Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach is a fantasy massively multiplayer online game developed by Turbine. In a genre dominated by World of Warcraft’s five million strong player base how does Turbine hope to succeed?

…With a really fun game, apparently.

Stormreach takes the path less traveled by on many of its features, and while this might keep Turbine up at night wondering if players will enjoy the shift, it fills me with absolute delight. At its core, Stormreach is fundamentally different than other massively multiplayer games. Active combat, platform elements, puzzles, and strategy rule the day in Stormreach, but that’s only the beginning. If you’ve been playing massively multiplayer games since they were popularized with Asheron’s Call and EverQuest in the late 1990’s then Stormreach has been a very long time coming indeed.

Dungeons and Dragons Online breaks the mold with its active combat system. Instead of just pressing an attack button and watching the battle unfold (which is the standard in this genre), you have to press a button to swing your weapon, fire your bow, or block with your shield. You can tumble out of the way of oncoming attacks, use cover, and even climb to get out of the way. You can aim spells, arrows, and throwing weapons with precision.

But to call Stormreach a twitch game would be doing it a major injustice. Your ability in combat is not determined by how fast you click a button, but instead on how strategically you fight. If you’re a small and frail halfling, for example, then it would be a good idea to roll backwards before that ogre wallops you with his club. This mechanic completely reshapes battle in massively multiplayer games. Combat is exciting, fun, and entertaining to watch. After some time it becomes second nature.

Character classes, races, and customization are other areas where Stormreach absolutely shines. Most massively multiplayer games funnel you into a specific role that you decide when you create your character. The genre has defined roles like tanks, damage, crowd control, and healers.

Other areas of interest:

DDO Unoffical Strategy Guide
Dungeons and Dragons: Stormreach

If you picked a tank character, well, that’s all you did and all you were good at. This was developed as a way to prevent players from accidentally messing up their characters, but as a side effect it prevents any real identity. Any character of a similar role would end up being roughly the same. 

Dungeons and Dragons Online has no safety net and allows you complete freedom in creating your character. Have you always wanted to make a wizard that can also cast healing spells? Go for it. What about a bard that can wield two-handed swords and pick locks? Sure! You can make just about any character you can think of. You have complete control. Thinking up odd-ball characters and trying them out in Dungeons and Dragons Online is a feature that I truly love about the game. DDO’s system prevents cookie cutter characters and players of similar levels will likely be vastly different, even if they chose the same class.

Dungeons in Stormreach are all hand-made, not randomly generated like in other popular massively multiplayer games. You’ll delve through sewers, basements, catacombs, even huge underground cities. Jumping down a chasm on the top of oversized glowing mushrooms into a stronghold of demi-humans isn’t something you’d ever get with a random dungeon generator. 

In addition to its new design ideas, Dungeons and Dragons Online has great attention to detail. Animations are fluid and lifelike, textures are crisp, and sounds are superb. I don’t know what a giant wooden door sounds like when it slides up a metal rail into the wall in real life, but I imagine it would sound very, very close to how it’s portrayed in this game.
Attention to detail spills over into other areas too. Characters can find identical weapons and armor, but they will look completely different. There are about half a dozen different skins for each set of armor and weapon. Not just color variations either, I’m talking about completely different geometry. It’s obvious that Turbine wanted players to feel unique and avoid the “Invasion of the Clones” syndrome of other games. 

Above all else, Turbine has crafted a game that doesn’t follow the tried and true design for massively multiplayer games. Although we won’t know for another month or two if Stormreach will be a critical success, I’m sure I’m not the only one who really appreciates the direction Turbine has taken the genre. Players coming to DDO from other games might have a hard time adjusting at first. Once they’ve got the hang of combat and triumphantly fend off 200 attacking kobolds, jump over a chasm filled with traps, discover a secret door stacked with treasure, or roll out of the way of particularly nasty spell, they’ll be hooked.

Turbine will probably be harassed by people who prefer the old way of massively multiplayer combat, but I hope they will persevere with their design decisions and not second guess themselves. Wizards of the Coast and Turbine should be proud of their creation. Trailblazing is never easy.

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