Posted: June 03 2008 at 7:11pm | IP Logged

On May 6th, 2008, |TIA|'s Dungeons & Dragons Online division ran their last mission.  The DDO division came to a decision to end the 2+ year run with the game.  Its always sad when a division comes to a close, but there's always fun memories that the participants can look back on when thinking about the experience with the game.

The DDO division was structured a bit differently than Planetside and World of Warcraft, other MMO games TIA has been involved in.  The basic idea was a once a week structure with certain characters to keep everyone close and keep our adventures the same.  It is kind of a throwback to the way classic pen and paper D&D was done with a weekly meeting.  It worked very well in this case keeping the groups together, although frustrating at times when someone could not make it and rescheduling for the week was not successful.  Otherwise, it was an enjoyable approach to an MMO game that eliminated some group problems
that are often found in the genre.

Special thanks to all the participants who played DDO with the division:

Arkady (TONK SMASH!!)
Davyn
Dr Moocowz
FireEater
Mothfarmer
Prometheus
Quarmal
Zombious

Taking a bit of a trip down memory lane, here's some screenshots.  Click the image for bigger view.

Here's the final results from the first successful Kobold Assault quest, a test of endurance versus a barrage of 200 kobolds!  The mighty barbarian, Uplift (Moo), came through with his promise to "kill at least half" of the enemies by himself!

Soon after this, the other TIA group managed to conquer the same quest, but with less people!

Jumping forward in time, the various groups revised and switched characters around to make adjustments to our overall makeup.  In this next shot, the new power of the Niac's Cold Ray is on display. Sometimes fights are hard and sometimes they're not when Moulekai (Moo) can do a 187, D.O.A.!  (Combat log in the lower right)

But after some time, some of the challenges are not enough.  Then one begins to create their own challenges!  Kemp (Moo) shows off soloing The Waterworks before the "Solo" difficulty settings existed, and at a mere level 3!

Same instance, next quest.

There were always the nights when we all could not meet for various reasons and we would use alternate characters.  Here's Taya (FireEater), Sarariman (Arkady), and Dimitri (Moo) standing at the elusive "Lone Tree" in the Searing Heights adventure area.

Then how can we forget one of the most difficult and easily unique quests we conquered, The Pit!

More final information from our completion of The Pit.

Overall, we had a very fun and enjoyable run over the past couple of years.  For our last quest, we ran through Delera's Tomb, a series of quests with the guest voice DM of the late D&D co-creator, Gary Gygax.  This was a fitting end and a nice cap of a farewell run.  Pictured on the left is Dimitri (Moo), front and center Keltaren (Prometheus), on the right Tayanne (FireEater), and in the back, the mighty warforged paladin, Tonk!

Posted: June 04 2008 at 6:08pm | IP Logged

Solo230 wrote: Is there no more content or no more want?

There's plenty more content.  We never ran it at a very high pace, and Turbine aggressively added new content every month.  In fact, Turbine did a great job with updates and their patches actually worked and downtime was minimal to nonexistent, in stark contrast with WoW.  I basically have nothing but praise for how it was managed.

The biggest problem was that DDO was by design extremely group-centric with emphasis on doing dungeons.  There was minimal soloable content, and the social and role playing elements were also quite weak, so there was little reason to log on except to do dungeons.  So you had a lot of the logistical issues that WoW dungeons have -- you have to have a viable group or it doesn't work, and that means rounding up people.

On the plus side, they did have great looking for group features and their loot system was great in that you don't compete with other party members for loot.  Instead loot (done mostly in chests and quest rewards rather than mob drops) is earmarked for each player.  You could trade items if you needed but no rolling against your allies.  This encouraged grouping more than WoW because there was simply no reason not to bring someone else if you have the space.  So the game refreshingly lacked the pathologic obsession with loot items that leads to ill-feeling and infighting that is so frighteningly examplified by WoW.  I absolutely despise that aspect of WoW.

But to do DDO well, you'd need a fairly large and active group, and we were never large nor especially active.  For the several months or so we ran two nights a week but that dropped to once a week and then for the past several months it has been more like once or twice a month because someone (often me) could not make it.  So basically there weren't enough coals in the fire to keep it doing.

Posted: June 06 2008 at 10:58pm | IP Logged

But it was a fun game while lasted...

Will I go back? Maybe someday, at least to check out the Monk class (finally!) 

But yeah, time, and expense justification given the time played and the rising cost of everything made it unfeasible at least for me, and I know time factored in for everyone else I think as well.

I will say that I enjoyed Tonk more than any other MMO character I have had with maybe the exception of my main CoH character.

Tonk and his  'potions of treeness'