Dungeons & Dragons Online

In Dungeons & Dragons Online, Kasul and I finished our trip through all the Korthos Island instances on Elite mode, giving each of us the maximum amount of favor you can get from those quests. Misery Peak, the one where you don’t kill the dragon, was its usual platforming mini game of jumping around a multilevel maze looking for levers and fighting ice spiders. Since it was his first time, Kasul didn’t know you were supposed to pretend you were actually killing the dragon for uber screenshots. Next time. ...

Massively.com’s Rubi had been hinting all day at something special for the Wednesday DDO meetup (9PM EDT, all are invited)… The big secret? We were going to explore some of the paid content in Dungeons & Dragons Online, courtesy of a double armload of 90-minute guest passes. .bbpBox{background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1273086425/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #9ae4e8;padding:20px;}p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px}p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px}p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} Nights of Eberron was great tonight. I bought a pile of guest passes and we did Tangleroot. Much fun was had.less than a minute ago via webRubi_ ...

You say you’re about to do “The Proof is in the Poison” quest you picked up in the Stormreach Market? You’re standing at the door, about to click in? Wondering how hard this adventure is going to be for you and your pals? STOP! Just … just stop right there. Time to take a little inventory of your party’s levels. Do you have a rogue in your party? Does this fine person have at least two levels of rogue to their name? ...

Kobold-eye view of Derra the Fighter/Cleric Last night, the OnedAwesome crew descended once again on the sleepy port town of Stormreach. There were five missions on the docket last night, but I didn’t take part; I’m still on a mission of my own: to catch up in experience to the other two members of my static Sunday group. Every time I miss a night, I fall further behind. These Wednesday night get-togethers are fantastic for filling in the spaces. ...

Lots of people really do ask me what I DO in EverQuest? Truth be told, most of the time I am either working on my Epic 1.5 (the rogue epic quest is THE WORST of them all), do monster missions for gear and experience, or do the Boomerang! event in Brell’s Rest. It’s a simple arena game; everyone in the party chooses a team – red, blue or gold, like in Star Trek – and each is given boomerangs in their opponent’s two colors. You enter, are transformed into a gnoll of your color, and you run around and fling boomerangs at enemies while dodging boomerangs thrown at you, as well as explosive barrels that drop randomly from the ceiling. You get one point for hitting an enemy; lose one point for being hit twice and lose five points for being blown up by an explosive barrel. After five minutes, the top three get gold tokens (used to buy high level uber weapons), and everyone gets silver tokens appropriate to their point total, used to buy a wide variety of gear and augments. ...

I know that I make fun of my dwarven cleric, Derra, a lot. Sure, she’s stocky, so ugly she scares bugbears away, has kind of a gruff voice, has a husband who voluntarily got himself exiled for life because of littering and creating a public nuisance JUST to get away. It’s okay when I do it. But if someone else wants to have a go about her looks, well…. ...

While developing a game to an established IP may bring the potential of thousands of players eager to live in the world they have come to know, the property may also be a straight-jacket. Clever developers have found ways around these problems, though. Game: Dragon Oath IP: “Tian Long Ba Bu” by Jin Yong In 1963, Jin Yong began serializing his epic novel Tian Long Ba Bu, or “The Heavenly Dragon and the Eight Sections”, in newspapers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Four years later, he finished. Over 230 characters make their way through TLBB’s grand plot of warring sects, intrigue, love, betrayal, blinding, death, demigods and dragons. He was the Robert Jordan of his day – if Robert Jordan had written a chapter of his books every day for four years. TLBB has spawned four films and five movies. After reading about TLBB on Wikipedia, I don’t understand why we haven’t seen a Western adaptation yet. A whole fake CITY was built in order to film one of the series (and is now a tourist destination). ...

The games in the title – EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online. Three of the four have “online” in their name. It’s Lord of the Rings, except ONLINE! It’s Star Trek like you never imagined it – ONLINE! Throw away your pencils and dice because D&D is ONLINE! EverQuest is just – EverQuest. Online is all it knows. That’s the power of having a pre-existing IP for your game; its name is its best feature. ...

I sat in front of my computer the other night, not really feeling a pull toward any MMO. I was watching Zombieland, and I couldn’t think of any MMO that would be more fun than watching the best comedy zombie movie since Shaun of the Dead. Blahblahblah. This isn’t a post about quitting MMOs. This is a post about WILLING IMMERSION. I talked a little about this yesterday. Immersion can seem like a quality of a game, but it’s really a quality of the player. Even the best game is nothing like reality; it’s as far removed from reality as anything can be. To make it important to us, we have to willingly fill in the lines, paint the walls, paper the ceiling and give it a place in our reality. You might argue that games can help immersion by having fantastic graphics, amazing sound design and killer animations, but I have been immersed in books before. I have immersion to spare; all I really ask of a game is that it doesn’t BREAK my immersion. ...

Even if you have a static group in Dungeons & Dragons Online, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the dungeons by trying them yourself on the casual or normal settings. If nobody in the group is a subscriber (as none of the people in my group are), then SOMEONE has to have done it at least once so that the group difficulties – hard and elite – open. ...