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DDO 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week
Hakiko
Member Posts: 103
I am going through a few games in the style of a casual gamer trying them out. I will be trying out ArchLord, Lineage 2, and DDO over the next few weeks (1 week for DDO as it has a seven day trial) I will spend a few hours a night several days a week on each game (simulating casual play style). I will make up a report that deals with the game after 1 hour (crucial for someone trying it out), 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month (traditional end of a trial and the real moment of truth. Do they subscribe or not?).
I will also be avoiding forums, instruction manuals etc. for these games during this time (it is my impression that the average, casual player does not bother with or even know many of these things exist)
In the interest of full disclosure I have never played AL or L2 (in fact any Korean game at all) before this experiment. I was in DDO Beta. I will take my Beta time into account since I pretty much forget all the controls anyway. I will ignore my accumulated 20+ years of D+D PnP time.
I will be aproaching this as someone who was in DDO Beta so I will give a quick impression of my time in Beta. I am also playing it on the same machine/headset/ISP.
1) The voice chat never worked right for me. It would be working one night and junk the next. No matter how I set it up the other players voices always came out of the speakers and not my headset and were hard to understand.
2) The bug report tool would time out on me while trying to report a bug. I had to report all bugs by forum.
3) Every few days it would not let me sign in and I would have to reinstall the client to get it to work (this was tech supports solution)
4) Frequent crashes
5) Rubberbanding
6) not enough content
OK most of these problem have been documented to death here and elsewhere but I had heard good things about the work they have been doing so I decided to give it a shot.
The first hour (well a little more than that)
OK the game is up and running, account made, no problems.
The appearance customization is nice in this game. It's not CoH (which it should be honestly. This is D+D customization is key and the game revolves around small groups anyway so having lots of char types should not be an issue) but it is well above average. I enjoyed making my character.
I looked over the attribute customization but decided that going with my test criteria I needed to just accept the default because that is what the average player will do when presented with that much information.
Zipped right through the starter area and relearned the controls with ease thanks to the tutorial type pop-ups. Everything worked well here.
Arrived in Stormreach and did the quest for the bartender where you kill the kobold, by this point I was well back into the swing of the controls.
Before I could even start on the next part of that quest I was recruited into a group. I had been dreading this moment and it was with great reluctance that I reached over and plugged my Logitech headset into the USB port. And it worked!! right off the bat! All I had to do was adjust the gain a bit to avoid killing the other players and map a hot key. An issue from Beta had been solved since release (those of you who have participated in a bunch of Betas know that this is by no means a given).
The group was great, they were very friendly. We ran through three different quests on normal, hard and then elite. A few of them were obviously very experienced and knew the quests well but they were not pushy and were helpful to a few group members who were obviously on their first MMO. Throughout the night as people left there were always quick replacements.
One irritating bug was that it always reads normal difficulty when entering a group quest even if you are on hard or elite. This created a lot of confusion for the newer people.
I stayed on wayyy longer than my sceduled hour and got enough XP to gain a level (although I have to clear some quest to gain access to the trainer). I was having a good time. I had no crashes, rubberbanding etc.
Now I know one of the traditional problems with this game was running out of content too fast and there is no way to encounter that in one night so that does not factor in here (and would not for the casual player just trying it out either).
All in all I had a good time and was impressed with the overall technical improvements that have been made.
First day:
I played enough to count as one day for a casual player so the first hour review includes this information.
I will also be avoiding forums, instruction manuals etc. for these games during this time (it is my impression that the average, casual player does not bother with or even know many of these things exist)
In the interest of full disclosure I have never played AL or L2 (in fact any Korean game at all) before this experiment. I was in DDO Beta. I will take my Beta time into account since I pretty much forget all the controls anyway. I will ignore my accumulated 20+ years of D+D PnP time.
I will be aproaching this as someone who was in DDO Beta so I will give a quick impression of my time in Beta. I am also playing it on the same machine/headset/ISP.
1) The voice chat never worked right for me. It would be working one night and junk the next. No matter how I set it up the other players voices always came out of the speakers and not my headset and were hard to understand.
2) The bug report tool would time out on me while trying to report a bug. I had to report all bugs by forum.
