As a D&D fan, I've been looking for a legitimate excuse to take the time to download and play "Dungeons and Dragons online Eberron Unlimited". What better excuse than a class assignment?
DDO is a third-person, "over-the-shoulder" MMORPG. It's free to download and try out for 30 days at www.DDO.com, after which, a $14.95 monthly is required to continue playing. The game uses the standard Advanced D&D character generation and classification model. The first time you play you must create the character and select it's gender, class, race and alignment. Next, you can personalize your character's hair, eyes, lips, nose and skin color. Once that's done, you are given the choice of which world you want to play in. I chose "Thelanis". For no other reason than it was at the top of the list.
In "Thelanis" you awake on a beach wearing nothing but robes. Off shore you see a wrecked, sinking sailing ship. You quickly meet and befriend a shifty Rouge name Jeetz. He tells you that you were a survivor of the shipwreck. The ship, he says, was attacked and sunk by a Dragon. He then offers you a sword in exchange for a favor. You accept and from there you begin your first, albeit small, quest.
While the controls are programmable to the user's liking, I used the default keyboard and mouse controls: W - Forward, S - Backwards, A - Turn Left, D - Turn Right. The space bar makes you jump. The mouse look controls looking left and right, however, in order to look up or down, you have to either hold down the right mouse button or press the "T" key on the keyboard. I found this to be cumbersome. Finally, to talk to another character, pick up on object or attack an enemy, you left-click mouse on it. Initially I found this to bee a little tricky. Not being used to the controls, I was having a bit of trouble getting my character in position to attack the enemy. Often I would be in range of the enemy, but not facing it; or, facing it, but not in range. As with any game, it can take a little while to get used to get used to the controls. After about 45 minutes, I had become much more proficient at attacking my foes correctly the first time. Yet, still, the controls never exactly felt comfortable. Accessing the various menu and inventory screens was simple enough and pretty much what you would expect from a game in this genre.
When downloading the game (from www.ddo.com), I was given a choice between the "Ultra-high Resolution" graphics package or the or "Standard Resolution" graphics package. Ever the optimist, I chose the "Ultra-High Res" package. Surely my purely pedestrian $450 Acer could handle some fancy online RPG textures. ... Right? Sadly, in order to get the game to run at even tolerable frame rates, I had to back down three full steps from "Ultra-High Resolution" to the lowly "Medium Resolution". I can honestly say the graphics on "Medium Resolution" are easily as inspiring as a bowl of wet flour. By comparison, Guild Wars, which features nicer looking graphics, ran many times better on my older, slower, Acer laptop at higher resolutions than I did DDO on my newer machine. Not surprisingly, I find the graphics to be the most disappointing aspect of the game.
Standard dramatic RPG music? ... Check. Player and environmental sound effects? ... Check.As far as this reviewer is concerned, unless there's something remarkably good or remarkably bad about the sound then I consider it to be average. The sound in DDO is just average.
In the end, if you're looking for a vessel that will satiate your primal D&D itch and you
aren't expecting amazing graphics or smooth, polished, player controls,
DDO will do the trick nicely. If, however, you're looking for a visually engrossing RPG with innovative game mechanics, BMW M3-like player control and a unique story, you'd better keep looking.
I rate this game 2.5 out of 5 Shiny Fireflies.
No comments:
Post a Comment