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Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

D&D Online is not a great looking game but it's diverse. The characters suffer from some blocky graphics which make them look like origami figures, especially in the limb sections. Even some of the animations are a little stiff. A dungeon master presides over each dungeon, highlighting the tales of antiquity of your next dangerous adventure. It's a good addition that instantly creates a specific atmosphere for each stage which is enhanced by the soundtrack. Your first month online is free with the purchase of the game. If you want to continue past that you're going to have to pay a monthly fee. More content is continually being added so by the time you complete the first month, you might have another month or two of content to keep you busy. It's certainly worth the price for the first month and if you find a team of friends that you really like, this could be your new social life.

Everyone has their own criteria for what makes a game as huge and complicated as an MMORPG fun, and D&D Online will be just what a certain number of folks want out of their $15 per month. For many established online role-players, however, the lack of community and secondary features will surely send them back to their current, more traditional games.

Een aardig fris briesje door MMORPG-land, hoewel niet voor de casual gamers onder ons.

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach is shaping up to be the place to be for Dungeons & Dragons fans. It's especially good for those who enjoy their adventuring along with others. For those who like to step out alone it's not so good, and there is no pvp as yet. Although it's not difficult to join forces with other players it can have its frustrations because there are popular or preferred dungeons and you can find it difficult to complete less desirable ones. It also diminishes the fun a bit when one party member is familiar with a dungeon and knows all its secrets. A first time quester can miss the opportunity to make their own discoveries and work out puzzles.

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach stays true to the faithful genre of its name, but can it really last against the other much deeper, and more diverse, MMOs out there? It has some solid graphics, an enjoyable instanced mission system, and handy integrated voice, but ultimately falls short due to lack of content. DDO has a tough road ahead, and no doubt many of its servers will be shutting down and consolidating as gamers are turned off by paying for meager updates and expansion modules every so often. However, if you are a rather casual gamer/D&D fan, you will probably like this title, better yet if you get your fellow LARP geeks indoors, and online with you.

Of je Dungeons & Dragons Online goed vindt zal minder van het spel zelf, dan wel van de kwaliteit van je online vrienden afhangen. Het spel dwingt je namelijk gezelschap op te zoeken. In combinatie met de komende modules, lijkt deze strikte online variante van Dungeons & Dragons een leuke en actievolle MMOG, zonder het brede pallet aan opties dat we bij andere fantasy spelen vinden.

This dedicated focus on the questing and adventure portions of the game ultimately makes sense and should help keep the quality of D&D Online's content a cut above the traditional online RPG. But in exchange, D&D Online doesn't deliver the broad scope and wide variety of features you could find in other similar games.

I think DDO's single-player content is more compelling and its dungeons more accessible and numerous than in World of Warcraft or EverQuest II. Its visuals are technologically superior to WoW's without suffering from EQII's unsettling mannequins and relatively bland environments. But DDO doesn't hold a candle to either in terms of breadth or replayability. If only they'd had more time, or a larger team, then I might be singing DDO's praises to the rooftops. Instead, it's a cool experience that's essentially over all too quickly.

Mit Erstaunen habe ich festgestellt, dass mir das Taktieren in den kleinen Dungeon-Gruppen besser gefällt als ein 40-Mann Schlachtzug mit meiner WoW-Gilde in den Pechschwingenhort. Eine Abwechslung zum Solo-Spiel ist D&D Online auf jeden Fall. Schade ist, dass sich die Dungeons schnell wiederholen. Dass die Charakterentwicklung so langsam vonstatten geht, finde ich weniger schlimm. Dass es aber für den ersten Levelaufstieg nur selten eine Belohnung in Form neuer Zauber gibt, wurmt mich einfach.

Zum Glück birgt Stormreach ein ausgeklügeltes Gruppensystem. Suchen Sie nach Mitstreitern, erscheint über dem Kopf Ihres Charakters ein entsprechendes Symbol. Zudem enthält jede Auftragsbeschreibung im Tagebuch eine Schaltfläche für Gruppensuche. Mit einem Klick darauf sucht Ihr Recke nach Begleitern für die Aufgabe. Letztere erhalten Sie von Nichtspielercharakteren. Die Aufträge sind abwechslungsreich, im direkten Vergleich mit der Konkurrenz fällt aber deren knapper Umfang negativ auf. Berufe und - Aua! - Spieler-gegen-Spieler-Gefechte vermissen wir auch. Das Auktionshaus haben die Entwickler offenbar selbst versteigert. Der Wiederspielbarkeitswert kommt daher an den eines World of Warcraft oder Guild Wars nicht annähernd heran. Fluch und Segen zugleich stellt die detailgetreue Regelwerk-Umsetzung dar.

Dungeons and Dragon Online: Stormreach, or simply DDO, is an MMORPG based on the famous Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition, and the campaign setting Eberron. Turbine has done a great job, with the help of Wizards of the Coast and made a game which fulfills the qualities of the pen and paper version. The fact that they don't have any PvP makes the game less attractive. The quests are hard, and requires groups, which they haven’t found a good enough system to actually be useful which makes the quests harder than they should be. They might have put up a channel that is called 'looking for group' or 'looking for players' instead of a social panel where you put in: "I need help with these and these quests", and hope that there is a few people that goes in and looks for it. The game will probably be a big hit among the hardcore DnD fans, but beyond that I'm not sure. If you do like questing more than fighting players however, this is a game for you.

Seine Komplexität kann ich dem Spiel nicht vorwerfen, dafür hat sich Turbine mit der Umsetzung des Regelwerks und der typischen Pen & Paper-Atmosphäre zu viel Mühe gegeben. Was ich D&D Online aber zum Vorwurf mache: Wieso gibt es keine Kurzinfo für Gegenstände? Wieso ist die Standardbelegung der Maustasten so verdreht? Warum ist die Suche nach Gruppen so umständlich? Wieso gibt es keine Kontextmenüs für Objekte? Hier hätte Turbine etablierte Standards übernehmen können, statt zwanghaft eigene schaffen zu wollen. So bleibt D&D Online eine Spielwiese für beinharte Fans der Regelwerke. Der angekündigte WoW-Killer ist es aber auf keinen Fall.

The good news about the unwieldy named Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is that the developer, Turbine, has managed to shoehorn most of the equally unwieldy D&D rules into the game. The bad news: Turbine managed to shoehorn most of those unwieldy rules into the game. The end result is an online game that is a fairly faithful adaptation of its pen-and-paper source but is also less than the sum of its (very) considerable parts.

Est-ce-que Dungeons & Dragons Online : Stormreach justifie de payer un abonnement tous les mois ? Eh bien la réponse est loin d'être un oui catégorique. En effet, le contenu laisse à désirer et est constitué quasi-exclusivement d'une suite de donjons instanciés qui finissent par tous se ressembler. Le plaisir de l'exploration est donc limité. En outre, la réalisation n'est pas au mieux et on aurait aimé avoir un plus grand choix de races et de classes. Ajoutez à cela qu'il n'y a ni PvP, ni artisanat, ni de quêtes pour soloter et vous comprendrez vite que le jeu n'a pas beaucoup d'atouts à faire valoir hormis les fameuses règles D&D 3.5.

For a title that costs more than World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is unbelievably light on stuff to do. It does feature some decent dungeons that can be fun to run through with a group, but with no pvp, no economy, no trade skills and nothing useful you can do by yourself, this is a dungeon to crawl away from.