Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
March 19,2006 - We count ourselves amongst the fans of Turbine's Asheron's Call 2, a beautiful and eminently playable MMO that sadly went out of commission last December. Of course, online role-playing games have grown by leaps and bounds since that game's release in late 2002. World of Warcraft has proven that broad appeal doesn't mean skimping on features, and Guild Wars successfully demonstrated that a game can focus its energies and still be great fun. As a result, Dungeons and Dragons Online is held to higher standards than it may have been a few years back, and in some ways, it rises to the challenge. It certainly should please fans of tabletop role-playing that have looked forward to adventuring with friends in dungeons filled with nasties. But therein lies the rub: because D&DO is not a full-featured MMO, there are far too many qualifications for us to outright recommend it. Not that D&D fans are likely to complain, because Dungeons & Dragons Online, for better or (more likely) for worse, applies the rules and the spirit of tabletop roleplaying rather well. But when it all comes down to it, as fun as it can get, this pony does only one trick, and it's not likely to offer much after the first free month ends and you're faced with being charged for more playtime.

Character creation starts off well enough, allowing a choice between races and classes, although you don't get nearly the options that you see in earlier games like Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate 2. Half-Elf? Out of luck. Druid? Sorry. You do get an interesting race called the Warforged, which is one of many attempts at implementing a steampunk feel to the high fantasy, although World of Warcraft balances those dichotomies far better. Once you choose your race, class, and cosmetic features, your faced with an alignment, which appears to be an essentially meaningless decision within the context of Dungeons & Dragons Online. There are no evil / unlawful options, although in the absence of any player-vs-player, this was somewhat expected. Once finished, you're off to Stormreach Harbor to make a name for yourself as a seasoned adventurer.

Anyone who's played a quest-based MMO will initially feel right at home, and D&DO does a commendable job of introducing you to the basics with the starting quests. There are plenty of differences between your run-of-the-mill online RPG and this one, although you may first be surprised at how it superficially resembles Guild Wars, thanks to a plethora of light bloom and the instanced quest areas that form the backbone of the gameplay. Quest-givers are easily identified by the golden goblets hovering over their heads, and the mission locations are simple to find on the minimap. Once you've retrieved a quest, you simply find the entrance and enter an instanced dungeon that only you and your party can enter.

Once inside, the sonorous voice of the Dungeon Master will offer up atmospheric words of wisdom, and then it all comes down to the crawl, and for most, that means combat. The quasi-turn based feel of previous D&D games has been replaced with a free-for-all combat that relies more on frantic right-clicking than it does on tactics. Sure, the dice rolls are there, but Turbine has increased the role of twitch gameplay more than most MMO's have. You do have the familiar auto-attack option of most similar games, but it is less effective, and due to the limited combat options at earlier levels, less fun than using your free attacks. You can also manually block using the shift key, or tumble forwards, backwards, or to the side. At its best, the combat is a ton of fun because it feels like every swing of your axe or every shot from your bow is meaningful, rather than relying on an automated attack to do it for you.

There are other things to do down in those dungeons. They're filled with traps, so having a rogue in your party is essential. There are also a variety of puzzles to solve by pulling levers, turning valves, and so on. Dungeons are often designed well, forcing you to climb ladders or swim underwater to get to certain locales. Unfortunately, they get old fast, because most of your time isn't spent in the beautiful, extensive city of Stormreach, but underneath it, where the sites are considerable less exciting.

But as they say, the devil's in the details, and while we applaud Turbine's love of the tabletop inspiration, that doesn't mean that a strict interpretation of D&D lore makes for a consistently fun game. Gaining experience and leveling up are the most noticeable concessions, and if it appears at first that the developers were trying to limit the “grind” we all love to hate, in practice the implementation does exactly the opposite. You only gain experience by completing your quest—unless you count the small bits you gain by defeating some encounters within them. Quests come in short, medium, and long varieties, but its highly frustrating to embark on a quest with others unfamiliar with it, only to fail it multiple times because you killed too many of one type of monster. On the other hand, you can get together with folks that have done the mission before, but that sucks away the wonderment of exploration, since those folks will zoom through the quest and your main goal will simply be to keep up.

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