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PC - Windows : Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach Reviews

Gas Gauge: 70
Gas Gauge 70
Below are user reviews of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach and on the right are links to professionally written reviews. The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. Column height indicates the number of reviews with a score within the range shown at the bottom of the column. Higher scores (columns further towards the right) are better.

Summary of Review Scores
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ReviewsScore
Game Spot 75
Game FAQs
GamesRadar 70
IGN 75
GameSpy 60
GameZone 70






User Reviews (1 - 11 of 16)

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A new review

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I just noticed that most of the reviews for this game are 2 YEARS OLD! The game has come a long way in the last 2 years and is a very enjoyable experience. You can now advance up to level 16 and even unlock the ability to create a Drow Elf character with enough Favor. I have been playing nearly every day for a month and I am only level 6 right now. Also, if you don't like having to group up to complete quests, you probably shouldn't be playing a MMORPG. This is an excellent game for any D&D fan and could be enjoyable to anyone who likes role-playing games. Next month the Monk class will be released, and so you see the game is still continuing to grow. At $9.99 a month it is, in my opinion, well worth it!

Avoid the expensive subscription, just download the Trial

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 4
Date: November 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Why pay Turbine when you can play for free and get the same (LAME) experience

unless you are an ad&d freak, don't bother, this is a boring waste of time and money

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: November 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

i wanted to like this game. i can't.

the graphics are stellar. there are some bright people working on dungeon designs. i wish they had set this team loose on an actual MMORPG implementation; this simply isn't one.

pretty much all the criticisms you've read here in other reviews are spot-on.

also, the default mouse controls are bass-ackwards and need to be remapped from the moment you start playing -- if you've spent any time in just about any other mmorpg.

i would not recommend this to anyone who does not *already* belong to an online rp/gaming guild and have a group of people you know you will be playing with.

forced grouping is fine. not having anything to do while you wait for groups to get themselves together is just boring.

instancing the few "outdoor" areas is a serious design flaw given how little interaction there is between non-grouped players already, though i have to say in my time i never saw a city zone get instanced -- that's how empty the servers are.

some areas that should not be instanced, are (the main market for example), and this is a pain in the butt, because traversing instances results in a lot of delay. segmenting a city into instances is basically taking us back to the days of EQ1. there's really no excuse for this in a modern online rpg. stacking instances to deal with crowding detracts from sociability and there's not enough of that to begin with. also, i have never seen enough people in any one place to justify it, unless the back-end server/network code *really, really sucks* -- and there have been some extended (and unplanned) periods of downtime to suggest that perhaps it does, or did.

there's not the feel of anything resembling a persistent, interactive world here. this fails as an mmorpg in the simplest and truest sense of the term, and sould not be marketed as anything but a group-oriented online dungeon crawl, which it does a good job of.

the graphics are worth paying for about one month for, to check out, as you run a character up to level 10 or so, and enjoy some interesting quest/instance/dungeon designs.

i did, then chucked my subscription and went back to playing WoW.

it would surprise no-one to see turbine ditch this the way they did AC2, especially with their upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG now in beta.

Buy with caution

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: January 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

J&R does not update their stock on this site. We purchased this over five days ago; said was in stock and avilable to purchase; just got an email from amazon stating J&R did not have this in stock.

could be better

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: July 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

grouping is a pain. it takes forever to put a group together. I hope that the game gets better with more updates. It is fun, but needs work.

I really Really wanted to like this game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: November 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I sounded like the perfect blend of the Challange of an RPG and the Online Community of a Massive Roleplayer. Unfortunatly from a Roleplayers point of view it's just another massive multiplayer repeating the same quests over and over, grinding, farming, ect. ect. The only thing is it does have a nice D&D "Feel" about it with all the newly trademarked monsters, it's also got solid graphics and such but in reality it's not close to an RPG and the tech support for paying a monthly subscription service is terrible.

Couldnt Do It

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is as good as it gets for someone who loves the D&D world. Character creation was deep enough and the dungeons were good. Problem as said before is forced grouping. After advancing to level 2 solo play is nearly impossible at least for casters which i simply must play. I dont mind grouping, when i feel like grouping but the main problem lies in the fact that you do not really have time to make enough friends before you have to start grouping. Being totally fried on WOW i gave this game several hours and just cannot bring myself to pay for hanging around waiting to group with people who may or may not be fun to be around. Hopefully they will try again and do the D&D world with enough solo quests throughout to keep everyone playing. I would love to see it.

