Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.

A Blog for Darren...

Welcome

Well here I am, my inaugural blog. Hello, my name is Jon, or Xelous, which ever you prefer, and this is my first blog about... well anything I damn well please.

You see, I'm one of these many people jumping onto the blogging band wagon to spout off about stuff no-one else wants to listen about.

I must stop myself a moment though and send your hatred and derision to Mr Love over at CommonSenseGamer he's constantly threatened... well not threatened exactly... maybe just mentioned it once... in passing... that he'll let me on his wonderful podcast if I blog. I don't know why you have to blog to get onto his podcast, but it's his rules so... Love your blog Darren Love, big hugs.


Frustration

So, now let me kick off my rabid drooling by picking up where I left off on Darren's Blog earlier... he's made an excellent post about quitting WOW.... Kudos to you sir, good move, well done, you're now one step closer to being able to leave the rehab centre and return to society, jolly good, pip pip. (Please Note: I am English, I was safe while using this phrase, no puppies were harmed while writing it; and unlike Dick Van Dyke doing a cockney accent; I never even broke a sweat).

But as part of Darren's post has made me think, about the game industry "blowing it's load", you see I see it similarly, but I think the game industry blew it's own brains out many years ago, and all that's left are pessimistic investor types funding more of the same stuff. Spoon feeding the console generations who will by any title, as they want to play all the titles for their limited dead-end specification console.

The reason being they've invested in development houses, tools and technology to write games, and they want to see return after return and return for that outlay. "They" don't care that "they're" now making "Blow your clip of ammo XXIV", because we're still down Asda or BestBuy cough over our dosh for it.

Now, I don't pick on consoles to be a bastard; I own consoles myself; I've seen them leap-frog a head of other gaming technologies. But once out a console becomes a rung on which we all dangle. We're all ready to reach up for the next rung, but it's not there until it gets hammered in the wall. And "they" only get their hammer out when "they" have rung every penny, cent, yen or drachma out of that platform.

And it's that ringing out of every last drop of cash which has currently taken hold of the game industry.

There are more and more titles from each and every developer who have paid for their development tools, but all are in the same dowdy old genres. RTS, FPS, MMO, RPG, MMORPG, MMOFPS... sometimes listing the genres of games is like going into a coffee shop "I'll have a decaf half fat frapachino.... and a Wii Controller".

God it annoys me.

Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge innovation when it comes along, the Wii... I liked it's new take on control methods I went so far as buying one. But, the games are all the same sort of thing... You know, I like nothing more than a Zelda title on my Nintendo. I love it... But has there been any innovation since the N64 with that genre? No, not much at all... It's the same lovable characters carrying it off, with better graphics and sounds along the way... but how far can character take us?

Without someone pushing PC gaming on there's going to be little innovation to move on the Consoles, and vice-versa, and since they're using PC's to write Console Content I don't see where any innovation is going to come from, there's (I reckon) ten years in the current Playstation 3, maybe a little less in the Wii & Xbox360. Ten years on the current nVidia Chipsets (260+) until we all HAVE to go buy a new PC.

That's a long time. I feel we're sitting on a high tide mark in the sand, and though we know the tide will come in one day, and maybe carry us higher up the beach, for now we're high and dry, picking through what we've got.

I do however hold a small candle in the wind, hoping that some indy developer comes along with some real innovation for us. CCP did it with Eve, maybe their new titles can (they're certainly pushing the massive eye candy with the current Nvidia Tools). But will they produce anything by another WoW style game, or a ST:DS9 episode style situation via their ambulation in stations promises?



In my next post, expect me to slate Star Trek Online and World of Warcraft... or Bloody Let Down and Virtual Cocaine, as I see them.