Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Broken"

Some definitions:
A bug is an anomaly. Something that was missing in the code that resulted in some kind of a problem, a game crash, an exploit, etc. Getting to Old Ironforge or the old GM Island was a bug.
Questgivers not spawning or enemies not dying are examples of bugs. DDO was not altogether buggy. I was able to play the game perfectly fine, free of things freaking out, or crashing.

What I do not classify as a bug, is when something is completely not accounted for. This is what I classify as bad game design. A good example of bad game design is putting the entrance to the next area inside an instance. Sounds okay? I mean, that's how Deadmines worked in WoW, right? Entrance in one end, exit in another? What if we add requirements to enter said dungeon, and make the exit in a completely different zone?

I finished the dungeon, and walked to the next area. The game told me no, the area has not finished downloading. DDO, for whatever idiotic reason, uses a proprietary downloader, which functions outside of the game. It is extremely and notoriously buggy. Buggy is when your downloader gets stuck at 99.8%(I wish I were joking). I was willing to work with this. I log out, restart the downloader, and log back in, only to find that my character was completely stuck in the starting area. There was no way to progress forward, swim out, jump over or otherwise get to the next area.

This was the final straw. I did not tell you about my experience installing the game. The installer crashed no more than 6 times today, due to a combination of internet instability, and server instability. I was okay, though, because I wasn't really paying attention to it. I was off doing other things, occasionally checking. After it "installed," it needed to download more stuff and install it. Okay, understandable, this is a streaming client. I got into the game and started creating a character. I spent around 30 minutes toying with different race/class combos, until I settled on an elf Fighter. I clicked start, and found out that the downloader was still getting the first area.

During this download, the Turbine Download Manager got stuck at 98.6% for an hour or so. I killed and restarted it several times, finally resorting to resetting my computer, which fixed it. I started DDO back up, and the login servers had crashed. I'm not making this stuff up. The login servers somehow had crashed between when I had started the game, and when I had reset my computer. This persisted for another 3 hours.

I cannot believe that this game has had such a surge of players. I'm glad I wasted no money, and sad I wasted time. Steer away from this one. It's incomplete and broken. 4/10