Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I received a retail copy of this game years ago back when I was still buying physical copies of PC games. Nowadays, due to the convenience and discounted prices of download services like Steam and Impulse, there’s no real reason to buy from retailers any longer. I didn’t even buy Dungeons & Dragons Online. Pcgame.com.my simply threw it in for me as a free gift with my stuff. That’s a clear sign of just how poorly the game sold. I never even opened the box until I noticed it sitting there during the Chinese New Year holidays. The game has since moved to a free-to-play model so the box now has zero value, so I thought, what the heck, and decided to bring it back with me to Kota Kinabalu. I knew I wouldn’t want to play it for long but I might as well check it out before it gets shut down completely.

The installation and inevitable patching up process went surprisingly smoothly, especially when compared to the horrible experience I had with Champions Online. Activating the game with the retail copy automatically gave my account VIP status for a month, giving me access to the Monk character class. I tried that for a bit and found it very easy to solo, but I was too lazy to learn all the details of how they implemented the monk abilities and eventually settled for a cleric instead. The online version uses spell points that you’re allowed to spend to cast any of the spells you have memorized, but otherwise everything is fairly faithful to the pencil and paper version.

Dungeons & Dragons Online boasted at least two unique features back when it was first released. First, it has an action-based combat model. You click the mouse to swing your weapon and you can press a button to block an incoming blow with your shield. This is however no different from what games like Champions Online are doing. The other feature is still unique to it as far as I known. In most MMOs, characters gain experience both from killing mobs and for completing quests. In this game, only completing quests yield experience. Each quest is worth a fixed amount of xp depending on the difficulty level you select when you begin it, but you get nothing from killing mobs.

This has some interesting implications for gameplay. In most games, you have a strong incentive to kill everything in your way for the experience. In DDO, if you can safely sneak past a mob, it’s in your interest to do so to save time and resources. Mobs don’t even drop loot in this game. Instead, dungeons have pre-positioned treasure chests that you get loot from. The whole game is tuned around the quest centric approach. Hit points and spell points can only be regained by resting at one-use shrines at fixed positions inside dungeons for example. This means that your resources for any given quest is finite and successfully getting to the end of a dungeon means astutely managing your resources well.

The downside to this approach is that it really needs a full party to work well. This played a pretty big part in why the game did so badly when it first launched as people hate enforced grouping. Later patches added the ability to reduce the difficulty of quests enough so that they could be soloed, but it turns it into a rather lackluster game. Mobs become so weak that defeating them is trivial. The only challenge is whether or not you have enough hit points and spell points to see you through the whole dungeon. Also, because experience can only be gained through quests and not combat, many players had to do the same quests over and over again to gain levels and gear.

I can see the game filling a special niche, especially now that it has gone free-to-play, by allowing friends to play together for semi-regular sessions. This would be the true videogame analogue of Dungeons & Dragons: arrange with a group of friends to meet once a week to play a quest or two together and then call it a night. But I can’t see anyone playing it daily as an MMO similar to World of Warcraft on an extended basis. Its scope is just too limited for that. People would be willing to play like this because there are recurring fees but anyone who wants some extra bells and whistles such as creating a Drow character or getting extra special items could pay money to do so, giving Turbine some income.

Anyway, I’m currently playing and enjoying Star Trek Online, so there’s little chance of coming back to DDO. It’s a bold attempt to try out some new MMO ideas, but ultimately it didn’t really work out.