I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons Online for a couple weeks now, long enough to get off of the starter island and into the game proper. I'm still only level 4, with the cap at 20, so you can certainly consider me a nub. I've been playing the game long enough, however, to be pissed at some things, and when I am pissed at things in a video game, there are only two proper responses: heap curse words on the monitor, and heap curse words on the internet. With the completion of this post, I will have done both.

You and me, we both know what kind of world we live in, with regards to MMORPGs. We live in a world that contains World of Warcraft. We might as well be honest about that, no? This is a post-WoW world. Every MMORPG is evaluated in light of WoW's existence. You almost feel like an asshole for doing it, for comparing something that will obviously, by definition, be inferior, lower-budget, less polished, with a gleaming juggernaut. "Well, yeah, this sushi is pretty good, but the stuff I had in Tokyo..." It's inevitable, though, so I may as well just say it: my main problem with DDO is that it's not WoW. There are so many little aspects of WoW that are vastly superior to DDO that it just hurts to play DDO at times. From the miniscule to the rather significant to the stuff that you never even realized someone could fuck up, DDO just feels a little shoddy when compared to WoW.

Take, for example, a member of the last category: something I didn't even realize you could fuck up. Certainly not this badly. Money. Currency. In DDO, there are four denominations, from least valuable to most, copper, silver, gold, platinum. Fine. Similar to the setup WoW has. Except there are crucial differences. First, the break between denominations is just ten, not one hundred. So ten copper = one silver, and so on. Second, the game does not auto-convert your currencies. Thus, it's possible to have, in your inventory, 375 copper, 967 silver, 1 gold, and 46 platinum. This is fucking stupid. But it gets worse! It is not uncommon for a random crate or barrel to drop 134 silver in a level 3 dungeon. That's 1.34 platinum, your most valuable currency unit, going to a level 3 character. From one random crate in a dungeon. Of which there are dozens, if not hundreds per quest. This is the equivalent of giving level 12 characters in WoW a gold per trash mob they kill.

As a very unsurprising result, prices are fucking ridiculous. At an inn, where things are vaguely sane, I pay 6 platinum - sorry, actually I pay 60 fucking gold, which demands the question: why the fuck even have platinum if no one uses it? This is something that carries to players too, and I have yet to divine the reason for it: no one, but no one, fucking no one, uses platinum. Why does it exist? But back to my original complaint, I'm paying 60 gold, which is 6,000 copper, for a bowl of stew at an inn. In real life, that is a sign that your economy is well and truly fucked. That's Democratic Republic of Congo type shit. That's "it'll take a barrel of currency to buy a loaf of bread" shit. That is the end of times for governments. And DDO set it up that way from the beginning.

Unsurprisingly, it carries over to the game's economy in predictable fashion. It's not uncommon to see decent items hit the auction house for millions of gold. Millions. It's fucking ridiculous. All games have inflation - and that's fine - but when it's that rampant, shit is silly. The worst part is that these numbers could be made far more sane by one simple change: 100 copper = 1 silver, 100 silver = 1 gold, and so on. Your stew now costs 60 silver (still seems like a lot to me, but hey), and your 10M gold Bracers of Ogre Strength are now just 100,000 gold, or 1,000 platinum, should people choose to actually use that currency.


Along those lines, the only explanation I can come up with for having the player have 336 copper rather than 3 gold, 3 silver, and 6 copper, is a realism thing. Which is ridiculous, since that amount of metal would drop your pants to the floor and overburden you. As was the case, not-so-incidentally, with Turbine's first game, Asheron's Call. At least at first. Then they made money weightless. DDO retains burden-less money, but it does have burden, which is somewhat inexplicable, given that my 20 strength barbarian (a high number for level 4, but not hard to achieve by any means) can carry roughly a ton. Unless there's some weird lost-in-translation thing where a DDO ton equals 200 pounds, that kind of tosses realism out the window, along with any meaningful impact that burden could have.

Above and beyond perhaps all other short comings, I wish I could lift and drop the smooth, functional, and polished user interface of WoW onto DDO. The interface isn't horrible, but it ain't pretty, either. I'm still not really sure how to use a resurrection shrine - nor are my four friends also playing the game - and the game's help hints aren't of all that much use. We all struggled with figuring out how to select feats, clicking and double clicking and right clicking on them in the list that said "choose feat." Eventually we realized you have to click and drag them from the list onto the small empty feat box you have. It's not unusable, it's just counter-intuitive and... odd. And the most recent line of chat on the chat window is always clipped off a bit at the bottom, no matter what I do to resize the window. Do the devs play the game? Do they not see these things?

The animations are another place the game feels less than stellar. I know I'm hanging out with David rather than Goliath and am bitching about his inability to block shots in a pickup basketball game, but still. One of my friends equipped a club for kicks and then attacked a few times with it. Swing, swing... stab. Hey, given the choice between having a bowl of ice cream and getting stabbed with a club, I'll pick the ice cream. I don't want to get stabbed with a club. But getting stabbed with a club ranks very low on the list of thing that I fear. I know that having a different animation for blunt weapons costs more money, but it just looks and feels so cheap when you see your character stab with a club. Similarly, when I use my trip ability, I have to check my cooldown bar to make sure it actually happened. A trip looks the same as a sunder looks the same as any other attack. I get no real feedback, visually or otherwise, to let me know I attempted and succeeded or missed with a kick. It just feels weak.


But these are just bizarre design choices that, while fucked up beyond reason in some cases, don't really impact that game that much. They're noticeable, but by themselves won't drive you from the game. Allow me to move to some gameplay issues.

