This week I was lucky enough to get an invite to the Stress Test of the highly-anticipated MMO Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I managed to register in time, and create an account. Downloading the client was a pain, as you had to fight your way through FilePlanet to get it, but I managed. It wasn’t until the next day that I actually had time to play.

I quickly revived an old favorite of mine, an Elven Wizard, and dove in. At first, the typical MMO stuff: You’re fresh off a ship in a strange land, as you walk down the pier you get helpful tooltips on how everything works, and at the end of the pier is your first contact with an NPC. He sends you to the inn, and *yawn*. Ok, where’s the meat? Well, in the bar you get your first quest: Retrieving 5 mystical stones as proof of your adventuring skills. She points you toward the door, and *bam* you zone. That’s when things get really impressive.

Having played Everquest 2 and Star Wars Galaxies, I had expected a drawn out tutorial on “here’s how you walk”, “here’s how you talk”. Instead, I hear the deep booming voice of the “Dungeon Master” describing the room, all those nuances that you can’t get from fancy 3d graphics: Smells, sensations. Then I get instructions to pull the level opening the door in front of me. Pull the lever? That was the first of many surprises. Levers, doors, booby traps, physics, smashing furniture, climbing ladders, all those things we’ve come to love and enjoy in single-player FPS games are here in DDO! It’s amazing! Fully instanced quests with FPS playstyles! In every other MMO, doors magically open for you when you approach, and a small broom on the floor is an impassible obstacle. Not so in DDO.

I was even more impressed later when I ran into my first quest with a Puzzle. I had to arrange a set of floor tiles to light up 4 runes and nullify a shield spell. This really showed off the flexibility of the engine, as these floor tiles (Which I could walk on) were movable and interactive. I haven’t run into many puzzles yet, but I’ve only logged about 3 hours so far. I have seen my share of traps tho, as clever and devious as any I ever threw at my unsuspecting campaigners.

My one concern is that the only way to gain experience (and therefore advance your character) is through completion of quests, and there don’t seem to be any “randomly generated” quests. SWG & EQ2 had the Mission Terminals & Guild Writs, so if you didn’t feel like taking on a real quest you could earn money and experience by just cracking some skulls. In DDO, it’s all quest based. This keeps things very “in character”, but I think it could lead to burnout if Turbine can’t generate content fast enough.

So, in short, I’m buyin it. I am going to have to make a few computer upgrades tho. My PC ran it, but had some difficulty. The instanced quests were fine, but in the “Public Areas” of town my system would bog down pretty hard. So, I think I’m gonna pick up a eVGA GeForce 6800GS from NewEgg to boost my graphics (TomsHardware’s VGA Charts say it’s 3x-5x faster than my 5900), and I’m gonna neat some new headphones with a boom mic (DDO has party voice-chat built-in).

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