Spring Cleaning: A Critical Look at DDO

By Karen "Shayalyn" Hertzberg

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Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach launched with great fanfare on February 28, 2006. You might look at the title of this editorial and wonder: Spring cleaning? Clean what? It's a new game! New game or not, DDO is not without its smudges, dusty corners, and neglected cobwebs. No game is perfect, and sometimes that's never more apparent than at launch.

Don't get me wrong--I like DDO. I play it and I enjoy it. I do think that Turbine delivered on their promise to make an entertaining massively multi-player online game (MMOG) that would come as close as possible to replicating the pen-and-paper (PnP) Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying experience. I'm down with that. But...

Yeah, there's always a “but.” But there are some things that Turbine could have done to improve the game before it launched. I'll start with the little things that niggle, and work up to the bigger, in-yer-face problems.

Traffic Jams

This is a small but legitimate gripe. You finish a mission, you head back to the tavern to regenerate, you zone in and...bam! There you are, right in the middle of a huge pile of other players who are all standing in front of the door in the exact same spot. While DDO does allow you to move through another player, sometimes it's nigh on impossible to dislodge yourself from the monkey pile at the tavern entrance. While I suspect this will start to become less and less of a problem as server populations become more spread out across the zones and various taverns, there's no reason it should happen in the first place. A few random spawn locations for players zoning through a tavern entrance would eliminate the log jam. And yet, this isn't something Turbine saw fit to address before launch.

This Setting Should be Global

During the head start event, I created an alternate character to play for those times when I wasn't in the mood to play my cleric. I logged on to my elfin ranger and joined a group. To my dismay, I couldn't hear them talking in voice chat, although they assured me that they were. Finally, one of my group mates said, “Oh, I know what it is! You have to enable your voice chat settings with every character you make.” Excuse me, wha--? Why?  If I've gone through the trouble of setting up voice chat (more on that in a moment), then it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that, unless I say otherwise, I actually want to use voice chat on all of my characters. There's simply no reason that setting, and any other game and UI settings, shouldn't be global.

Voice Chat for Everyone? Eh...not Exactly

Upon launch, DDO became the first MMOG to use an integrated voice chat system. Turbine realized that the game was challenging enough to play without having to type during combat, and they did something about it. The only problem is that their solution is buggy. I still haven't been able to get voice chat to work with my (1 month new) computer.  (I can hear others, but I they can't hear me, even though I've tested my mic and it's working properly.) I've tried everything Turbine suggested, as well as some fixes offered up on the DDO.com forums. None of them did the trick. And in the midst of searching for more information on getting voice chat to work I found numerous posts in which players lamented about the bugged system. Many players confessed to using 3rd party voice chat programs like TeamSpeak instead of DDO's system. For a game that promotes voice chat as a stand-out (and highly necessary) game feature, there simply shouldn't be this many problems.

Solo? No Go

It's a cold fact--you can't solo in DDO. Oh, there are a few missions in the earlier levels that a solo player can squeak through, but on the whole DDO is not a solo game. Turbine never said that it would be, so I can't exactly blame them for holding true to their concepts of how the game should work. But I can't help thinking that, although this isn't actually a bug, it is a mistake.

Sometimes I just don't have the time to dedicate to getting a group and running quests, yet I still want to play. Let's say I have an hour to play--a reasonable chunk of time for a working mother of two. I log on and begin to look for a group. Because I play a cleric most of the time, groups aren't all that scarce. Let's say it takes me a conservative 10 minutes to log in, stock up on supplies like crossbow bolts, wands and spell components, and head to a tavern and find a group. Now I have 50 minutes left to play. It's going to take my group some time to assemble and meet at the quest entrance. Let's give them another 10 minutes, leaving me with 40. Finally, we enter the quest. Let's say it's a medium length quest, and it's a bit challenging. If all goes well, I might make it to the end of the quest before I need to go. But if people die; if we need to carry soul stones to resurrection shrines or, worse yet, release to town and run back...it's going to take longer, and my time may well run out so that I either have to bail on my group and my quest, or bail on my family and my responsibilities.

I don't see any reason for Turbine not to have several solo missions available per level range. No, soloing shouldn't be the best means of gaining experience or loot, but it should be a viable option for time-crunched players like me. I'd play more often, and enjoy the game more, if I could log in and run a solo quest every now and then, and save my grouping for those larger chunks of time.

An Assortment of Random Crunchy Bugs

It depends on who you talk to--some say that DDO launched cleanly, while others contend that it's bug-infested. Overall, I'd have to say that my own experience has been somewhere between clean and buggy. But it only takes a read through the DDO.com technical assistance forums to see that there are too many players experiencing problems. Bugs will happen, and beta can't squish them all, but glaring problems like screen freeze, various client errors, and both text and voice chat issues have become a little too prevalent on those forums to write off as one-time glitches, user error, or client side issues.

So, there you have it...just a few things I believe Turbine should have tidied up. Let me reiterate once more for the record--I like DDO. I'm going to continue playing and enjoying the game for a long time to come, and I'll recommend it to my MMOG-loving friends, as well. But when it comes to spring cleaning, this shiny new MMOG has a few smudges. The time to polish a game isn't after company comes over, but before the party begins.

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