Save your money it's buggy and small

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: March 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is the worst save your money
Hello all just a note to tell people to stay away from turbine this game is bad buggy and very little content and they want 14.99 a month to keep playing and playing the same dungeons over and over. I played the beta and thought there would be a lot more content in the game when it realeased there was not and the bigger dungeons that are in the game have been closed half the time since the game was released because of bugs. Also I tried to sell the game on ebay to help recoupe some of my money and turbine complained to ebay and had my game listing removed. Well I hope it was worth it turbine I will never by any software from you or atari again. To many companies release games that are not done and stick us with them with no recorse/return policy I will wait next time and not listen to the hype.

see my review under the dvd version

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: May 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

In there i forgot to mention that the drow elf will soon be a playable character.

Worth the free trial, but not much more

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: April 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Bringing D&D to an MMO is an interesting concept that is amusing for a while but has some serious shortcomings.

THE GOOD
The dungeons are quite fun. I like the interplay of the classes. I like having the rogue scout for traps, the strongman being needed to bash down certain doors, the wizard activating glyphs. D&D is about teamwork and the uniqueness of each class. I'm not sure if this is inherently fun, or just a breath of fresh air from the monotomy and homogeny of every other MMO.

I liked that health and mana didn't regen in dungeons except for discrete one time only points. In other MMOs stopping for 5-10 minutes between each battle to rest up got really tedious; IE in WoW, 90% of your time in an instance was spent resting up between each micro encounter. It only served to artificially inflate an instance from 20 minutes of content into a 3-4 hour ordeal

The grouping interface seemed a little clunky to me, but with some improvement would be great. It's nice to have a bulletin board so to speak to look for a group, and to be able to say what you're looking for.

I also have to applaud turbine for putting out an MMO without any PvP. I can't say enough how much I hate PvP influence in an RPG and its inevitable effect on attempting to balance the game for both PvP and PvM (ie it doesn't work, and you end up screwing up both of them). I was told City of Heroes was the same way, but I never got around to trying that one.

Last but not least, thank you for putting in a group-based voice system. Counterstrike had this YEARS ago. It's about time an MMO put it in there.

THE BAD
Some of D&Ds strengths are also its weakness though. D&D is sort of like football in that playing alone is pointless; you need a group of people, each with different roles. After the first 30 minutes of the game, you will need to be in a good balanced party in order to accomplish anything. You'll only be able to solo dungeons much lower in level than yourself. It gets boring trying to put a party together without being able to do much in the meantime. In P&P it's only the cruelest of DMs who intentionally designs everything to take advantage of any weakness of the party (no rogue?..then we'll go through a dungeon without monsters, just trap after trap after trap), but almost all of the dungeons in DDO seemed designed to punish you if you don't have the iconic party (rogue, wizard, fighter, cleric).

Also, as much as I hate to admit it, character advancement isn't frequent enough for me. In P&P, fighting, killing, and gaining XP is only a small amount of the game, so not leveling up frequently is just fine. Plus, leveling up frequently is tedious without a computer-based system to do it for you. Keeping track of dozens of random modifiers bogs a P&P game down, where on a computer system it's nothing at all for it to keep track of for you.

In an MMO, fighting, killing, exploring and gaining XP/equipment is pretty much it. RPing is waaaaay to much to expect from an online game that is not actually policed for it. And so, for a CRPG, it just takes too long to really feel rewarded.

The treasure seemed a bit too random as well. When I played a wizard I would receive magic weapons/armor left and right that my fighter 2 levels higher would kill for, but that's all I'd find. When I played my fighter, I found scrolls and wands like no tomorrow, but was still using mundane armor and a MW weapon at lv 3 because of no luck with treasure.

OVERALL
Overall, I don't think the game is going to really take off. It's fun and refreshing for a week or so, but then grows stale.

A game as heavily based off of D&D isn't really good for an MMO (though if other MMOs would cherry pick some of the good things from DDO that'd be a plus for them) and belongs more in the single-player realm ala Baldur's Gate, where you can make and control a well-balanced party. Either that or Neverwinter Nights style, where you just get together with a bunch of people you know and run through some dungeons for a few hours that your DM created just for your party in particular (ala a LAN party, or played over the internet).


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