Well I have been in the beta and got in the stress test (lasts till the 19th) and so far I am not that impressed.

The graphics are nice looking, and can be pumped up, but not to much effect that I can see. I am running at 1600x1200 with everything set to high or medium, and 2xAA and I run smooth as silk. The only thing at medium are the shadows. Bumping it to 4xAA at said resolution does make for some slightly choppy play, but not much.

Character creation is actually rather nce. You can either use a pre-rolled character or select your own feats and skills, as well as divy up some stat points, nice for both people that don't know (or remember) 3.5 rules, and also nice for those that do.

Race selection is across the board. Humans, Elfs, Dwarves, even Warforged, and the bonuses for each are there as they are in the books.

I have only played a human fighter for now, figured I would go with something rather easy to start with.

Combat wise I am not that keen on. It is more like Diablo than anything else. You can press Tab to select what you are fighting, but it does not "lock-on" to that target, so you must turn to hit it. It is a little off at first, but you do get used to it, sorta.

Movement and looking are done by default with WASD and the mouse. Right-click and you will be swinging away, a common sight in the newbie area. Double left-click opens things, talks, and picks stuff up, a little off to me as well.

There is no XP from killing things. XP is only gained from finishing quests. The quests are difficulty selectable when you enter them, easy, hard, and elite. I think the higher levels unlock as you gain levels, though they may have them locked for the stress test. All in all it is rather interesting concept. And the missions that I have gone on so far are all instanced, so no quest/kill stealing. Though that may make grouping a little more difficult, ie Guild Wars.

Personally I hope that they tweak out the animations a lot more. Jumping is nothing more than a straight-legged leap into the air (think SWG) and a lot of it, while not totally blocky, just isn't fluid enough for me. There are some nice touches though. Walk into water past your knees and you slow down, use the search skill and you kinda crouch and look around, but that is about it that I have seen.

I will be giving it more of a shot during the stress and beta, but so far I am not gonna pick it up. To me it just looks to much like an upgrade to Neverwinter Nights more than anything else. This may change though. I love pen & paper D&D, but that may be part of it. I also will admit that I am spoiled by how smooth WoW works for me. I guess if they can beat WoW in playability then I am there.

Interesting, Albatross and I were talking a bit about this game. But right now we are having a lot of fun with EQII.

How is the game from a solo point of view? Can you solo?

How are the Items, weapons, etc?

I dont like the idea of not getting anything for killing monsters, but if the quests are cool.

Speaking of the quests, how are they? typical kill X monsters, Fed-Ex delivery, scout points a, b, and c and return...what exactly?

And lastly, does it have that D&D feel to it?

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Actually that is all I am doing is soloing. So far it is quite easy, but then again I am in the begining of the game. It does look like at later levels they intend for you to group, as do all MMO's though.

So far they are right out of the Players Handbook. One exception that isn't in the regular books is the inclusion of items for the Warforged. They can be healed with regular spells, but only by half. They added healing specific spells and skills (which are in some of the books) just for them.

Honestly it grows on you not getting XP everytime you kill something. There are bonuses to the set amount of XP you would get for the quest for disabling traps (if there are any), looting chests, the monsters killed, bonus things you can do in the quest.

So far all the quests have been in sewers/dungeons. Which is what I expect so far. I don't know how far I will get, but they have been interesting. Breaking into a long forgotten (it seems) wizards lair, destroying an unholy altar. All of them could be modules for pen & paper quite easily.

Actually it does, though you could look at EQ 2 *shudder* and get the same feeling. With the dwarves, elves, halflings, humans, and warforged, and coming from the company that basically started RPG they do put a D&D feel to it. For instance when you walk into a room you will get a breif description of the room as if it were coming from a DM. I would like it better if it was being said to you in a deep voice, to truely give it a DM feel, but it is a nice touch.

There are some bugs though. I had issues buying things from vendors, a repeatably takable scroll, and some very minor graphics bugs, but overall I am starting to like it more and more.

I do have to say, I made up a sorc and they used spell points. I cannot see any other way that they could have handled spellcasters. Clerics are the same, while they have more spells to choose from, they are limited to how many they have ready and can cast.

Readying spells can only happen when you are resting. This is done in the tavern/bar. While in there you slowly gain back HP and MP, and can swap out spells, if you want to change what you have ready, to have them ready to be cast.

There are also resting points, and ressurection points in dungeons. This is how they are seeming to handle getting HP and MP back while questing, and they can only be used once, so think of it like the shrines in Diablo 2.

I signed up for beta on this game, guess I must not have gotten in. I have been reading the website a fair bit though and it sounds like this game will be aimed at people who like to group (D&D was always sort of set up to be a group activity) they did say that they would try to have content available for the solo player but it sounded to me like it would be very limited and especially at higher levels.

Anyway I was kind of fired up about this game, but it sounds to me like the graphics are pretty lame from your description, was hoping they would be something really special....time will tell

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"My anger outweighs my guilt."

