While I’ve been in a fair amount of betas in the past, I’ve learnt to value and spare my time. As I said a while ago, the only beta I’m currently interested is Vanguard, and mostly because of the scope of the project, those involved in it and how loudly I expect it to collapse. It’s the only game right now in development that I don’t feel completely indifferent about (along with Warhammer, but that’s because I have gripes against it).

As a gamer I’m fairly pleased with Eve, DAoC and WoW. Beside that, I don’t expect anything interesting happening in this genre in the short-mid term. It’s dead and I can see clearly what’s next. And I find it dull.

With the failure of Wish (for me, one year before it was officially announced) I started to select what I care about and what I don’t. I don’t play anymore whatever comes out and I’m rather confident of my early impressions about the projects. What I find valuable and worth my attention, and what isn’t. This is why I never played, even for a minute, most of the recent mmorpgs: Horizons, Lineage 2, City of Heroes, Everquest 2, Matrix Online, the last reiteration of SWG, A Tale in the Desert and many others. And I won’t touch silly, amateurish projects like Dark & Light or Darkfall even with a long pole. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m done hoping for those kinds of things with no solid foundations. And I’m also done with the hype. You won’t convince me anymore with a pretty screenshot of a landscape without a character model or the semblance of a UI.

DDO falls in the “mostly ignore” category for me. I have zero faith on Turbine, overall. They bought licences but they didn’t demonstrate they have a clue about what they are doing or that their work is solid. I have read enough about this game to wrap it up and form my own opinion. I’m not saying it is crap, but I’m saying that I have no interest about it, if not because I follow the market overall and read what other thinks and how the genre changes (for the better, the same or the worst).

The following is about some comments gatherted from random forums. It’s my personal selection and it is supposed to be biased. I’m voicing my opinion through them:

Soulflame:
I think the #hate people lasted a couple of weeks. That’s all I really need to know.

Murgos:
Solo content runs out about the third session.

Kunikos:
This game has less feeling than a Uwe Bowle movie.

Garylian:
There is a significant lack of content. While Turbine expects characters to repeat dungeons to gain XP and gear, it almost borders on the ridiculous. It is so bad that same folks deliberately don’t level up, so they can gain XP at their last trained level, instead of the level they could be. Instead of losing out on groups due to their level, they just make sure they form their own groups. This lack of content means that they will have to have some expansions ready to go within 3 months, to keep customers happy. Not a healthy sign.

Atoner:
I didn’t like it much. I got into the Beta months ago and was quite fired up about it but after a few play sessions I could barely muster the energy to fire up the client. If AC2 and Guild Wars had a love child, this is what it would look like. It would be most accurate to call it Bizzaro-AC1; anything that AC1 was, DNDO isn’t.

The world feels tiny and cramped ( GW )
There’s nothing to really interact with or explore in the world at large ( AC2 )
There’s nothing to do besides missions/quests ( GW )
The graphics are pretty but movement and animation feel rigid ( AC2 )

There’s barrel-smashing aplenty if you didn’t get enough of that in Diablo. Everything requires a group and a moderate-sized block of time, that’s true of many other games but as a husband and father I don’t always have consecutive three hour blocks to play. Sometimes I enjoy the ability to log on for half an hour or an hour and still accomplish something, so I prefer the games that allow for this.

On the other hand, I do like the character creation system, which is true to DnD in that you could spend hours fiddling in there.

All in all, AC2 burned me enough that I am no longer willing to play half-baked Turbine games on faith alone. There’s just not enough gameplay here to warrant any interest on my end, and it disappoints me to say that given this game’s heritage.

Korak:
Who are they marketing this to? Other than the 50-100 hours spent doing the quests it doesn’t seem like there is anything else to it. Would have been a fairly nice single player game if they tacked on a better combat system and a decent storyline.

TheGoodNun:
I’m predominantly a solo-er and I’ve been able to find a fair number of solo-capable modules. The trouble is that it’s difficult to discern from the description whether any given quest is solable. Pretty much if the duration is “short” I’ve got a fair chance.

Arthur_Parker:
When you repeat a dungeon with an alt character everything appears to be exactly the same. I repeated one of the first dungeons with a new thief character, he can pick locks, he could not pick a totally unimportant door, the key for which is in one of 60 odd barrels that my first character had to break. For a game that boosts of having alternative ways to complete a dungeon that’s a bit stupid.

Inn’s are the place characters are forced to go to heal and where they spawn when they die. I was amazed that given how important Inn’s are to the way the game works that characters can not even sit down in a chair.

