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Dungeons and Dragons Online First Impressions

On Friday, I received my Dungeons and Dragons Online pre-order from Play.Com.  I spent a fair number of hours at the weekend trying out a couple of characters, and I am not yet entirely certain what to think.  In general, though, my first impressions are really rather good on the world, overjoyed with the game experience proper, but a bit disappointed with the interface.

Much of this is the caution of the previously-burned: I loved my first hours in Star Wars Galaxies: "look, an AT-AT!  A tiny Mos Eisley!  Stormtroopers!".  It all went sour later and my naive enthusiasm began to look very jejune.  So I view this new girl in the class with a jaded and cynical eye.  She's pretty, fun and does all I have asked of her.  But I can't hep worry that I'm being led on.

This game drives home what a traditional MMO World of Warcraft is.  When you start World of Warcraft for the first time you see the mission-giver ahead of you, clearly marked.  In a matter of a couple of minutes you are killing ten rats (well, young wolves, kobolds, scorpids, nightstalkers, etc...) and getting "prizes": loot off bodies, mission rewards.  Within a matter of ten minutes or so you are level two.  It follows every rule in the Jessica Mulligan/Richard Bartle/Raph Koster Big Book of MMO Game Design about the newbie experience.  It is smooth and seductive.  It is the ultimate refinement of the Diku model.

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach is not like that.  It really feels like a traditional, if magical D&D session.  It feels like a three-dimensional version of the game of Neverwinter Nights you always meant to create, using the authoring tools to implement your own campaign world for your friends.  There is a dungeon-master voice narrating elements of the story as you move through dungeons. The same DM tells you when you make your listen roll and hear monsters beyond a door, when you make your spot hidden roll, and so on.  It really is like playing pen'n'paper D&D with a brilliant new GM's aid showing you the world.

It is pretty straight D&D 3.5, which means that it is much tougher to start off solo as a sorceror, for instance.  I discarded a character because my spell choices, while useful, simply wouldn't get me through the early quests (Summon Monster 1, to provide me with a tank, and Sleep, the first level fireball).  Starting again with Magic Missile and Summon Monster 1, I was all set: I needed caution, sneaking and smart spell use, but it was do-able.  I even got a "devious" bonus to my experience point award for murdering kobolds by surprise.  Going back and using a warrior was a breeze by comparison, and required far less thought.

But then, discarding the solo pley that D&D rarely involves, and playing instead as a party of two (warrior and bard), it all came together.  This was fun.  D&D is about parties, after all.  The twitchy play with diving, turning, rolling and lunging made sense.  It became more like PvP combat, with tricksy opponents, and nothing could be further from teh go-and-make-coffee style combat of Everquest.

The controls are terrible, I should say.  Really, needs-three-hands unpleasant.  But you begin to forget them, except when you see all the WoW refugees right-clicking on things to speak to them or use them, and instead launching a blade through them.  Another pest is that the common instances - the taverns in particular - are the laggiest things I have ever seen.  You go through the door, then you wait for 20+ seconds for the server to communicate 70 player and NPC models to your pc.  Even the spaceport in Coronet wasn't this bad.

The graphics are odd, and I am, again, unsure what to make of them.  The character detail, both PC and NPC, is gorgeous.  Look at any particular model, be they building or character, and they look almost photo-realistic.  But as a whole they are slightly, disturbingly not quite right.  I think that the designers have entered Uncanny Valley, not a battleground in World of Warcraft but a point where representations of, for instance, artificial people are so close as to be a touch eery and even a little jarring.  But when you are in a dungeon, a proper fantasy setting with kobolds and metallic automaton dogs and the like, you leap out of the valley and become immersed.

But let's balance this: their servers stayed up at launch!  The client was stable!  I only found one dupe bug in the first half hour!  Yep, that's right.  If you want scrolls of Identify Secret Doors on Lysandor server, I'm your man.  What were they thinking?  I "made" ten as an experiment, tested I could get them out of the training instance, then stopped.  No duper, I.  But somebody shoot the testers.

In all, I was mildly disappointed until I remembered not to expect a traditional MMORPG.  Then, once I started treating D&DO as a "real" sesion of Dungeons and Dragons it was brilliant, superb.  OK, cast the caution away: I am loving it.  I want those extra spells.  I crave 2nd level...