With one day to go to the end of the year I'm 4 hours away from the end of this run of Dungeons & Dragons Online. Ideally I'd like to wrap this up tomorrow and kick off 2020 with the next game, but I'm not sure DDO lends itself, to what would be for me, a fairly long session.
The episodic structure of the game means there's a lot more natural break points to be found than in many more open world MMOs, where questlines might lead back and forth across a zone multiple times, and the focus switching from one story to another depending on which is being advanced in a particular area.
DDO is different. So far in Stormreach I've ran a lot of stand-alone adventures that run the length of a single instance and only occassionally lead directly into a further story. I imagine it's intentional that Korthos Island, as an introductory zone, is paced in a way that's more reminiscent of other MMOs, and when I first got to Stormreach I found the experience fragmented. It didn't draw me in.
It's different, but that doesn't mean it's not as good. I like it now as a change of pace, and the instances are often a lot more interesting to navigate than many open world zones – I will never tire of just how much use there is of vertical spaces in this game – and it also doesn't feel as padded, since there's almost always an immediate goal beyond Kill 10 of X.
Or in addition to the other objectives. Thinking about it DDO does have a fairly high body count at times. Less attention is drawn to it as there's other things going on and it's a different experience to slay monsters while traversing a dungeon than it is to travel to a particular place on a zone map and kill a defined number of whatever is walking about there.
I've been tracking my death count (2) but not my kill count. I do recall being asked to kill 80 kobolds during The Butcher's Path, and doing so with more than a few over. It's not the only time either that the kill counter has likely neared three figures, but seeing as most enemies die in a couple of hits the combat doesn't drag on or overshadow the exploration or other aspects of the adventure. In DDO combat is something that happens during adventures, not the main focus.
Still, that's a hell of a lot of dead kobolds. Perhaps the adventures in DDO are padded, only I haven't noticed because everything dies so damn fast.
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