Dungeons & Dragons Online Previews

Both GameSpot and IGN PC have published updated previews of Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online, after getting some firsthand time with the MMORPG at this year’s Atari University event. A snip from GameSpot’s article:

Both the tomb dungeon and the outdoor dungeon did a good job in showing off the game’s various features, which include “DM text,” a text narrative that appears onscreen to describe your surroundings, similar to how a dungeon master (or “DM”) player would in a tabletop game. The game will have highly interactive environments, so you can expect to be smashing open stone urns full of hidden treasure, flipping switches to open secret doors, and using healing shrines to revive your fallen comrades. Extremely high-level cleric players can use “raise dead” spells to revive their fallen friends, while parties without clerics can pick up their dead comrades’ “soulstones,” which are glowing items that can be brought to a dungeon’s healing shrine to coax deceased adventurers back into this world. (Interestingly, just like in the tabletop game, characters are considered “unconscious”–but not stone-dead–if they reach a health level of zero to minus nine. This means they can actually be revived with basic healing abilities at that level of injury.)

And a snip from IGN PC’s article:

Visually, the game is quite imaginative, varied, and colorful. It’s not bleeding-edge, so who knows how it will hold up a year or two from now, but it looks like someone with a GeForce 6800 or Radeon x800 series videocard should be able to run almost everything at full detail. And like World of Warcraft taught us, the number of polygons and the length of the list of buzzword bells and whistles doesn’t necessarily make for a great game. Thankfully, that’s one of the few aspects in which WoW didn’t raise the bar. Either way, DDO’s art design is distinctive and detailed. I’ve always thought that EQ2 felt strangely underpopulated with objects and scene details (aside from pretty water and high-poly character models), but DDO does not seem to have this perceived problem. But don’t take my word for it — check out the screenshots and videos and judge for yourself. I think DDO looks pretty keen.