Dungeons & Dragons Stormreach

My favorite RPG growing up like many, many others was Dungeons & Dragons. In the store I’ve seen D&D Stormreach (DDO) the MMORPG version of the TSR game that started it all and finally took the plunge this weekend buying the retail boxed version. I see from the site you can buy it online digitally and skip the trip to the store if you want. It was on sale and I paid $19.97 at the local Fred Meyer store. It comes with a 30 day subscription although you are required through the turbine.com site to give them a credit card, of which they authorize $1.

DDO starts out like many other MMORPG in the character creation mode. For the first time play I chose a cleric.

After the brief character creation and customization process, it’s onto the academy where you can spend a little or a lot of time learning how the basic gameplay works before taking a ship to the main Stormreach area.

One major difference in DDO over other games is much less looting corpses of monsters. Instead you open treasure chests and break open objects that reveal hidden treasure. Some monsters can be looted but at least at the first level most monsters don’t drop any loot. I swam under water and found some treasure too, so be sure to look around and explore. There are also dangerous traps that will cause damage and kill you. All this in the first level.

The leveling goes very slowly, too slowly, but the monsters and quests drop some good gold. I was surprised at first level to defeat one monster and receiving weapons worth 500 gold. Considering it can take lower level World of Warcraft characters a day to generate 2 gold it seemed odd that in D&D gold would be available for a first level character.

After my first couple of hours and solo quests I was still only halfway to the second level!

Day two of playing, I finally reached the second level. DDO is much more quest driven than any other MMORPG I’ve played. You can take quests on EQ and WoW and gain lots of experience but you can also just roam, explore, kill monsters and gain experience and levels that way. I haven’t done much roaming in Stormreach yet.

From the official D&D online forums I learned they have recently worked on implementing more exciting wilderness quests splitting into three different types of quests: slayer quests, explorer quests and rare encounter quests.

Tons more DDO screenshots here.