So moving on from the contemporary masked vigilantism, it's back to basics with Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach. Of course, the first stage was getting a trial at all, which proved to be a bit of an adventure in itself.
"You have followed the link given to you by the DDO trial webpage, and now find yourself gazing at the terrifying visage of a File Planet login page. Vile and unpleasant banner ads crawl about the screen in all directions, clashing wildly and threatening to overwhelm your resolve and send you off to find a Matrix Online trial instead. You swallow your pride and create yet another spurious login and password, having long since forgotten your last one. The sound of other disgruntled adventurers ahead tells you that you may have to queue for quite some time."
Yes, somewhat unprofessionally, the free trial link on the DDO website just sends you to File Planet to get the thing, which weighs in at about 2GB, and takes around 4 hours thanks to File Planet's wonderful 1940's valve-based server technology. Oh! I pay mun-eh, I can haz fast serverz? Took three goes in the end, and even then, I ended up with a self-extracting exe that just made my little 'I'm busy, go away' cursor do that little spinning circle thing indefinitely, and required a hard-reboot to get my desktop back. In the end, I had to go off and find this proprietary 7-zip super-zipfile extractor thing and do it myself.
That got me to the pre-patch phase. Patching itself took another four hours, and at one point, I was encouraged to go and get an optional 3.3 -> 4.0 launcher patch (500mb), from File Planet again! I'm not sure using File Planet as a primary file distribution mechanism quite fills me with confidence to be honest.
Actually, just stepping out to a more general point for a moment. If you're going to offer free trials, as complete downloads of multiple gigabytes, taking hours to acquire, for god sake, make sure the damn thing is up to date! I'm not a network architect or QA manager, but how difficult is it to delete MyBigassMMO_ver1_0_0.zip out of the place you download the big ass MMO from, and replace it with MyBigassMMO_ver1_345_211.zip instead? The work of minutes, I suspect, but would save hours for the rest of us.
If I've got to sit there and successfully not get bored and give up, for the requisite hours it takes to drag the client kicking and screaming out of the netherworld that is the internets, the least I could expect is that it's broadly the right version. I don't mind being a few updates behind, but having to sit there while every file in the archive is completely replaced does tend to make Van Hemlock sad. I know I'm paying you nothing, but it's possible I might be persuaded to at some point soon.
NCSoft are quite good about this. Guild Wars, Auto Assault and City of Heroes all just download a tiny little executable stub thing, a few hundred kb, and that then goes and gets the latest version direct. Been a while since I last installed an SOE game, so not quite sure how they're doing it at the moment.
Annnnnyway, got there in the end, and in we go. One suitably vague, but well done, cutscene later (which probably accounted for at least two of my eight hours of download), it's character creation time... again. After CoH, this was a bit on the rudimentary side, but I did like the little movies it plays to explain what each of the classes is about. The options here are quite formulaic really, but then again, this is Dungeons and Dragons we're talking about, so you'd expect the very standard line-up of usual suspects - Warrior, Cleric, Mage, Rogue (Because calling them Thief is kind of frowned on these days), Bard, Mage, etc. The races are more limited, with only Warforged being something new. These seem to be fantasy-grade robots of some kind - constructs, and whose main feature seems to be that they have trouble being 'healed' in the normal sense and need repair kits instead.
Also listed, but greyed out, are everyone's favourite renegade emo bad-ass race of spider-fanciers and all-round BDSM fetishists, the Drow. That's dark elves to you and me. I'm not sure quite what happens to make an otherwise somewhat effeminate race of frail flouncing decadent poets into this force for Awesome and Cool, aside from giving them black skin and white hair, but I blame R A Salvatore. In any event, it's all a bit academic, as you need 500 'Fame' on a normal, boring and frumpy raced character to unlock them, making it some kind of Prestige Race of sorts I guess. I went with a Dwarf Cleric for the time being, but intend to give each of the main archetypes a go, if I can. One of the nicer things about the 3rd Edition Rules of D&D is that they've dispensed with race/class restrictions, allowing any race to be any class, which is always nice.
