Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

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Product Features

• Be a champion in private quests focused on adventure, not grind.
• Survive unforgiving dungeons, fiendish traps and foes that punish the foolish.
• Create a custom hero from five races, nine classes, and hundreds of skills, feats and looks.
• Fight using active combat where skill matters and seconds count.
• Experience classic D&D role-playing based on the v3.5 rules.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0009N5O5E
• Item Weight: 2 pounds
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: February 28, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,835 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

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Product Description

Platform: PC | Edition: Standard (DVD)

Amazon.com Product Description

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach recreates the essence of the classic pen-and-paper roleplaying experience - with an emphasis on non-grinding, instanced quests that provide a unique, immersive experience for each party. Authentic features in the game include customizable characters; dungeons filled with devious traps; monsters and stories from the Eberron campaign setting; an on-screen d20 (20-sided die) and a dungeon master. The unique online world of Stormreach is a bustling city with thousands of players from around the world. It represents a new paradigm for the MMO genre with unique features including party-based quests, integrated voice chat, real-time action combat, and award winning graphics. DDO is based on the world-renowned Dungeons & Dragons brand.

The included Twilight Forge module offers new content for players of all levels ranging from new soloable dungeons in the harbor to additional advanced-level quests that culminate in a new raid encounter with the legendary Warforged Titan. The player experience has been vastly improved by including new features that make grouping easier, an improved user interface, and enhancements to the dungeons in the harbor that enable more solo-play and more diverse monster encounters.

In addition to the ability to create characters based on the drow, also known as the dark elf, players can expect to encounter eight new monsters from the D&D universe, including the Mindflayer, Ogre Magi, Warforged Titan, Mummy and Lich. Finally, the Twilight Forge module includes a new award system that gives players bonuses for completing dungeons on all difficulty levels.

Product Description
For over 30 years Dungeons & Dragons® has been the legendary benchmark for all roleplaying games. Now you can experience the first online 3D virtual world faithful to classic D&D. This is no ordinary MMO – you will have to rely on your battle-tested combat skills, your wits, your cunning and a talented party to survive where many others have failed.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 137 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fun dungeon crawler - but many flaws and enjoyment depends entirely on your group, February 28, 2006

By	D. Parvin "dparv" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is an above average dungeon crawler that has the potential to be a lot of fun for a while with enjoyable instanced quests and lively gameplay. Unfortunately, there are a lot of little things that will likely make the value of the subscription fee here questionable in a month or two, and even early on many will have issues with forced grouping. Having actually purchased the headstart, I am having a blast - but take a star off of fun for the grouping issue, and two stars off of overall for the rule implementations, lack of PvP, and value proposition, leaving this at 4 fun/3 overall, or 3.5 stars.

With Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) having spawned literally tens of thousands of imitations at the top of the family tree of RPGs, MUDs, and MMORPGS, publisher Turbine has both the blessing of an eager audience and curse of a really tough comparison. The good news is that they've done an enjoyable job of implementing the heart of the D&D experience, which is the dungeon crawl. Unlike many MMORPGs, support classes like rogues are a requirement for almost all dungeons - there's no uber single class build here - and a well designed group and careful gameplay is a more important than any particular player, item, or spell.

However, the group aspect is double-edged. Outside of the first 5 or 6 early dungeons (even less for certain weak combat classes), solo play simply doesn't work - meaning your entire gaming experience will depend on finding a suitable group or guild. The support for this isn't bad, with ingame voice chat and being able to select exactly what you want in terms of a class and level in group search, but even players within a good guild can have significant waiting times while everyone gets ready. Turbine could and should have come up with a way for solo players to do something to advance. All adventure is instanced, which in this implementation makes sense but does mean like Guild Wars the only 'massive multiplayer' aspect of the MMORPG feel is when you're at the taverns.

D&D purists will probably not like the rule implementations either. Monks, druids, and several races are left out as are any number of skills, but the biggest wildcard is adding 4 class and race 'enhancements' which provide benefits far above even the best feats (like +5 to all skills or +3 in a certain statistic). Given how the game is set up, it doesn't really affect balance much - can't solo anyway - but between that and loot drops that rival the taj mahal (down a bit from beta, but not much), it does annoyingly throw traditional character builds out the window. Why bother making an especially stout fighter with high constitution if you're going to get 25 free hit points from the start?

More significant is longer term viability. Advancement is quick enough so the current level cap (10) was actually reached by any number of people in the 10 day beta. This will shortly be raised to 12 and eventually to 20, but the real issue is the lack of any alternative to the dungeon crawl - PvP, crafting, or anything else - that encourages people to stick around to pay the $14.95 monthly fee.

