The Digital Continuum: Four days with Dungeons & Dragons Online part 2
8:04pm Thursday, April 9th
Funny thing. I unfortunately had to cut my playtime short today because I need to prepare for some actual tabletop D&D tonight. Being a DM can be a whole lot of work, especially when you're crafting a custom campaign. After writing this, I need to compose a set of Skill Check responses that an evil follower of Vecna will give depending on my PC's rolls. Ah, I love doing that.
Anyhow, I opted to keep away from Stormreach for today and do a few more remaining starter quests in Korthos, which is fine since it gave me the chance to talk about the Korthos experience as a whole.
Players originally began in the harbor of Stormreach. Now of course, there's the island of Korthos that eventually lets you catch a boat to that harbor -- after a series of increasingly fun and varied quests. And while I'm sure that I haven't seen nearly ten percent of DDO's content, I can say with a certainty that quests are actually far more interesting overall than your typical "Go kill 10 of X" ordeals. In DDO, you're sent to save a man descended from a famous bloodline and he's the only person that can aid the town in some substantially dangerous -- but equally exciting -- stuff.
Along the way, you may also prevent snake men from defrosting a giant dozing beneath the island. You may also rescue a damsel in distress, sorta. But ultimately, the only time you're killing any amount of 'X' is when you want to -- it's a free-form quest.
Korthos Island is actually subject to three of them: one for killing, one for exploring and one for rare monsters. In my case, I've found about 7 of the 12 locations and killed something like 70 inhabitants of the island. For me the killing monstrous inhabitants thing was a nice sort of side-side-quest. It started simple enough. A little window in the upper right of my screen said "0 of 10 Inhabitants" or something along those lines. It also informed me an XP reward was in the making, were I to meet this meager requirement. Once I'd done that, it jumped to 25 kills. My overall kill count didn't go down, which was very nice of the game. For some reason, this just made me want to do it even more and gave way to further exploration.
I've been really impressed with the starting area, and tomorrow I plan on checking out the city and maybe a few lowbie quests and instances. Here's hoping the fun keeps up!
11:14pm Friday, April 10th
Stormreach is brimming with content to the point that I felt like an adventurer kid in a candy store, that also sold authentic dragon slaying weaponry. Not much else really needs to be said about the game, or at least I don't think I can add much more without spending more of my time with it. So instead I'll leave you with this:
Whatever you may have heard about this game, you should give the 10 day trial a good run. It download easily, and actually comes with all the content updates as far as I can tell. Like I said before, it only took me a total of about 45mins at around 300kbs, give or take. If you've ever played and enjoyed pen and paper D&D, you'll like what Turbine has done over the years. Maybe it wasn't perfect at launch, but MMOs are like butterflies: They launch as a healthy grub and hopefully find enough of a community to wrap them in a strong cocoon, allowing them to truly come alive as another wondrous creature entirely.
Is this the D&D MMO for everyone? No of course not, but it's certainly an impressive take on the experience and one that no D&D or really MMO fan should miss. At 15 bucks I think I can easily say that DDO is worth a month of my time and anyone else who's looking for some high valued fun.%Gallery-49916%