Once moderately happy with the choice, it's out to Smuggler's Rest, a small island on the way to the big city of Stormreach, where the main game takes place. This is chock full of the usual pop-up hints and tutorial NPCs, all explaining how the WASD keys work and the like. Some rebinding may be required, as RMB makes you just swing your weapon at whatever is in front of you. For some reason I was expecting this to rotate the camera, which probably made me look like a very aggressive dwarf indeed for much of the time. The UI is fairly familiar, from a dozen other games of this ilk, and initially, it's hard to see what makes this game that special or different from the rest. You run about, talking to people, picking up quests and so on, and it's not until you reach the first dungeon - a kind of training room thing in the back of the local Inn, that you start to see what DDO is actually all about, and that seems to be Stories.
The Inns and docks, and streets of the main city beyond, mostly exist to hang various quest instances together in a meaningful way, and throughout the place are the doors, sewer hatches, row boats and similar, behind each of which, is a..well...D&D 'Module', I guess. The first one was a fair introduction to the kind of thing one can expect.
The Innkeeper has set up a challenge for new adventurers, which consists of finding five Wizard Stones, in various chests. As soon as you step into the instance, you're greeted by the Dungeon Master's disembodied voice-over. Delivered in classical 'You gaze around the dank cellar...' style, and with a fair degree of voice-acting proficiency, this chap follows you throughout the, well, adventure, describing each room for you, stepping in when events happen, and so on, and it's a bit strange really.
Back in the day, I had brief and generally unsatisfying goes at the pen and paper stuff. For me it never quite worked, partly because my imagination was never quite up to the job of detaching from the table and charts and dice, and actually going on these adventures, in my head. Wait ten years or so, and the paper-based spreadsheet exercise was finally, and perhaps inevitably, taken over by computers, and here we are, with the modern MMO, not needing to imagine anymore. So hearing this quirky and odd throwback to those computerless days is at once odd, and comforting. The DM's running commentary does actually work. The textures and polygons are still there, of course, just like in any other MMO, but just having that bit of audio embellishment enhances the experience in indefinable ways. And of course, with it, you know you're playing a game of D&D, of a sort.
Shortly after that, you learn that the instances are a lot more detailed than we're typically used to. Levers, doors and chests are nothing new, but one room involves mantling, climbing ladders, breaking open pots and crates, and a great deal more acrobatics than is typically required of the genre. Later on, there are traps, and quite possibly, riddles!
There's also a somewhat unique and more considered pace required too. DDO has a tricky line to walk, between the frantic mob-massacre of WoW, EQ2, GW and similar, and the painstaking 'And now we go to an Inn and spend the next three days recovering, learning fresh spells and waiting for Gorod's ribs to mend...' ignorance of time passing, more in keeping with pen and paper.
From what I've seen so far, they've not done a bad job. A new mana bar has cropped up from somewhere, and the spells, while still needing to be prepared/memorised, are powered from this. Most crucially of all though - health and mana do not 'just come back over time', making the careful rationing of resources a new and difficult thing for the typical MMO gamer to have to learn. Compromise exists in the appearance of 'Rest Shrines' in strategic points through the dungeons, allowing one-time recharges of health and power, and a rejigging of memorised spells if needed, but you can't just stop anywhere and hit the 'Camp' button, as in Neverwinter Nights.
But go too crazy in the early fights, and you might not have enough mana or health to make it to the end. And of course, unless you get to the end, you don't get seem to get any xp, which means you can't just duck in the door, beat up the first ten kobolds, bail, rinse and repeat. There is no grinding, as such. It's good in theory - Adventures and Stories, rather than Improvement and Levels for their own sake. How well it actually works, remains to be seen.
Graphics, Noises, Performance, Latency, all that technical jiggery pokery, are comfortably acceptable, but then again, I only tend to notice those at all if they're dire, which I suspect ought to be the point.
I'm now in the city of Stormreach itself, which is a well detailed and interestingly different type of magio-mediaeval port city, and very three dimensional; steep streets, stairs, multiple levels. It's also home to an awful lot of Citizens In Distress, which is handy, and lots of Adventures to be had. So far I've only had a go at one or two solo ones, (The Wavecrest Tavern basement one - the first 'real' adventure you go on, was very well done) and have yet to join a group. Something tells me that grouping is likely to be a lot more important here, than in other games though, so that's for next time.
With any luck, I'll even get a Ranterbury Tale or two out of my ten days in Ebberon!