Don't get me wrong. I'm having more fun playing this now than any game in a long time. The issue is that I can also easily see not playing this in 30 or 60 days from now, which is a real shame. Hence, why this is rated 3.5 stars, and why I hope Turbine thinks carefully about how to improve it.

34 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Why is it an online game?, March 27, 2006

By	Gretchen Mckinney (Grants Pass, OR) - See all my reviews

Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

I saw this in the store and thought it might be fun. I like online games and usually find them relaxing and fun to play with others. This game was not.

I checked forums to find a popular server so I would be able to start on one with a lot of people. I chose Ghallandra server. I logged in my new Wizard and for the first hour I was completely alone. There wasn't another person anywhere. At first I thought there were lol, but it turned out they were Computer people. So.. I trudged through the starter quests alone and eventually left the area on the boat for what I hoped to be the actual fun game. For the start, I will say the graphics are very nice.

I reached The harbor. The next area after the start quest. I saw people running around. This got my hopes up. Until I tried to communicate with them. During the entire time I was there, there was maybe 3 lines of text appear in my general chat. Nobody was talking at all. I found a tavern and asked some questions about where I should start. Nothing. not a singal response. Nada zip nothing. Now come on.. I was a pretty cute wizard. Somebody could have at least said Hi to me.

Finally I figured out how to get the quests started. I ended up doing a couple of the first ones by myself. Again. I died alot, since Wizards are evidently not supposed to travel the dungeons by themselves.

I asked people how to use the grouping menu. No answer. After a bit, I finally figured it out on my own and off I went. I ended up joining a group of 4 that said they were off to do the starting quests in the harbor. Said as in that's what was in the grouping menu they had up. Well, I have no clue what happened. They ran through the dungeons so fast I had no clue what was going on. The game does have a nice voice thing so you can actually talk to people in your group. It was nice that is till the person leading the group started yelling at me that I was holding him up. I was trying to read the description of some loot I got out of a chest and he started actually yelling at me. Well I just followed them till they were done with the dungeon, said I had to go and left.

I went to the forums to see if I could get some help. I messaged that I was upset at the lack of communication in the game and with the fact that there was virtually nothing to do for a new player other than walk around a deserted starter town and then try to group up with people for quests they obviously had done serveral times before.

The responses in the forum made my decision to quit this game pretty quickly for me. A group of more socially repressed, elitist, jerks you will never find. I have never had this sort of response from online games or the related forums before. I was basically told that it was my fault and that I should have researched the game I was buying before I got it. Told that I must have been lying and that there were lots of people on "their" servers. Told that I need to join a guild and that It was my own falt for joing a PuG (pick up group I am guessing that meant) and that maybe this wasn't the game for me and I should just leave.

So I did and I suggest you don't make the same mistake. Evidently this game is made for a small group of socially backward individuals that feel free to insult people wherever and whenever they like..... as long as it's behind the annonymity of the internet I bet though.

Pass on this game. It shouldn't be an online game. I didn't get an online feel from it. It seemed very dead actually.

Sorry to be so negative, but I dislike wasting 50 bucks and then being insulted for wasting my time trying to figure it out.

I probably was the only actual female playing the game. lol

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves a second look, October 23, 2006

By	Andrew Mcguire (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

The expectations for this game were through the roof and a lot of people were dissapointed when it launched. One thing that is important to keep in mind is that it is an MMO and so the reviews that were drawn up the day this game launched may not be so relevant at this point (8 months down the road as of this writing). The game has grown in leaps and bounds in this time.


There is someone in another Amazon review who complained about bugs and lack of customer support. Its true that there were a number of bugs at launch (quest item decay, monsters not spawning correctly all the time, etc). These weren't common but were pervasive enough to be a problem. And at that time some of the customer service policies were not in place to handle these situations. But Turbine has ALWAYS had a good rep for customer service and they made good on that in the case of DDO too. They never were rude or uncommunicative in in-game support. They never had long wait times for support like other popular MMO's have had. And lastly they figured out ways to resolve some of the quest breaking bugs.

Turbine will have released three modules by the end of this month and a number of smaller content updates. All of the major bugs at launch have long since been addressed, major amounts of content have been added, the level cap has been raised, game systems have been added to reward playing through all content (not the the quests that were easiest / had the best loot), game systems for auction houses, pvp, and a mail system have *all* been added since the game launched. In short this game is twice what it was at launch, and all this without an expansion pack.

DDO delivered on its promise of delivering a Massive Multiplayer Online game with the basic game rules of D&D 3.5 (with real time twitchy combat mechanics to boot). If you want to storm an ancient tomb with your buddies and go head to head with iconic D&D monsters (mind flayers, beholders, etc) this game is for you... and with all the additions in the last 9 months now might be the time for you take a look.

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