adequate replacement for DDO?

[whereispowderedsilve]

Okay this made me laugh, mostly because my sister is a huge GW fan and is even a mod for a fanpage so I totally get this Beiber-esque frenzy about the new one coming out.

I plan to play GW2 but I'm fairly decided that it can't be my main game these days. I have about 6 or 7 MMOs installed currently and out of all of them I only subscribe to one. And it ain't DDO either (DDO is fun, but only in short spurts for me...)

Uh, Which MMO is it then that you subscribe to if you don't mind me asking? Please & thanks in advance! :P! ! xD!

(Rift? SW TOR? WoW?)

[Missing_Minds]

Uh, Which MMO is it then that you subscribe to if you don't mind me asking? Please & thanks in advance! :P! ! xD!

(Rift? SW TOR? WoW?)

I think that would be EverQuest 2. She's got a long history in the EQ series.


Op could always try Champions Online. Play through all the content in about... 2-3 weeks if you guys are playing games for long stretches. If you really screw around with the UI you can make it play near identical to DDO.

[Inconel]

Thanks for the great input everyone. BOgre's idea is pretty good, I'll run it by my friends and see if they bite.

[Ciaran]

I could play DDO for many years more still, but my friends (who I group exclusively with) want to move to a new game. Does anyone have a game they can recommend? Since DDO was my first MMORPG I didn't realize that it might very well be the only one with it's dedication to instanced, group questing. Even though my friends have played all kinds, we have all grown very attached to this kind of questing and we would love to be able to find something as close as possible to it. So far Rift and Age of Conan don't fit, Vindictus comes closer but has almost zero character customization.

To be honest no other MMO I've played or researched has anything like DDO's instanced system besides GW1, but even then there are significant differences (not to mention GW1’s combat leaves a lot to be desired after playing DDO). So if that’s the primary selling point for you good luck finding anything that remotely touches DDO’s instanced system. It’s both something I appreciate and dislike about DDO; I appreciate it because it allows each quest to feel personal and interesting as it tells a story, but I dislike it because for me it makes the game world feel too incongruous and broken up. At least Turbine does an excellent job (for the most part) of making interesting and fun quests that manage to feel unique from other quests (again, for the most part, recurring quest elements notwithstanding).

AoC has a good mix of open-world questing and instances, especially at end game but again, it’s not the same thing and to be honest even though I still actively play AoC I wouldn’t recommend it for a new player these days unless you already knew a lot of people playing it.

Guild Wars 2 is for kiddies. It has a fraction of the build depth and features a tone of cutesy ****. Girl gamers and tweeners are screaming for it like it's a limited edition Justin Beiber shirtless poster.

Trust me, I've done the research.

Asura and Mesmer butterflies aside, from all the gameplay videos I've seen (including two videos of the first dungeon and all the class videos) very little has struck me as so cutesy as to justify calling GW2 a “kiddie game”. In fact very little seems "cutesy" at all.

I think GW1 had TOO many skills but that said, all the skills in GW1 now were not all there at launch; it seems likely more will be added to GW2 as time goes on. Not to mention skills are not all there is to character building. There’s weapon choice (available attacks differ based on what is in your main hand and offhand and you can swap between two weapon sets) and traits, which offer quite a bit of depth to character customization from what I’ve see. Add to that there’s active dodging to avoid attacks and no set roles (NOBODY is supposed to sit there and soak up damage) and the game looks solid to me.

To each their own, I just think labeling it as a “kiddie game” is taking a few too many liberties. The Asura aren’t really my thing, but then again neither are squeaky kobolds that spout pop culture nonsense…know what I mean?

[Nightalas]

To be honest no other MMO I've played or researched has anything like DDO's instanced system besides GW1, but even then there are significant differences (not to mention GW1’s combat leaves a lot to be desired after playing DDO).

I've seen a very similar instanced system on one NWN 1 PW server. Newbies could train on dummies or assemble a party with at least one fighter or barbarian, one wizard or sorcerer, one druid or cleric, one rogue and one bard and enter a small instanced adventure module. In the adventure a warrior had to smash a big rock for the party to proceed forward, then a rogue had to disarm a trap and unlock a gate, then a wizard or sorcerer had to finish a troll with a fire or acid spell, then a bard had to sing a song to a hill giant guard, then a cleric or druid had to revive an NPC who told a password to the gates of a bandit camp, and in the end there was a fight against a bandit leader and his gang. NWN 1 and NWN 2 are based on D&D and you will feel right "at home" with character building there.

NWN PWs are very much like MMORPGs, except that there are usually less than a hundred players online at the same time. Otherwise, they can function exactly like MMORPGs. The dungeon master client and powerful toolset allow developers to continue creating interesting new things in NWN and thus keep boredom at bay. I've been playing NWN 1 and now NWN 2 for nine years already and still not bored, still finding new things. I played DDO for a year but got bored and returned back to NWN. The only reason I even tried DDO was because I was immediately familiar with many features and details of character building (including classes, skills, feats, spells and multiclass combinations) from my experience in NWN. New NWNX plug-ins have made it even more powerful, flexible and complicated.

The most beatiful thing about NWN is that it allows ordinary people like us basically be "MMORPG" developers. For example,
here is a screenshot of a map I made myself which might be integrated in PW MMO environment in the future. It's even possible to assemble a team and make a rough DDO emulation in NWN 1 or NWN 2 with many of the same or similar instanced adventure modules.

[Midgavia]

After you have experienced action combat in DDO it will be hard going back to stand/target/spam skills MMO's (wow, gw2, swtor).

One that comes to mine mind with similar but not as great combat is TERA online, it's korean MMO, been in Korea about a year already and now it's coming to NA and EU on May 1 i believe.

I was in one closed beta and i won't say i didn't like it, graphics are awesome, combat is pretty good, they have these so called BAM's (big ass monsters) which are very fun to solo and some other stuff but i couldnt experience everything since i managed only to get to lvl 25 in a weekend.

Major turnoff for me was basicly that game is too asian, similar to Aion. There are milions of these questgivers that more or less give you same quests: Go kill x, go gather x and there were a few where u escorted NPC's.
Also keep in mind that game is P2P, that can be a problem to some people, !BUT in TERA online players are able to buy these chronoscrolls which give them 1 months of subscription and more importantly they are able to trade those for ingame money, so in the end you would be able to buy monthly subscription with your ingame plat.

Devs did that to restrict goldfarmers abit.

I probrably could get into TERA if DDO wasn't mine addiction since at endgame there is quite alot of PVE content to do, they also have this political system and some other stuff which i can't tell you much about since i've only read about it myself.

Other that comes to mine mind and has action combat is Vindictus online but i've never played it so i can't really tell u much.

Mine advice to you: when choosing MMO where you will waste you precisious lifetime would be, don't rely much on videos, rewievs, forums, pictures u have to try the game to get some general feeling from it.

[sebastianosmith]

The only other MMO for which I have some knowledge is Darkfall. I've not played it personally but my step-son (19) did for about six months. He seemed to enjoy it. It's a PvP world, so, there's that if you like PvP.

You could head over to the MMORPG Game List and see what looks interesting.

Best of luck!