3) Every few days it would not let me sign in and I would have to reinstall the client to get it to work (this was tech supports solution)
4) Frequent crashes
5) Rubberbanding
6) not enough content
OK most of these problem have been documented to death here and elsewhere but I had heard good things about the work they have been doing so I decided to give it a shot.
The first hour (well a little more than that)
OK the game is up and running, account made, no problems.
The appearance customization is nice in this game. It's not CoH (which it should be honestly. This is D+D customization is key and the game revolves around small groups anyway so having lots of char types should not be an issue) but it is well above average. I enjoyed making my character.
I looked over the attribute customization but decided that going with my test criteria I needed to just accept the default because that is what the average player will do when presented with that much information.
Zipped right through the starter area and relearned the controls with ease thanks to the tutorial type pop-ups. Everything worked well here.
Arrived in Stormreach and did the quest for the bartender where you kill the kobold, by this point I was well back into the swing of the controls.
Before I could even start on the next part of that quest I was recruited into a group. I had been dreading this moment and it was with great reluctance that I reached over and plugged my Logitech headset into the USB port. And it worked!! right off the bat! All I had to do was adjust the gain a bit to avoid killing the other players and map a hot key. An issue from Beta had been solved since release (those of you who have participated in a bunch of Betas know that this is by no means a given).
The group was great, they were very friendly. We ran through three different quests on normal, hard and then elite. A few of them were obviously very experienced and knew the quests well but they were not pushy and were helpful to a few group members who were obviously on their first MMO. Throughout the night as people left there were always quick replacements.
One irritating bug was that it always reads normal difficulty when entering a group quest even if you are on hard or elite. This created a lot of confusion for the newer people.
I stayed on wayyy longer than my sceduled hour and got enough XP to gain a level (although I have to clear some quest to gain access to the trainer). I was having a good time. I had no crashes, rubberbanding etc.
Now I know one of the traditional problems with this game was running out of content too fast and there is no way to encounter that in one night so that does not factor in here (and would not for the casual player just trying it out either).
All in all I had a good time and was impressed with the overall technical improvements that have been made.
First day:
I played enough to count as one day for a casual player so the first hour review includes this information.
Comments
The nights I did have a group where awesome. Like you some of the players where obviously experienced in DDO so could explain the quests and it was pretty fun.
I thought the graphics looked great. Everything ran on full at 1280x1024. The sound was pretty cool; dungeons had "dungeon" sounds to them.
At the end though the few nights I couldn't find a group made me not want to re-sub. If Turbine did a server merge so groups are easier to find, then I would most likely subscribe in a hearbeat. Even if the claims that content is lacking are true, for the $20 the game costs a few weeks worth of content is plenty.
The voice chat didnt work right. I had not changed anything but when I logged in all of the sound was coming from my headset! Music, soud effects, and voice chat all right into my ear in stunning mono. This was annoying. I spent a couple of hours trying to fix it while I ran a few quests solo. Also the option to contact customer support in game is marke unavailable!
DDO I want to like you why do you taunt me so?
The head set problem seems to be a glitch that has happened to me on multiple games. I have noticed that when I launch the game(anygame) with the headphones plugged in at launch, I get all the sound coming from the headset. If I launch the game then plug the headphones then it works as intended.
Now I havent played DDO but have this same problem with WoW. Logitech headphones is what i use.
So, launch the program before plugging the phones.
I know you have good intentions and I am not really jumping on your case, but you have a lot of misconceptions about casual players.
Casual players know how and do use the forums. We like character customization and will also spend days figuring out a template before creating our character. With DDO in particular, most people I knew or talked with (a 100+) were all casual players and most spent loads of time figuring out which skills they wanted to use and etc. I never met a person in DDO that was casual and used the default template.
Casual player does not mean dumb or uninformed. It just means we play less hours a week than the hardcore and we have jobs, families, or both. A lot of us casual players were former hardcore players and many casual players have gamed all their lives.
The way you put 'casual player' in context in your post is insulting and degrading, because we are not like that at all. We know what we are doing and spend the time making wise choices. We only take longer getting to max level.
