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DDO is F2P up to level 10.
Xero_Chance
Member Posts: 519
Between the levels 9-20, there are only 14 F2P quests. None of them level 19-20.
Between 12-18, there are 6 F2P quests.
The 1 or 2 adventure packs that you could earn with favor might only add 3-4 more quests each. Even if you farm for favor for months, you might only get maybe 3 or 4 free adventure packs adding ~12 quests.
This game is actually good enough to consider paying for VIP if you really like it. But if you don't expect to pay a dime, don't expect to play for long.
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You can also just purchase the quests zones individually and play them for life. So Subscription isn't the only option. In fact, though maybe a bit dated, if you purchased during a sale you could get the whole game for ~$50-60 dollars.
Worst case, even if you can't pay anything at all, if you make friends many often have and don't mind giving out passes to the zone so you can play with them.
I'm interested in playing DDO. If I were to get to said levels, would it be worth it to buy the extra quests? I mean does it have a decent player base? I really like the look of the game so any help would be appreciated.
Most of DDO's Player base is 14-50 year olds, most people during the day work or the kids are at school. But in summer its litteraly a chore to get into the servers. During the summer if you buy a 3 month subscription you will get 1k ddo pts ea month, which will get you around 3 major packs. or 4-6 lesser level packs. Its around 160 dollers normaly to buy every class, race & packs.
The gameplay is bad ass, but some people say the GFX are dated, but i dont think they are bad at all. And no other game has Class custmization like ddo, every class is built diffrently and there thousands of combos you can do with multi classing.
I have played the game for 5 years and still enjoy it. And it beats the click and sit crap out there atm.
If you do decide to play, Im on the Ghallanda server and im usaly on ign SanKami, or Krumpin, sometimes if im PvPing im on Quikk.
Good luck and have fun XD. Hope i anwsered any questions you may have.
I have just started playing and agree, the game is very fun. One of my burnouts with WOW is just that so much of the game revolves around 5 man content, and it just gets old pugging with bad, or obnoxious players. It is nice to do a long dungeon crawl with traps, puzzles and bosses as a solo character.
That said, you are bit off on your analysis. Here is a site that shows all the F2P quests
http://ddowiki.com/page/Free_to_Play_quests
One of the big ´secrets´ to DDO is not that you can use favor (reputation points for factions) to buy more adventure packs, but it is the bonus favor you get for meeting goals on different servers. You can earn a LOT of bonus points just by playing your alts on different servers. Currently, I have 3 characters ( wiz, fi, cl) on 3 different servers that are only lvl 3 and I have only done the quests in solo mode, and I already have something like 450 points, which is enough points to already buy one adventure pack.
If you do some research, there are enough people who have already gotten to lvl 20 by using just one ´bought´expansion pack.. Vale of Twilight, which you can easily afford to buy with freebie points you get from favor.
I am not sure i can handle having 7 alts on all 7 servers just to get Turbine points, but I definitely have one or two more characters I want to create, and I will do so on different servers. The cool thing is that once you get to 400 favor on any one server, you can start a Drow alt on that server. Having alts is nice because their gameplay is very different, and doing the same quest on different difficulty makes it feel very different.
So your statement that ´DDO is free up to lvl 10´ is completely wrong. Even if you don´t grind the same quests, and just do content as it comes to you, you can get well above lvl 10. If you have alts on different servers, it is very easy to get to lvl 20 with free content (adventure packs that you can buy with free points). There are even dedicated ´grinders´who have bought every expansion pack with favor. But that said, as someone else mentioned.. adventure packs are only a couple dollars each. If you enjoy the game, just buy 1 every month or so.
Ok, so I did some quick math..
Getting a character to 100 total favor (which you can do by only doing level 2 quests and below) on each server will net you 875 TP After your first or second character, this will take you no time at all to do.
Getting a character to 500 total favor ( which you can do by only doing the level 6 quests and below) on each server will net you 1925 TP.
I "own" DDO which is to say I sat down, decided that if I played the game for one year and enjoyed it then as a VIP I'd have spent $15 a month, totalling $180. I therefore set myself a cash limit under that, and focused on sale events Turbine holds, to buy the content I wanted. At this point, I've been playing the free version for almost two years now, have spent less than $150 and acquired all of the quest packs, eleven character slots, the shared bank, veteran status (which I could have earned but oh well, I was impatient) and the optional races and classes (although I did earn some of those as well).
