Still Playing Dungeon & Dragons Online
We've got a weird way of playing massively multiplayer online games. Probably weird. At least, I don't hear of anyone else playing it that way. Curiously enough, Dungeons & Dragons Online is well suited to our style of gameplay.

See, we actually ignore the "massively" part of the description. We play these games by appointment, just like our Saturday Night pen & paper gaming, or how we played Neverwinter Nights until recently. We get together at a usual time on a particular day of the week, kick around the world as a group of friends for a couple of hours, and then sign off until next time. Occasionally some of us will pop online at other times - usually to sell or trade stuff, or to play an alt (alternate character). But for the most part, we treat the games like our own private world, unless we need to recruit someone else to fill in a slot because someone is missing that evening.

In fact, we ended up replacing our "Neverwinter Nights" night with Dungeons & Dragons Online. One of our group commented, "We'll just let Turbine be the Dungeon Master for a while."

That's how we played EverQuest, too, towards the end.

Some things in Dungeons & Dragons Online really support this type of play. For one thing, there's no problem travelling to get together and meeting online. We can get all get together within 5 minutes or less of everyone showing up. The adventures are instanced, and don't have much in the way of "respawns," so if someone shows up late, they can usually rejoin the group with little problem.

Since none of us are "hardcore" players, once we got out of the Dock areas for adventures, most of the time nobody in our group has the quests memorized. So we all get to experience the adventures for the first time together.

It's also fascinating to me that D&D Online... based on the great-granddaddy of RPGs which started the whole concept of giving experience points for body counts... doesn't directly reward players for killing monsters. Not that it matters - you still pretty much have to clean out the dungeon regardless (unless you are skipping side content). It's a good system, but unfortunately flawed. You get bonus XP for accomplishing certain goals (like the trite destroy-all-crates-and-barrels element, or finding secret doors, or disarming traps), but many of these bonuses only apply BEFORE you complete the main quest. If you haven't smashed all the crates before stumbling into the final "boss" you are meant to confront, tough cookies. You may have missed out on an admittedly small portion of the XP bonus.

This is not to say that I think Dungeons & Dragons is a great or perfect MMORPG. One of our group can't resist the urge to put in some extra playtime on weekends with his primary character from time to time (and really, we can't blame him THAT much), so he's two levels higher than anyone else in the group. This means that with him in the group, we get an XP penalty... but we can't take on any adventures appropriate to HIS level or we get clobbered.

And we're too nice to just let him solo the content for us until he dies, to "slow down" his leveling... :)

The whole tiered level approach to power thing is one of the most obnoxious elements of most Massively Multiplayer RPGs out there. Sure, the unlocking of content and new abilities is the point and the "goal" of these games - it's a powerful draw that works. But it's frustrating how it stratifies players so that they can't play together. The best resolution to this problem so far has been City of Heroes, which allows players to partner up with each other as "sidekicks" or "mentors," to raise or lower their effective level so that they can team up together.

The party size limitations are also annoying. The dungeons and difficulty level are geared for a party of six (unlesss you choose solo difficulty, a new option). The experienced points for the quest are limited by the level of the highest member of the group. This means a party of three gets exactly the same experience as a party of six, even though the party of three is facing much greater danger. Undoubtably this is to encourage grouping and people taking a full party. But a more severe limitation is that - before members of our group dropped out of the game - we'd often have 7 to 10 people playing. This necessitated splitting our group up into totally different groups and adventures (and supplementing our numbers with pick-up-members, always a hit-or-miss proposition).

The quests also have that heavily-scripted, inorganic feel to them. Fortunately, the variety of quests (after 2nd level or so) means you don't often have to repeat the same quests over at the same difficulty level, thus finding just how little randomness there really is in the game. But the linearity and lack of interesting player choices outside of combat tactics or which order you take the wings of the dungeon does make the game feel a little too much like an amusement park ride at times. While I don't REALLY miss the respawn cycles of EverQuest, that element did add an extra dimension - a strategic element - to the goal-based dungeon run.

But overall, we're still having a good time. The quests are amusing enough to keep us interested. And the game DOES keep updating constantly with free, new content. Not that we've exhausted the old stuff yet. But ultimately, it's still about getting together with friends, not about the game itself for us.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:52 AM (Permalink)