New DDO "Dungeons and Dragons" online FREE

Installed the new DDO FREE edition on the laptop yesterday. Three install options, 1. Quick install for faster playing. 2. Standard install with regular textures. 3 High Texture Install, largest.

Decided to wait the 2 hours for the high texture install. Game installed smoothly, only asked if I wanted DX9 or 10. Went with 10. Customized graphics to my liking...Character creation was very easy really. Not very complicated at all.. Basic characters only, fighter, ranger, wizard, cleric, druid, thief, sorcerer, barbarian. Like many other games you can customize the looks and so forth. The intro play and dungeon was not difficult. I have to say that I really liked the gameplay. I choose to setup controls like a FPS, so it was very familiar. Play was fast pace. The party conversations with AI were nice. All in all the graphics were better than I expected. Not crysis but good.

I think this will appeal to those who like a good compromise between rpg and hack&slash. It can be played on many intro level laptops. So if you have an entry level dell or something you should be able to play with low to medium details. I will continue to play for a while to see how development goes. You can also pay for play to get more dungeons and characters.

Pro's -
1. Easy to play
2. Nice graphics
3. good ai conversation. Very immersive so far
4. Play on budget machine
5. Free
6. Obviously a huge universe to expand from...

Con's -
1. A few crashes so far
2. Long download for high textures
3. Pay for extra dungeons

Best Wishes,

SXO792

 

Yea, I came across an ad for this game couple days ago and it really interested me. But after reading some of the poor reviews, I wasnt sure whether it was worth trying or not. I guess I cant really trust other peoples reviews and should try it out myself, but I already bought Oblivion for a really cheap price; will be a while before Im done with this game.
Might download it sometime in the future though when I want to play something online; too bad free-play has certain restrictions.

 

nlspoh, not a bad idea to give the game some time to mature and get the bugs worked out. Again, not a bad deal if you have a day where you can set the laptop to download and walk away for a few hours. I like having lots of stuff installed. If I hit a snag in one, I can switch to another.

Best Wishes,

Stevenx

 

Just know that you'll pretty much run out of free content at levels 8-12 and will definitely need to put money in to get far in the game.

Oh and you can't use the official forums, can only sell 1 thing at a time at the auction house, have restricted in-game chat abilities, and a level based cap on how much gold your character can carry.

 

Im thinking about playing this with my friends but how will it run on my laptop and desktop in Sig? Also my friend has intel gma 950 for his computer... He's gonna change it to 9600gt soon but would it run on the 950??

 

Thats very true. Id much rather pay for a game than pay monthly fees in order to 'upgrade' your account to get features that are almost essential to play the game and enjoy it.

 

You do lose the restrictions and gain 2 more character slots and server queue priority if you spend the minimum amount of money ($6.25) on the game, making you a premium member (not to be confused with VIPs, who pay the monthly fee). But you still don't get any content except what you can get for $6.25 and any turbine points you managed to get for free (which isn't much).

Monthly fee payers get almost all of the content unlocked (unless they stop paying the monthly fee), a few extra turbine points per month to spend on one time use things at the store and anything the fee doesn't unlock for them, and of course they get top billing in server queues and better customer support.

It would cost about $200 for a premium member to get all the content subscribers get, but they would get to keep it without paying any monthly fees. But if you just buy the stuff that interests you and don't need a lot of character slots or uber optimized characters, you could probably get a pretty full experience for a lot less, especially if you focus on endgame content and only buy enough low-mid level content to get you to level 20. You will eventually have to put more money in to get whatever new expansion pack type stuff they come up with though if you want to play that (subscribers will surely get future content without having to pay extra).

P.S. After a few days as a free player, I haven't considered server queues an issue at all, I've only had to wait to connect once, and it only took 2 minutes to get in.

P.P.S. Had my VIP/Premium member terminology wrong, fixed it.

 

Seems like a pretty decent game and it's free! I'm currently playing a few games at the moment so I don't know if have place for one more but I'll try it out and if I like it I will start playing it. Thanks for sharing!

 

Oh, and you can buy the boxed game for $5 from gamestop, and get a free month of VIP status out of it and when the month ends you'll be a premium member. I'm pretty sure you also get 500 turbine points out of it, which is worth $6.25 right there.