Perhaps the most annoying is the way that equipment works. Or doesn't, more accurately. You can get various stat bonuses on various pieces of equipment. The simplest one to deal with is something like strength. I'm a barbarian, so I love it. I put on my gloves of Strength +1, and I go from 19 to 20 strength. I then put on my boots of +1 Strength, and I go from 20 to... 20. Statistic bonuses don't stack, you see. Unless they're coming from different, you know, types of sources. Or something. Take AC (armor class), for example. Two rings of +1 protection (+1 AC) don't stack. A +2 protection and +1 protection ring = +2 protection. No stacking. But if you have a ring of +1 protection and boots of +1 dodge, your total AC bonus is +2. Dodge and protection, two difference sources. I think. I'm not really fucking sure. It's confusing, and stupid. Trying to figure out whether or not a new pair of gloves is an upgrade involves looking at all of your fucking armor, and then maybe your backup armor to boot. I know these are D&D rules, but fuck, man. Just limit strength to weapons, gloves, and bracers, and then let it stack. The current system is annoying, confusing, and not at all explained.


And then there are the bugs, scourge of any game, but particularly of MMORPGs. I've not had any crashing as a result yet, but there has been plenty of annoyance. About a quarter of the times that I start the game, it just disappears while loading, and I have to start it again. Then there's the extreme annoyance of item detail pop-ups disappearing almost instantaneously. I turn in a quest, get a choice of rewards, hover over them to see the pop-ups that compare the new weapon with what I have equipped, and within a split second, the pop-ups disappear. I have no idea what triggers it or solves it, and it is annoying as hell. Truly.

Not as bad but perhaps more aggravating in a way is the collectables-turn-in-
conversation bug. It is annoyance heaped on top of annoyance. You will get scads of collectable items as you quest - grave moss, a fractured skull, bronze festival coins, a withered nipple, whatever - which you will eventually turn in to various NPCs scattered across the city. You can only fit something like twelve stacks in your collectables bag, which means plenty will overflow into your limited inventory, which is an annoyance unto itself. But what really grates is that you can only turn in one stack of collectables per conversation with a collector, a conversation that takes probably five clicks. I recently had 20 turn-ins to a single guy, which means I click click click click clicked for minutes. But there's a bug in the game that will make said collectors unclickable at times, which means that in the middle of your stupid click fest, you'll be forced to run away, open menus, hit escape, do a dance, and say a prayer to the god of bugs that he'll let you click on the guy again.



But you're probably wondering by this point why I'm even playing DDO given that it pisses me off so. The game actually has a lot going for it, and I'm quite enjoying it. Perhaps its greatest drawback is also its greatest boon: that it's not WoW. While I curse the bugs, the imperfect interface, and the complete lack of feedback when I use abilities, there are plenty of positive differences.

The biggest is likely their quest system. Dungeons and Dragons Online is, as the name indicates, primarily a game of dungeon crawling. The quests are largely geared toward raiding a dungeon and accomplishing some objective. Quests typically have multiple objectives, some optional, which are neatly tracked for you. The dungeons are often in town, just steps away from the quest giver, and delightfully quick for the most part. I like that everything is so self contained and convenient. Platforming elements are common, as are traps and puzzles (!!), which break up the monotony of slaughter.

Even better, though, is how open quests are. They each have a recommended level and group size - from solo only through to six players. These are very soft limits, though, which is why I like them. Where WoW is about gear checks and levels, with instances often coming down to brute strength, DDO is about brute strength or finesse, which is a crucial difference. In WoW, you need five people for a five man instance, unless you have someone way above level for the instance (which kind of kills the fun) or someone way overgeared (at level cap). You can probably whittle down and kill the first set of elites in an instance, but since enemies in instances have triple the life (or whatever it is), you're going to end up blowing all of your cooldowns, plenty of expendable items, and generally just not make any progress. Instances in WoW are made and balanced for five people. Period.

Given my rather sporadic playing schedule, and that of my friends as well, this is a problem. Yes, you can PUG (and I hear that with the new patch, that is far, far easier, so kudos to Blizzard), but I'd rather just play with my friends, whether that's two of them, three of them, four of them, or one of them. In DDO, higher recommended player counts usually equates to more enemies, more dangerous situations, and a possibility of swifter death. That, in turn, means that if you have the skill and coordination, you can still pull it off. There really aren't any gear checks - if you can make adequate use of the terrain, carefully employ crowd control, pull with caution, and work well as a team, you can succeed in a dungeon that recommends more people of higher level.


On top of that, DDO also offers hirelings to augment your party, should you be lacking in numbers or in particular classes. If that, too, weren't enough, you can actually repeat quests, earning experience and rewards for doing so, just as you did the first time. You unlock harder difficulties each time you do so, too, which means more favor, greater rewards, and the benefit of keeping things interesting. All told, the strong point of the DDO quest system - and essentially play system - is flexibility. I don't need to wait for all my friends to be online to play, I don't need a person of each role to be able to play, I don't need to be geared out, I don't need to be the right level, etc. I like it quite a bit at this point in my life. I am no longer hardcore.

There are other aspects I like, as well. The capital city of the game is huge - there's a dock district, a market district, districts for all of the various noble houses, and plenty of places I haven't even explored yet. There are the outside combat areas, which are treated like instances as far as having your own playground is concerned, though they in turn link to other instances. There's the flexible multi-classing system, the visual aesthetic, and the ability to block and roll. But what it really comes down to is the flexibility of the quest system, and the fact that it's a fun game that isn't WoW.