DDO, or Dungeons and Dragons Online, had a pre-order beta test pre-play gig going on last week, and despite myself I decided to pick up a copy. I say “despite myself” because my impression before reading up on the game was that it was going to follow in the molds of its MMORPG predecessors and be a wholly unfulfilling prospect, (with the notable exception of WoW, which feels like its own type of game in my mind.)

After reading up on it, several enticing aspects drew my attention.

• No “killing fields” where players simply devastate populations of wild animals or tribes of humanoids to gain the dubious experience that makes them more powerful.
• Close adherence to 3rd edition D&D corebook rules, which as a very critical gamer I find to be streamlined and simple, yet capable of producing complex results.
• All quests are “instanced,” meaning that everything is reset for you and your group specifically. Like Guild Wars, you don’t wait for a specific thing to “respawn” due to someone else having just completed the same quest.
• A sincere focus on making every quest interesting and detailed. No “kill X number of Y creature” or “find X number of Y doodad by killing Z creature,” etc.
• Experience granted on a per dungeon basis. You get quest XP plus bonuses based on the way you solved the dungeon. A rogue gets mischief/stealth bonuses, a fighter gets ransack and assault bonuses, etc.

All this adds up to a game that doesn’t feel like a MMORPG. Or maybe feels like a MMORPG was meant to be.

Levels are gained very slowly. Treasure is not an economy; you don’t acquire new items by simply buying them in an auction house or even from a vendor. If you’re lucky enough to come across a magic sword, it really feels special and unique. Levels come very slowly and seem more representative of actual experience. For example, your FPS shooter skills come in handy while in a fight as you can maneuver for position to gain bonuses or negative modifiers. You can use tactics such as dodging behind barrels and firing surreptitiously through spaces in walls.

You could also — as I did — get a skeletal warrior thing to chase you down a hall, hide and sneak your way past him (they don’t just return to their initial walking path) and make away with the gem he was guarding. Your guile and planning make an obvious difference and you find yourself working with other people to make quests more interesting rather than just easier. You want the mage with you to read the runes on the walls, you want the rogue to open doors that you can’t get past, you want the bard to fool the chieftain into believing you’re on his side.

Clerics and fighters are a little more obvious and have been implemented properly in most games. As a gamer addicted to support classes, it’s nice to have a role in the game that isn’t just “off-healer,” “buff-bot,” “off-tank,” or “DPS.” I enjoy WoW and CoH for their charms in this area, but before I started to understand those games for what they were, I was expecting a game more like DDO. (Props to Guild Wars for a step in the right direction.)

DDO will likely not appeal to MMORPG fans. There is essentially no player economy, a very slow, team-intensive experience system. No uberloot or game-breaking talent builds. Less character customization in terms of costume and cool-looking gear (at least at low levels). Between quests, you must rest in a tavern to regain energy and health. But as a conversion of the pen-and-paper RPG experience, DDO comes closer than any game before it.

That said, the game interface is a little less “tight” than some of its predecessors. CoH and WoW have very obvious feedback for when you’ve hit or been hit. A game like DDO needs this very badly, as its looser sound and impact feel actually takes away from the immersive quality of the rest of the game. Since DDO is quite difficult, even — or perhaps especially — at the lower levels, I find myself having to more closely pay attention to the little red meter that represents my health than in other MMORPGs. This is due to the fact that I can’t really tell how I’m doing in a fight without it. In other MMORPGs, I’m not surprised when I look at my health bar, having been given a fair indication of how badly I’m getting beaten down by other interface elements. With DDO, a clear indication is not always there (although this was a beta test, so perhaps they’re adding to that.)

In general, however, the interface and feedback are not very clear. I played a bard, with many “active” social skills. My success or failure in their use, as in the use of other non-combat abilities, was never apparent to me. Whether this was an intentional ambiguity on the part of the developers — in real life, you can’t always tell if someone is affected by your charms — is unknown, but simple feedback like “You used Bluff” or some such also seems to be underplayed or entirely lacking.

With a tighter interface and feedback system, this game would probably have me cancelling my WoW account, though mostly because I can’t really afford two monthly fees. And while I only played in a beta pre-test, DDO as a game felt unfinished in comparison to its peers. But as a concept, DDO is a shining example of what an online RPG should be. As someone in the game recalled while resting in the tavern, “It’s like Neverwinter Nights on crack.”