The net effect was that I have saved money on DDO in two years by simply purchasing the content I wanted outright. It's proven to be the least costly MMO rleative to the pay-to-play options. I don't even like looking at the "History" option in my battle.net account for WoW, for example....I think I've given Blizzard approximately $840 dollars over a six year period. So yeah, DDO has proven to be considerably more fun and cost-effective. I also like the fact that I can fire it up and play anytime, anywhere, at my liesure, and if I decide to take a four or five week break I'm not deciding to do so at the expense of prepaid time.
Honestly, I wish more F2P MMOs would take Turbine's approach seriously...they'll get more loyalty if they offer players a way to buy actual ownership into the game. I'll be playing DDO until their servers go cold and dark (which hopefully wont be for many more years!)
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)
There is a 20% off thing for adventure packs right. I just bought 2, Catacombs and Tanglewood with points I earned just from playing the game. I currently have 7 characters all on different servers, all around lvl 3-4.
More math... just by doing the catacombs quests on all 7 characters, it will give me half the points I need to buy another adventure pack...
Doing tanglewood quests on all 7 characters will give me enough points to almost buy another pack.
This all on top of the fact that I have only done the lvl 1, 2 and half of the lvl 3 freebie quests.
The game is awesome, and the first game in 5 years that has made me think about quitting WOW. Soloing through dungeons with puzzles and traps as the majority of your gametime is so much better than pugging with 4 other people through dungeons you´ve done 300 times.
DDO does not have that many puzzles or interesting traps.
As opposed to the majority of MMOs which have 0 of either, or traps that are simply there and you cant do anything about regardless of class, and "puzzles" which require something like stand in 1 spot, then another spot, then another spot, until something happens with no actual interaction with any objects?
I cant think of a single MMO which has anywhere near the number of puzzles & traps that DDO has, and certainly not anything that you can actually interact with on the scale of DDO.
Agreed, this is actually the thing DDO do better than any other MMORPG/CORPG and I would like if they had more of them.
In pen and paper RPGs the trap were often more dangerous than the mobs, and I spent more than a few hours looking on drawings and trying to figure out how to disarm them. Good times.
I miss that part of dungeons, the small claustrophobic ones filled with traps, puzzles, riddles and a few undead instead of the killing sprees all MMOs have. Of course dungeons like that isn't as fun to replay, we never replayed the same dungeon many times in P&P.
That alone does not mean you can spend the majoprity of time doing them as the post I quoted claimed. Please try and stick to the discussion that was.
DDO has a lot of those same stand here stand there puzzles too, when you get to them you will see.
I disagree. DDO is the only MMO where I feel the interaction between the world and the player is meaningful, where dungeons are complex and interesting. There are hidden doors, breakables, several traps, some very well thought out puzzles, runes, levers, etc.etc. Furthermore, dungeons are developed to such a degree that they can be tackled in various manners such as using the traps against the monsters instead of disabling them.
If only the world was solid and not squares with areas,or even solid areas without the district 1-10 for each area,would remind more of a real like fantasy rpg world. And if only there was more things than farm dungeons(which are great) and had adventuring interactivity or intrigues and fights with other players in a supoosely Forgotten realm setting and if only housing ,every guild or players could build settlements in the wilds and other things we would be celebrating now for a grand mmorpg that shaked the foundations of the mmorpg industry and market
Using those traps against the monsters is called bad AI. Being the monsters live in the dungeon they should know where the traps are. The fact you can use them against them just shows poor planning.
DDO dungeons are rarely able to be tackled in various manners. Killing mobs is almost always the only option.
I think you're misreading what he said. I dont think it was meant as "you spend the majority of your time dealing with puzzles and traps". He seems to have been saying you can spend the majority of your time soloing AND doing those things, rather than grouping up with people and running the same raid youve done a bunch of times before as fast as possible to get that leet gear or whatever. You can do both in DDO, take your time and look around for all those little hidden/optional sidequests and treasures, dealing with traps, etc OR you can just join up with some people and rush through it all killing everything. But youre not forced to do it only 1 way in order to have a good time.
There's a lot of good guides out there on how to get by in the game on the cheap.
You don't need "every" adventure pack, and quite frankly some of them aren't worth having considering drops and over all design.
