Many games have instanced dungeons now, and then you have games like Guild Wars in which every square foot of the game is instanced, but they don't handle it in the way that DDO does. When you enter the dungeon, there is a disembodied "gamemaster" that fills in little details and builds tension. What's more, these areas tend to be more acrobatic than their counterparts in other games: one jumps and climbs, devious traps must be avoided. These things combine to make it seem like you are going on little adventures, which is, I assume, the whole point.
Of course, these are all places which must be constructed, plotted, and populated by hand, and even with three separate difficulty levels you can choose maintaining a high-pressure stream of content that can satisfy a ravenous playerbase seems like a tall order. I think they legitimately are trying to create style of play which is outside the mainstream of Massively Multiplayer games, and that might actually be their problem. It turns out that I actually like constraining spell usage to a certain extent, I think it could lead to some truly epic confrontations. I imagine that - on this and many other points - I am in the minority.
There are experiential things about the game that need work: I can't stress enough the value of a consistent, attractive, customizable interface. If your UI does not look as though it was hewn out of raw granite according to firm usability principles, it needs to go. I hate to compare it to World of Warcraft, and I'll bet they hate it too, but that's resplendent lord of the genre. Take everything else off the table. The way that a player interacts with your game needs to feel confident.
I feel like I've played World of Warcraft, and now I would like to play something else. You might expect me to be dragged into recidivism on that score one more time, the Burning Crusade perhaps. DDO has some neat ideas, but the presentation of the game's functionality needs to clean up a bit before I'd commit to it.
(CW)TB out.
I had my first real taste of the High end raid content in WOW last night. I ran Zul’Gurub with a mixed group of PA guildies. I’ve spent plenty of time in instances like Scholo and UBRS but ZG was an entirely new experience. In any other instance it would be pretty hard for me to wipe the entire party. I’m not uber l33t or anything but I’m no nub either. I know how to play my class and that’s what I do. I may get myself killed on occasion but I’ll never kill the entire raid because of a fuck up. That’s simply not the case in ZG. It feels like each person in the raid has a job to do and if they aren’t doing it perfectly all the time there’s a good chance everyone’s going to die. Honestly I loved it.
I loved the ten minute intricately choreographed boss fights. I loved seeing each class in the game doing exactly what they were designed to do and doing it with absolute precision. I loved the feeling that my class and abilities were not just appreciated but necessary. Oh and the loot isn’t bad either.
Woohoo, time to one shot some rogues!
Thank you to the PA guildies who took Kara and I along last night. We had an awesome time. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished on Dark Iron. It’s pretty incredible that we can have a group of PA guildies running MC and another group doing ZG and I can still pull together ten people for a Scholo run in less than five minutes. I don’t think that happens in many other guilds guys. You should feel pretty fucking proud of yourselves. With end game instances comes the inevitable drama. Molten Core has destroyed plenty of guilds. The PA alliance has at least half a dozen guilds all working together and somehow we’ve made it work.
Obviously we’ve had our share of drama. There will always be people who would rather throw a fit than talk. You can’t avoid them especially in a group as big as ours. We've got a great bunch of people here though and we've had a lot of fun. Maintaining that is not something that will happen without some work. You may need to bite your tongue on occasion or turn the other cheek. You may need to give yourself a day to calm down before you make a post or send someone a tell. We need to recognize the value of what we’ve created on Dark Iron and we need to work together to keep it strong.
-Gabe out