I know you don't mean to come off this way, but you do.
Edit: Where are my manners...nice review by the way. I don't play the game currently and haven't since the first month, but I've been thinking about returning and finding one of those once a week groups that try to simulate the once a week PnP games (Perma-Death and all).
Basically they just said hey I like D&D and cool they have some game based on it where you RP with other people online. Neat. So they try it and go from there. Or even further down the inexperienced scale they've never played D&D but were curious about it (thus the accepting the default build).
At least that's my impression.
There are hardcore gamers who son't have a lot of time, hardcore gamers with oodles of time, and then there arre casual gamers for whom games are a way to pass the time when not watching TV, or something they have recently become interested in. All this petty forum infighting is really between hardcore gamers with too much time and hardcore gamers with too little time. Casual gamers rarely even see the forums and might not even be aware that 40 man raiding exists in WoW.
For example I play WoW with my old gaming D+D gaming group. None of them was interested in reading the manual, confident that the tutorial would explain everything (which it pretty much does). They don't care about builds, they place their points in the skills they want the most. Half of them have never bought an item from the auction house. For the most part they are not interested in grouping with people that they don't know in real life. And other than me none of them have gone to any type of WoW forum or website. When they get to 60 they do some quests and then try out a new character. And there are plenty of people who do this. Actually as MMOs move into the mainstream this will become the majority. Just here to have fun and waste some time.
Many of these people (including my MOM) are trying out various MMOs for the first time now, and it is important that they don't get turned off. I think DDO did an admirable job by offer the kind of complexity hardcore and serious gamers, as well as D+D alumni, expect while have acceptable default builds that casuals can be used.
Trust me there is a whole segment of gamers, especially in WoW, that would be bewildered at the common internet forum's definition of the casual vs. hardcore debate. In fact many of these people have been long term casual gamers. They have moved from UO or AC1 or EQ1 to WoW in a group of sometimes 40 or so people. None of whom have ever experienced any kind of engame content. All just enjoying their long playing session together.
Well the free trial for DDO is over. So what are the main questions that I would be asking myself if I was considering subscribing?
1) Did I have fun? Some of the time yes. The first night was the most fun by far. I was in a good group of cool people for several hours. For a few nights after I had problems with the headset and mostly soloed. Soloing in this game is not a lot of fun. It has a great group experience and the solo game is just dull. Unfortunatly it seems like not as many people are willing to group when solo is an option. Most of the groups I had later in the week just wanted to rush through the content.
2) Did I like the art/sound? The sound and music were fine. I liked the character art and the atmosphere in the dungeons. However the city itself did not do it for me. For some reason it just didn't look real. People are just kind of standing around and there is not a lot of free space in the city. Everything is very cramped and well brown.
3) Do I see myself playing for an extended period of time? No. I was almost to level 5 and keep in mind that I was giving roughly equal time to Archlord and Lineage 2. I am also not interested in going back through those same dungeons all over again with another class.
4) Is it technically stable? In short, not enough. Many of the same problems and weird little bugs persist from beta. While the rubberbanding is not really there any more there is till wierd slowdown (and I am playing with 2 gigs of RAM and a 256 mb ATI card on 3 mb DSL on a machine I only use for games) and strange loading pauses.
I really want to like DDO, I really wanted to like it in beta too. It just needs more work and more content. I really feel like this game was just launched too soon, and like a premature baby it will struggle to catch up. I can have fun in this game, its not broken, and it has a good base.
I do not have a problem with the overall format of the game. The premise is interesting and it brings back that 1st edition AD+D feel of run the dungeon see you next week. But I want more from a subscription game. And "more" has always been this game's problem. There needed to be more content in beta and they still need it now. There is nothing wrong with a shorter game but you need to offer more paths through the early levels then.
All of the classes and races needed to be in at launch. I'm sorry but this does not cut it. You are pushing Eberron (a setting I have enjoyed hours of PnP in) but you hardly included any of the setting specific content. Its a great setting and this content could have given the game more character, which in my opinion it lacks. It just feels like generic fantasy instead of this really unique world.
Here's hoping for an online D+D miniatures game that is turn based.