The player base is good. Lot of people who know the game, and the guild structure is pretty top notch. It's a very group oriented game and the group oriented players make up the player base. Go in asking questions and you'll find someone able to answer them.
I'm not playing only cuz I personally found LotRO to be a better match for me based on scale. And that's not saying DDO is small, but there isn't much to exploring in the game. It's what it technically should be, a good ol' fashion dungeon crawler with some unique elements added to the MMO genre.
I may reinstall it now actually just to go say hey to some people.
It may be the quickest & easiest way in most cases, but not the only way. In fact there are several times when the only way to reach your goal is to NOT kill things. Just 1 example would be the "Stealthy Reposession" quest in the Harbor where your objective is to sneak in and steal the jewel back. Kill 6 of the Kobold Prophets and you fail the mission.
Your example happens to be one of 2 like it in the entire game, the other being in Tangleroot. The Tangleroot one is only done that way because you get extra EXP for not killing things, otherwise there is no reason not to.
As a matter of fact some quests that used to be able to be done by a sneaking rogue or other no lethal means had requirements added that took away that option. Turbine decided long ago to remove as many options in a quest as possible.
False. Most quests grant you the option of getting past the vast majority of the monsters. It's not necessarily skipping every single monster, but having the ability to kill only what is necessary for quest objectives gives the dungeons a far different approach. Furthermore, some quests like Let Sleeping Dust Lie and Stealthy Repossession are failed if you kill a certain number of monsters. In most quests, if you are able to skip past monsters, you can definetly save up resources thus making the quest soloable. Indeed, if you take your time to think about all the encounters and all the tools at your disposal, you will learn to tackle the dungeon in various different manners. For that reason, creativity is a key principle in dungeon crawling and killing is never the only option. I would recommend you view some of Ghoste's or Mr. Cow's videos and how they have devised ways in which to solo quests without necessarily killing everything. It seems you have much to learn about the game if you think killing is the only choice.
I don´t know what other games you play... but at least in WOW, there are 0 traps and 0 puzzles.
Walking down a dark corridor, and suddenly having giant spikes pop out of the ground was awesome. Trying to open a chest, and seeing a huge dart fly in front of my face was awesome.
Having to adjust the floor tiles in a dungeon in order to make a frost machine ´refreeze´ a giant monster was pretty cool. not sure how that doesn´t qualify as a puzzle. Having to use a gong to break away an ice floor is pretty awesome.
I also forgot the ambushes.... which are very cool. Nothing like opening a chest and examining the loot only to find that 5 mobs have run in behind you..
Again, as someone who played UO for 5 years and WOW for close to 6 years, these things are interesting and fun. It is nice to not just rush from one pack of mobs to the next.
Let see, I have played.. I dunno.. maybe 50 hours of DDO right now.. about 99% of it has consisted of me soloing through dungeons... almost every dungeon has traps, some have puzzles, and many have ambushes (which in my opinion is a trap). I have done a few dungeons in a group, and spent a little time at the AH and bank... so YES.. you CAN spend a majority of your gameplay doing it.... which is why I said it to begin with.
Yeah, I am finding this out by taking different characters through the same dungeon fairly soon after each other ( I usually do about 5 quests then switch toons). There are a bunch of dungeons where with my fighter I just went in and bashed every mob I saw.. but found it just to be much easier to stealth past them on my Wiz2Rogue1 character. I also learned not to bash all the containers right away.
There was one cool dungeon where you could kill the rogues by blowing up explosive barrels next to them if you could stealth close enough to them.
I love DDO, because you can group or solo at any level. At the higher levels the groups don't come as fast, but that isn't due to lack of population. Its more due to the fact that people don't like to group with others unless they know one is not "just another idiot".
This is about the only populated fantasy game out there where raiding is not mandatory at max level. That alone is enough to count me as a fan.
This game is not like WoW, Rift or EQ2. Mashing buttons will not enable you to faceroll. Thought and planning are required.
F2P is not up to level 10 if you go to Houses from marketplace and you can do the quests again with on harder levels. That's how i got my paladin to Level 17 and finally i had to buy Vale of Twilight pack and made it to level 20 and green steel weapons
I still never understand why people assume games should be 100% free. It's not like the devs worked on the game or anything, or servers cost money.