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What is turbine/wb doing to bring in new players ?
allegria
Member CommonPosts: 682
I have played DDO for several years on and off and I am likely going back for the expansion and yet i wonder... what is turbine/wb doing to bring in new folks ?
DDO is a great experience... although becoming a dated one. After running around Neverwinter I am just amazed how much better the visuals are... I just wonder, could DDO gain some of Neverwinter departures for a more complex game... yet look so outdated...
If DDO had a major graphics overhaul to get it to well, 2010 standards at least I could see many new folks playing DDO as a more complex alternative but it is kinda getting ugly these days lol.
Comments
The character building in DDO is second to none. There is no comparison between the two games in this area.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
I'm not sure what, if anything, they are doing to target new players. I think they have focused on keeping old players by adding more and more high end content and new players just come in for the free try. Hopefully all the new f2p games and conversions won't kill DDO because it really is an amazing game.
I've always felt that DDO was rather broken at the early levels. Although I agree that the graphics are dated, everything about the game including the graphics gets better and better as you advance. I could never understand why, outside of running on the ice above the dragon in one of the early adventures, the first 4 levels of DDO are the lamest in terms of graphics and art design. Combine this with the fact that you really have no idea what characters are capable of and how they truly interact with each other until something closer to level 10 and you have major issues with keeping new players' interest. When you consider that level 5 = level 20 in other games, and level 10 is something akin to level 40, that is an awful long time for new players to wallow in mediocrity before ever discovering how awesome DDO really is.
http://www.youtube.com/flymolo
btw... Just ran The Sane Asylum for the first time last week. We were stuck trying to figure out the alternate realities for quite a while!
I never cease to be amazed at the variety and creativity that continuously goes into DDO's design.
http://www.youtube.com/flymolo
I really enjoyed DDO. The quests are great, immersive and you feel the story behind it, complicated puzzles (Crucible is all I gotta say, damn shame it's a rarity in DDO), and they did a cash shop right (at least pre Astral Exchange which made it straight up P2W if one wants to shell out the money for items).
However it does have many flaws. It is a very dated engine that drives me nuts at times (like the scorps burrowing even though paralized), bugs galore (numerous talents, feats, abilities that are bugged for over a year), mechanics broken that they show no signs of fixing, severly OP classes (not OP per say but take the monk, no one not splash a monk just because of the insane benefits it brings over other classes or how the monk is THE archer build, NOT a ranger or fighter which is messed up), very very VERY grindsome for gear that sucks the fun out of the game for me.
Damn shame that Cryptic got Neverwinter instead of Turbine who I think would have done it right, at least a hella lot better than Craptic. I have given up on a good modern D&D MMO or a D&D game with multiplayer aspects like a NWN3. However I would definately go for a DDO 2. The game is just way to dated now and really is an eye sore to play.
The attitude of the BYOH elitist crowd is a major deterrent to keeping new players as well.
Today I rolled a new alt on a random server to get back into the game (I find it to be easier at a level when there's not too many buttons to push, later I can switch back to a higherlevel when I'm back in the flow). I asked to join an LFM group and was then told that I needed to be in a guild or be a reincarnate.
This then brought back memories of some of the bad experiences I had with the ddo elitist types last time I played. It also seems to me that these byoh exclusive groups got a lot more prevalent after shipbuffs trivialized lower level content, putting up another barrier for new players, who of course don't have easy access to them.