Great combat mechanics can't make up for PAPER THIN CONTENT.
This review by no means covers everything about the game. As of October 07 I've gone back to change some things because of recent module updates and other changes that have occurred.
Introduction
I jumped into this game simply because I was looking for a new MMO to play. The D & D 3.5 rules, as well as the franchise's long history of story telling, also had real appeal (and potential). The problem is, this isn't really an MMO in the classic sense.
This game is run entirely on instancing. The only time you see other players and have a free-for-all type environment is within cities. It is utterly identical to Guild Wars in this regard. Instancing is fine, and I'm a fan of balanced instancing, but in DDO it doesn't really work. Within the last few months they've opened up bigger areas. They are more open and slightly less linear than the regular quests. They are essentially "wilderness" regions like the ones you'd find in WOW or other games. However, even these are instanced!! The addition of a few open areas is nice but the content is still very limited by MMO standards. The statement I made months ago stands: If you take a 2 week holiday and decide to go nuts on gaming, it'd be possible to explore the entire game within that period. You'd EASILY be able to max your character. It's also likely that you would see just about all there is to possibly do within the game.
There is no crafting. There's no housing. There's really nothing at all to do but run the same instanced quests over and over again. The people who play the game run the same quests 20,30,40,50+ times in order to have something to do. I'm not exaggerating and most of the established players have done the main quests 100+ times. The level cap is currently 14th. You can achieve maximum level very rapidly by MMO standards, even without playing 10 hours a day. The level cap was 10 until several months ago. It took the entire first year of the game to raise it just 4 levels.
There's one race that stands out as being the strongest for casting related classes -- drow. Dwarves tend to be the most powerful combat types. The new enhancement system has given dwarves triple the advantages that other races have. Whether you agree on my 'racial' opinions and preferences or not, the point is that there's no real balance. 70% of the people in the game are the same race(drow). Even with Dungeons and Dragon's rich history of writing, the world selected (Eberron) was one of the least popular. As for development, Turbine quite simply sucks. I've played many MMOs and know what the industry standards are. They trump up "new content" in loading screen ads for literally MONTHS on end. The most recent module was advertised as a "JUNE RELEASE" for MONTHS. June came and went without a word. 2 weeks into July, the June splash screen remained. To give you an idea of how Turbine operates, instead of saying they were behind schedule, they said, 'It was a typo." That's a direct quote from the DDO forum, written by a developer.
Once the quests are released their success is a crapshoot. Some of the later released areas, like the original Necropolis, are ignored and loathed outright. For a long time, the only area worth playing was Gianthold. It's really ALL the high level players had to run. They sometimes went back to run older quests like the Dragon or the Demon Queen, but the vast majority of play time was invested in the Gianthold region. It has maybe 8 quests total, and I can solo almost all of them in 1/2 hour or LESS. Some of them require lever pullers or are just too tedious to solo, but you get my point. The entire area is tiny.
Now, with mod 5, the game has gone through a few changes. The graphics engine was updated. This was very positive. The new area is a higher level add-on to the Necropolis. It's the new Gianthold in that all people just hang out there and pretty much go no where else. Ninety percent of high level characters will be in that one area, doing one of the handful of quests, repeatedly.
Turbine continues to try to update content. The game is still just too small and doesn't have the depth people demand from an MMO these days. Crafting, housing, and true open areas (non-instanced) are non-existent even tho they are preferred by most MMO players. There are no plans to add any of this into the game. If you've got 5 hours or less a week to invest in building a character, this game could work for you. The content it has now, if you have never played it, might keep you going for a while. I think you'll still level very quickly by any MMO standard if you've gamed before. There are actually quite a few more positives but I think that they are overshadowed by the horrible Turbine management. Things that other MMO's management figured out 10 years ago still perplex Turbine. Example: ALL UPDATES ARE DONE IN THE DAY. Not a single update has ever been started before 7 am Eastern. They tend to be done between 7 am and 3 pm.During the last month, there has been at least 40 hours worth of down time during mid-day hours.
As for DDO, the combat system is the best I've ever used, but it really doesn't mean much when you're running the same quest for the 87th time. Instead of spamming icons and sitting back clicking, you can actually control each movement and block in real-time combat. This is tremendous but because you're controlling a character within a very cheeseball and tired world, it doesn't matter.
If someone took the core game and mechanics and put it into the hands of ambitious developers, you'd quite possibly see a game I could give a 9.0. HOWEVER, that's all speculation and based upon imaginary scenarios that do not exist.
I've put several hundred hours into this game. You're probably asking yourself why I STILL pop in from time to to time to play this game? Well, a lot of my real-life friends play it. My best friend lives 3,000 miles away and it is the only game he owns. We can socialize using this game. I renew, play for a week, then quit again...I come back once every couple of months to go sick on it. Rinse and repeat. It's nothing earth shattering and I don't think I have ever recommended this game to a fellow gamer.
The game IS fun for most people until they realize there are only maybe 90 quests in the entire DDO world. Never mind if you've tried other MMORPG games. Once you do that, your expectations increase and DDO is ruined further. I'd say that 30-40% of people in the game have never played another MMO. To me, this seems like a very high percentage and explains why the few 1000 people who still play the game have not run yet. They don't know any better.
In order to try to make people stay, Turbine is constantly coming up with schemes that make it "beneficial" to run the SAME quests YET again. It's really sad. Instead of coming up with mindless ploys to get people to rehash the same burned-out material, Turbine should wake up. Example: They have a system where you have to do almost every quest on 'elite' difficulty in order to give yourself a few extra points for spending at character creation. Know what that means? You get the huge reward of running ALLLL of the quests AGAIN. Their customer service is HORRIBLE. The game has plenty of bugs that have been there since its release yet they are constantly trying to change things no one wants changed. When I first wrote this review months ago, I stated:
"With Lord of the Rings coming, though, I think that we'll see the DDO development get even more pathetic and worthless. It's all about the money. They're clearly focusing on LOTR, hoping it will be their cash cow."
This has come true entirely. The best devs see Lord of the Rings as a promotion. When they start doing well for DDO, they are "promoted" to LOTR. DDO has taken a HUGE back seat to LOTR, making the game sabotaged by its OWN company.
I'd recommend Guild Wars as an alternative to DDO, given the parallels. Also, there's no monthly fee. DDO is NOT worth 15 a month in any way,shape, or form.
It is important to note that only ONE YEAR into this game they've had to do a HUGE server merge. The number of servers was cut down drastically to only a small handful. Does this sound like a thriving game to you? I've caught myself hoping that in a year or two DDO will have expanded and grown into something more interesting. The problem is that by then there will be a new generation of games capturing our interest. With ever increasing investment interest in this niche, the rise of ambitious new gaming companies, higher expectations from customers, and robust/interesting new MMORPG concepts, Turbine's DDO will most likely continue to be sustained solely by a small core group of people.