The game interface is complete junk, really really terrible, they should just scrap it and start over. The whole twitch combat idea didn’t really work for me, maybe it improves at higher levels. The game virtually required me to group at level 2, completely missing one of the reasons why WoW is such a good game.

I don’t like the idea of zoning, I don’t like watching a loading screen, upon death I had to zone 3 times to get back to where I was, I will not be buying it.

It was better than I expected though, given the design of the game it’s going to be interesting to see what happens a couple of months after release, I really can’t see Turbine creating enough content to maintain subscription numbers.

Hoax:
1. This game is not worth a monthly fee, it would do much better then GuildWars has with this community if it was free though since the gameplay screams for organized short runs then logging off. Where GW’s pvp endgame (while awesome) is very time consuming as it is with all competitive pvp.

2. This game will annoy those who do not suffer from the disease known as altitus or whatever we call it these days. Unless there are literally SOO many newbie quests you have no hope to complete all of them, but then it will still suck. Because most players will not want to take on an inferior xp/time grind just to see new content even if that would be more fun. People are broken and stuff.

3. The game doesn’t look nice (in the way so many have gotten used to WoW’s visuals) and it doesn’t look like it is ready to release, it reminds me much more of the EQ “style” which is to say almost no style at all. Broken group chat, attacking npc’s with no response, arrows gfx sitting in mid air and invincible boxes? mmmm beta (note: nothing has ever been fixed in a MMO beta, ever)

4. The combat while decent systemically (wonder if that was a real word) -talking melee here- looks stupid. This is a mistake people like for the thing they will spend 90% of their game time doing to not look stupid. Also without trying it myself I couldn’t tell if there was any improvement over WoW’s melee combat, just even faster and more mouse clicks!

Kuro:
I found it rather meh, but I of course couldn’t get to level 10 in 10 days, so who knows if there is OMGAWESOMEJESUS content at level 10. It was getting rather annoying and repetitive even by level 3, and with the idiots who couldn’t tell their right hand from their left that I had to group with, I basically wanted to slit my wrists after playing it for more than 2 hours in a row.

Haemish:
But telling me I need to research all the stats, the builds and pick the one true template (or one of a set of templates) is going to be a problem for a game. The majority of MMOG players don’t read message boards, they don’t visit spoiler sites and they don’t stay with a game that makes their character a gimp. It’s all well and good to say “They aren’t looking for the typical MMOG player” but I have yet to see how they are going to capture the non-MMOG player and get them to pay a subscription fee when the game is content-light and has classes that don’t cut it outside of a group. It’s ok if it’s a forced grouping game, but that will probably mean I won’t play it.

Jubee:
The controls and the constant warping turned me off the game by the time I hit level 2. The combat system really felt like Morrowind: Online, without the assbeat Daedric weapons. And just like in every RPG ever, clerics were impossible to find.

And all the choices you have to make at the char select screen really overwhelmed me. I’ve never played DnD before, so tossing “Choose yo feats!” screen at me with as little info as possible on what they actually do just ensures you will create a gimp nobody will group with.

“Before you ever saw what the game was like you picked Improved Hide over Improved Detect Trap? GTFO nub!”

Mazuli:
Now that the NDA is lifted: The game sucks. I was in alpha, played it for about a half hour, then stopped playing it for about 2-3 weeks. Tried it again, it looked a little different, and it still sucked. Then I uninstalled it. It’s like city of heroes with worse controls and less customization.

Dahlrek:
I played it off and on, though not during the xp boost period. I liked some aspects of it; the nice touches in some dungeons, the customization of character abilities, the loot, the sorta-no-xp-for-monsters.

I disliked the interface, the ridiculous triviality of jousting some critters (maybe the entire combat system), the over-instanced feel (like GW except with tiny combat areas), the lack of non-combat solutions for almost every progress block, and the wild disparity in mission difficulty from one mission to the next.

On top of that, this will surely be a game of gods and gimps, as someone else already mentioned. A huge assortment of feats, skills and whatever the little bonus points were called, but little to no indication of the relative power or long-term viability of any of your decisions. I always thought CoH was bad in that respect, but at least it has a limited respec system; this game will be far worse.

Itzena:
One description I heard of D&DO was ‘Guild Wars, but with a monthly fee’

Gaunt:
Guild Wars without the PVP and with a monthly fee.

Go to a player hub (inn), spam LFG, go to instance entrace and do mission.
There is no shared hunting grounds. There is no soloing past level 2 or so.

Basically what Mahrinskel said long ago:

Turbine got some major VC money (over $30M), but WoW has upped the ante for DDO and LRO to where that probably won’t pay for either, never mind both.

In a word? Weak.

I believe we’ll forget about this one rather soon.

Tobold has, as always, the kind, optimistic review.