DDO First Impressions

Oh for crying out loud, will I ever find an MMO I don't complain about? Probably not [throws rattle out of his pram], but that's not my fault games are just so bad.

And I think, DDO is going to be that way, I played the first little bit last night... and I wasn't impressed, first of all there are graphical glitches, like I set it to be 1280x1024 full screen mode, and all that did was cram the game into 1280x1024 pixels in the top left of my main screen as a window... So, not a good start there.

In the game itself the colour palette looked a little washed out, like everything was dusty, I'm not sure what was causing that appearance, but I'll persist in finding out.

Then, there's the game play itself... Okay, so I was level 1, I had the standard crappy starting mace in my hand and I was playing clueless. Ironically I immediately had to stop myself trying to use things in the "wow" style. You have to left click on things for activation and right click on things for passive selection in DDO, this is the opposite to WoW and Runes of Magic, and well, opposite to every other MMO I've played. I'm not sure if Turbine were just aiming to be different that the rest of the pack of MMO's out there, but the mechanic annoyed me greatly.

Then, the character animation and movement struck me, they were awkward, there are options to smooth the animation going on, so I'll have a play about with them tonight, but the actual movement was odd. Characters, NPC's especially, didn't seem to walk or run around, they seemed to glide while moving their legs. A most disconcerting effect. And very 1990.

Not something you'd expect in a game boasting "This Machine can run me in DirectX10, do you want me to?"... and you click Yes to be given appreciably nothing different... I'm going to run it in DirectX9 mode thoroughly for comparison...

Finally, the combat system, yes I was in a melee just swinging my beginner mace around wildly, but the text used to indicate damage, yes it floats off of things, but it's in the Courier Font... it looks like the system default... it was really off putting.

NPC speech was also presented like this, floating without a bubble, just loose text above their heads, it was hard to follow where the text began at times, and where it ended.

Overall, so far I'd day the game's pants, but I'll persist... I'm yet to interact with anyone else... well except one person called "Rox Rox" who simply ran up to everyone spawning in the first town and said "paladin" to them... "paladin".... "paladin"....