DDO

[OrgroInsanity]

First of all i'm writing this having never played pen and paper DnD so my opinions might have been different had i done that but, in general, this game is terrible.

First off, everything is instanced, even the cities. When you get a group, you have to ask the group are you in Marketplace 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
Thats IF you can find a group, because of the instancing the only way to find one is thru the LFG interface, which has you make an LFM message and choose the classes you need and the level. Except, no one ever picks the level and classes they need, whenever someone does LFM they leave it at Level 1. So if you're level 6 and trying to find a group good luck figuring out what level the person making the group is.

Second, there are only 10 levels. I know even pen and paper DnD had 20. Exping is long and drawn out, and because everything is instanced you do dungeons for exp. Imagine the only way you can get Experience in EverQuest 1 is doing LDoN dungeons. It's like that. Except you hardly ever group with the same person twice.

Some of the graphics look really nice, thats one plus of the game. But they got very, very lazy with some things. All the weapons in the game look the same, no matter what. They make about 4-5 different graphics for 1 type of weapon, say a Longsword. Now every Longsword in the game, be it the best weapon or the worst, looks like one of those 4-5 graphics. No armorslots are visible except your chestpiece and your helmet. The armor being done the same way, 4-5 graphics for each type of armor, Full Plate, Leather Armor etc. Boots aren't visible, Gloves aren't visibile, etc.

Economy: nonexistent. Players are discouraged from trading with eachother. Instead, you sell things to Pawnshops, which pay slightly more money than a regular vendor would. The item you sold then appears on their Buy area and other players can purchase it thru the vendor, at around 8 or 9 times what you sold it for. There is no auction channel, which wouldn't help much anyways because of how broken up the cities are thru the instances. Only roughly 30ish people in one city instance at once. Likewise, the Pawnshops only sell what was sold to them in that instance. So you find yourself jumping across 2 or 3 instances searching for something to buy. There is no player crafting.

I bought the game thinking it might hold me over till Vanguard or LOTRO but its failing miserably. It would be an OK game if they didn't expect you to pay 14.99 a month for it.

[dorick]

That sounds terribly unsatisfying. I imagine there is no sense of community except with the guild you're in if they even have guilds. Perhaps an online forum is the only sense of community that will exist.

The armor and weapon graphics sound really messed up. That's worse than allowing dyed armor.

[Kula]

I've heard the same things about DDO......mostly from people posting on the Vanguard forums.

From what you said it differs greatly from real D&D especially in rate of experience gain. In real D&D if you follow the CR system that the rules lay down you will gain a level every other adventure. Personally I think that is too fast and players really don't get a sence of their characters abilities before they are compounding it by getting newer abilities.

[OrgroInsanity]

There's other stuff too thats super annoying, Mini-map nodes where the thing actually isn't at. Multiple minimap nodes where there should be one, typos galore. The UI is the worst i've ever seen.

I'm running a 3.0ghz dual core processor 2k ram and a geforce 6800 and i still lag bringing up the Character sheet or Inventory sheet. And especially when examining items. Getting 80-100 FPS but if you open your character sheet, bam 3FPS till it opens. I was playing on my shitty comp i use for Porn and MP3's etc and it took me up to 1 minute to examine an item. Never has a more poorly done UI existed. If you want to inspect an item, you have to target it, like you would an npc, from your inventory. (And if you're currently targetting an NPC in battle or what not you have to lose your target) Then you have to move all the way to your "focus Orb" which basically just shows you it's picture and click the examine button. Why couldn't they make it so you could just Right click the item to examine it? I dunno.

[xilanthanax]

Sounds like complete garbage.

[GINLAAN]

Sounds like a certain beta that is being tuned right now. ASide from the instance's.