As an old DnD player I tried to like this beta test but the lack of a persistent game world that I feel I could explore really detracts from the game for me. I played through several dungeons and the quests were pretty vanilla (collect 5 of these, and you won't miss them since they're in chests placed in the middle of different rooms. . .I may have rode the short bus to school but I'm not yet on a ventilator, thank you), and the dungeons were too room-hallway-room-full-of-crates in design for my tastes. And the UI was pretty wretched too.

Ah, well, my EQ2 addiction still rages on. Got my dwarf paladin, Trestolt Oakenheart, up to level 27. Been trying to save up for a full suit of pristine imbued feysteel armor for when he hits 30th. Just bought an Adept 3 for his offensive combat stance too since I solo a lot with him. My slutty female dark elf assassin is also almost 23rd now.

Cool, I just dinged my Iksar Shadownight level 21, I took out a level 15 named MOB that had 3 arrows up totally solo. It was a close battle, but damn fun.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Dinged 30 today and put that feysteel vanguard armor on, which almost doubled my mitigation. Also bought this huge 2-handed sword called the Gorehorn Blade of Butchery, but can't use it until I'm 33rd.

Hey guys, if ya all wanna do a EQ2 thread then please do, but this was a review of DDO, not where to say ya dinged and what uber-weapon ya got in EQ2.

Perhaps since you went to the dark side there Scorp you could make a section just for EQ2.

You are correct sir, please accept my apologies.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

I was accepted to beta today...I'll let you guys know what I think, I have to try and find the time for it somehow though.

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"My anger outweighs my guilt."

Lucky dog, give us a full report after you have a few hours in it.

Well, this thread sorta died and I never did get around to doing beta, I did on a whim however, buy this game last weekend, I have about 12 hours into it so far and I have to say that at this point I really like it. The artwork is really nice, has less of a "cartoony" feel than either EQ2 or WoW. I am getting close to level 2 and haven't grouped at all though it is looking like that will be a necessity in the near future.

I am playing a rouge, trying to base him after "Gord the Rouge" (some stories written by Gary Gygax that I really dug as a kid) and I have been having a blast so far, the game is pretty demanding though and it does crash my video card pretty regularly, at this point I am comfortable blaming that on my hardware and my insistence on not turning the graphics down below average, as opposed to saying the code sucks or whatever. I'll let ya know as I progress over the next couple of weeks.

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"My anger outweighs my guilt."

I do know that fairly recently they went through and added in a ton of stuff for solo players.

It has gotten to the point that once you reached about level 12-15 you just could not go into the dungeons/instances solo anymore. The boards for the game were getting many many posts about people, while they understood that D&D is a group game, online shouldn't have to be. So many changes were made, and things added, to make it easier, and to extend solo playability.

To update on my D&DOnline experience....my video card can't take it, gonna cancel my subscription for now and re-up after I upgrade my computer, hopefully early next month.

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"My anger outweighs my guilt."

Got a new video card and I have been able to apply some time to this game now, and I have to say that I really like it a lot. It would be even more fun with friends to play with. But over all I really like the feel of the game, and the graphics. The dungeons have some interesting and challenging puzzles. They have added, or I just found places called "adventure areas" where you can kill monsters for XP more along the lines of an EQ or WoW. When I first found one of these areas, I thought to myself, "Oh, boy, here we go with the grind." But after having ventured in I found that at least as a solo player it was not going to be a matter of setting up "camp" and slaughtering to my hearts content. The big thing is that you do not regenerate HP/MANA while in a dungeon or adventure area. The only way to recover after a battle is to use potions, or have a healer with you. I have on occasion found 'healing shrines' in the dungeons where you can rest and recover hit points and mana, but as a solo player with limited funding for healing potions I have found that my best bet is to fight until I am very low on hit points and then head out to a tavern to regenerate. The problem with this is that any time you leave an 'instance' there are a couple of things that can effect you. One is that if you are gone for more than 5 minutes the instance resets, so none of the progress you have made counts anymore, if you do happen to get up to fighting strength and back into the instance in time you face an experience penalty when you finish. Not positive on the numbers but it seems like it charges you 10% XP for every time you 're-enter' the instance.

My character is level 2 now, and it was a very slow process, you don't get experience in this game for just killing monsters (for the most part), you get XP by completing quests. I did every quest that I could find listed for level one and that was just about the right amount of XP to carry me to level 2, I'm not sure if that is what the developers had in mind or not. Some of the quests are repeatable, and I found one that was yielding a fair amount of loot, which is something that I thought was lacking through many of the other quests, so I have run it into the ground now doing it over and over so as to get my player well equipped and funded so that he has a fighting chance to advance.

I will keep you guys posted as I move along and if anyone is interested in joining me, I am on the Thelanis server and my players name is Aeriax Stratocaster. I honestly don't even know how to send a person a personal message in game yet as I have played solo thus far, but I imagine it's pretty easy, the rest of the interface has proven to be fairly intuitive so I have to think the communication part should be pretty easy too.

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"My anger outweighs my guilt."