If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know that my favorite game of the moment is Dungeons and Dragons Online. I had originally tried it way back at launch and thought it had potential, but given that it was exclusively group-focused at that time, I thought I’d probably find it frustrating. Last fall, when it went free-to-play, I (like a lot of other people, I’m sure) revisited it and found it much improved and a lot of fun.
DDO, for me, scratches two gaming itches at once, which I will refer to as the “Builder” itch and the “Diablo” itch. The first of those is my love of interesting and detailed character customization, which DDO excels in due to its use of the D&D/D20 ruleset instead of something more like other MMOs. The D20 rules reward planning ahead and allow free multiclassing — while it’s easy to screw up if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also possible to build interesting hybrid characters. Another side effect of their use of the actual D&D rules is that you can apply your knowledge of the ruleset from outside the game, if you’re familiar with it from other sources such as the books or from playing Neverwinter Nights (another favorite of mine). (And if you want to know the backstory of the world DDO is set in, there are books about that too.)
The other thing I like about DDO is that it feels more like a hack and slash CRPG than most MMOs do. Combat feels a lot more active than the typical “auto-attack with interspersed skill usage, burn down one target at a time” that is typical of the genre. Movement and position matter, and the enemies know this just as well as the players — you can dodge incoming spells and missiles, roll around to flank your target, and so forth, but at the same time, enemy casters and archers will try to kite and agile meleers will hit-and-run. Plus, instead of more powerful single enemies, often a tougher encounter simply means a larger horde of mooks, which means nonstop carnage and a lot of hacky, slashy AoE fun.
The world of DDO is reminiscent of Guild Wars rather than a more typical MMO, in that it is highly instanced with handcrafted missions and outdoor areas. You don’t get experience points just from killing things. Advancement always comes from completing objectives, even in outdoor exploration areas. Finishing a quest gives a chunk of XP no matter how you manage to do it, with bonuses and penalties applied for such things as killing everything (or sneaking past it all to gank the boss), disarming all the traps, not dying, and so forth. Quests come in multiple difficulty levels suitable for soloists and groups, with a corresponding scaling of rewards, and you can repeat them as often as you like. One unique bit of fluff in DDO’s quest system is that there is a narrator who serves as the dungeon master, occasionally describing things as you progress — and like real DMs, the ones in game occasionally do badly acted NPC voices, pronounce names differently from one another, and so forth. In one particular quest chain, the voice of the DM is even provided by the late Gary Gygax…
Another point about DDO worth mentioning is that because of its subscription-based origins, it isn’t as big a money suck as some free-to-play games. You can still subscribe to get access to everything, but if you don’t you can buy content in chunks and once you buy it, it’s unlocked on all servers forever, so it’s possible to make a one-time purchase and never pay again, or more likely, spread out a bunch of smaller buys as you level up. There is no need to constantly purchase consumables, as in some “free” games, and there is plenty of free content at low levels to keep a typical player busy for a while (especially one who likes trying different classes).
All in all, I highly recommend DDO for anyone who wants a somewhat different MMO experience — and all it costs to try it is a download.