Dungeons & Dragons Online: StormReach - PC

really great for lovers of the pen and paper. just not enough dynamic content to be the same experience of the pen and paper fantasy.

You can download the game for free at DDO.com, even if you buy it here, it will cost you either way for membership fees, or free to play is free. why pay for something you can download for free?

I'm unable to play this game, due to the updates that need to be downloaded first. 3G is the only "high speed" internet available to me, and I let this game do its self updating overnight, and in the morning, it wasn't even at 1%. Not sure how large the updates are, but they must be huge.

Very nice

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is an above average dungeon crawler that has the potential to be a lot of fun for a while with enjoyable instanced quests and lively gameplay. Unfortunately, there are a lot of little things that will likely make the value of the subscription fee here questionable in a month or two, and even early on many will have issues with forced grouping. Having actually purchased the headstart, I am having a blast - but take a star off of fun for the grouping issue, and two stars off of overall for the rule implementations, lack of PvP, and value proposition, leaving this at 4 fun/3 overall, or 3.5 stars.With Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) having spawned literally tens of thousands of imitations at the top of the family tree of RPGs, MUDs, and MMORPGS, publisher Turbine has both the blessing of an eager audience and curse of a really tough comparison. The good news is that they've done an enjoyable job of implementing the heart of the D&D experience, which is the dungeon crawl. Unlike many MMORPGs, support classes like rogues are a requirement for almost all dungeons - there's no uber single class build here - and a well designed group and careful gameplay is a more important than any particular player, item, or spell.However, the group aspect is double-edged. Outside of the first 5 or 6 early dungeons (even less for certain weak combat classes), solo play simply doesn't work - meaning your entire gaming experience will depend on finding a suitable group or guild. The support for this isn't bad, with ingame voice chat and being able to select exactly what you want in terms of a class and level in group search, but even players within a good guild can have significant waiting times while everyone gets ready. Turbine could and should have come up with a way for solo players to do something to advance. All adventure is instanced, which in this implementation makes sense but does mean like Guild Wars the only 'massive multiplayer' aspect of the MMORPG feel is when you're at the taverns.D&D purists will probably not like the rule implementations either. Monks, druids, and several races are left out as are any number of skills, but the biggest wildcard is adding 4 class and race 'enhancements' which provide benefits far above even the best feats (like +5 to all skills or +3 in a certain statistic). Given how the game is set up, it doesn't really affect balance much - can't solo anyway - but between that and loot drops that rival the taj mahal (down a bit from beta, but not much), it does annoyingly throw traditional character builds out the window. Why bother making an especially stout fighter with high constitution if you're going to get 25 free hit points from the start?More significant is longer term viability. Advancement is quick enough so the current level cap (10) was actually reached by any number of people in the 10 day beta. This will shortly be raised to 12 and eventually to 20, but the real issue is the lack of any alternative to the dungeon crawl - PvP, crafting, or anything else - that encourages people to stick around to pay the $14.95 monthly fee.Don't get me wrong. I'm having more fun playing this now than any game in a long time. The issue is that I can also easily see not playing this in 30 or 60 days from now, which is a real shame. Hence, why this is rated 3.5 stars, and why I hope Turbine thinks carefully about how to improve it.

Amateurish interface, this game is just plain bad. but the worst thing about it is that it'll take you at least a week to realize that you've just wasted a week trrying to "advance" a level. Seriously, the keyboard movement interface is terrible, I'm surprised they released this game without running it through some basic testing. If they had done any level of user acceptance testing they would have quickly realized that they were employing the wrong game developers.You'll find yourself spending too much time backing up and realigning yourself because movement is challenged. In addition to that, you'll be spending half of your time breaking boxes to find hidden items, and when you finally fight a beast, you'l end up running around in circles frantically hitting the right mouse button. I can't imagine anyone is particularly proud of this game, I figure this, the developers probably are not that bad, but the corporation that produced it started to freak out about how much money it was costing to develop this game. I'll bet anything that some suit decided to cut his or her losses and forced the technical team to wrap up early. This whole game just reeks of inadequate testing.Spend your money on something else, this one is a dud.