Do I?
It's maybe a strange question to ask at the end of 24 hours of /played time (more or less – DDO doesn't actually have a /played command so I've been tracking my time spent in-game manually) but it's 24 hours over 3 months. Since I started this blog none of my other runs have taken anywhere near as long to complete, so is it possible I just don't like Dungeons & Dragons Online as much as I like those other games?
Thinking about it, the answer is a bit more complicated than that and since I'm in an introspective mood right now I'll break it down.
I've not consistently been in the right mood for this game over these last couple of months. There are a few games that I can more or less rely on to grab my attention and hold it, even if I'm not necessarily in the mood for them when I initially log in, and DDO isn't one of them. City of Heroes is, with its effortless movement and frenetic combat, and the difficulty sliders are always there to ensure I don't get bored with easy enemies. Lord of the Rings is another, though for very different reasons. If CoH is the first cup of coffee in the morning, followed by another two and none of them decaf, then LOTRO is the warm comfy blanket at the end of the day. I can wrap myself in Middle-Earth and just relax.
I was probably more burned out than I thought from close to two hundred hours of Fallen Earth. In hindsight any game that followed on directly from that was probably in for a rough ride, and perhaps I should have went with my first instinct and did SWTOR instead. Whenever I do I know that I'll be more critical of it than any other MMO in my intended rotation so I could have doubled down on that with additional unfair comparisons to a recently sunsetted favourite.
Right, so with that out the way there are a couple of things that are more specific to DDO.
Compared to a lot of MMOs the game lacks momentum. After finishing Korthos Island I got to Stormreach, did the first few quests you essentially trip over upon entering the Harbor and... started wandering around in circles looking for things to do. It's not that there is a lack of things to do – there isn't – and I've enthused before about the positives of not being locked into one particular storyline or location for an extended stretch of time, but the flipside of that is that it's easy to feel you're not really going anywhere.
The combat isn't very interesting. I've died 3 times in 24 hours – twice because I ran out of arrows during a longer dungeon, and once because I walked into a dungeon flagged as an extreme challenge without really knowing what 'extreme' meant in this context. The exploration can be fun, the puzzles can be fun, but mowing down hordes of kobolds at little risk to myself isn't fun, and I feel like I've been doing that a lot.
It's an older game, and in places it does show. I don't need cutting edge graphics to enjoy a game – if I did would I even be playing MMOs? – but a lot of DDO's more repetitive environments do lack eye candy and over an extended period they can start to blur together, figuratively and literally.
Ultimately none of this is an absolute deal breaker. There's a lot I enjoy about DDO, like the flexibility of the character building, and the times when the focus is on exploration and puzzle solving rather than pure combat. It's a game I will come back to, because I feel like it does have a lot to offer, but for the moment as I close out this 24 hours I feel like I'll need something a little more instinctive, something a little more kinetic, for my next game.
Either that or I'll sharpen my knives and put Star Wars The Old Republic on the chopping block.
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