/herself. though it isn't as big of a problem since most quest givers and its locations are next to each other.

-Lvling happens ways too fast, my 3 days play already put me at lvl 3. Should try to either add in a lot more quests or upping the lvling cap.

-where is end game, what will be the future of max cap character? It should be more than just re-rolling.

-needs rapid quests update, with turbine betting everything at this, they need to keep cranking out more and more quests very fast to keep players interested and constantly playing rather than repeat old quests. Character A's experience and character B's experience shouldn't be absolutely the same. Probably going to need a team of dedicated DM making a lot of quests. what would be even cooler is to release a DDO making tool and players can submit their made dungeons to Turbine who will evaluate and decide if it will be actually implemented into the game.

-More information in group finding system by providing important information as to the location of the player and such, so you wouldn't end up inviting players that have not advanced to the part of city you are at yet. also shows how many players a LFM party has and how long since it was created.

-needs a better xp credit system, sometimes when a player dies and goes back to town, and then the party happens to finish the quests by going ahead, the dying players will receive absolutely no xp if he/she is still in town.

-way too fast combat goes a bit against traditial D&D's slow paced, thinking required combat system.

That's about all I can think of. I personally think DDO can have great potential if done correctly.