Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

Pen&Paper role-playing games for the PC have been around for a while. But now you can also play Pen&Paper online as an MMORPG. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, DDO for short.

DDO is set in the world of Eberron, so we have to say goodbye to familiar names like Forgotten Realms. This has the advantage that the world is still quite unspent in which you go in search of glory and honor.

After a short tutorial, the player lands in the port city of Stormreach. And it turns out, of course, that evil lurks everywhere and tries to destroy the good. Our task now is to drive the evil out of the city.

As races the player can choose between humans, halflings, dwarves and warforged. Warforged are mechanical constructs created in a past war. Additionally, the Drow race is available, but you can only choose it if another character on that account has unlocked the race.

For the class choice you have fighter, paladin, barbarian, rogue, ranger, cleric, mage, warlock or bard to choose from. It is also possible to choose a class combination. However, a maximum of only 3 classes are possible on one character. And it is also not possible to bring all chosen classes to the maximum level, but all levels of the classes added together can not be higher than the maximum.

The following characters were in my possession:

The graphics of the game look very appealing. Unfortunately, the dungeons always look kind of the same. It almost looks like every inhabitant of Stromreach has the same basement. In my opinion, more individuality would have done well there.

Due to the battle system of Dungeon & Dragons, the battles turn out quite differently. Sometimes your luck runs out and you barely hit your opponent, and then you’re almost dead yourself. It happened to me that in one dungeon a spider killed me with two attacks. On the next try in this dungeon, the spider didn’t deal out a single point of damage before it passed away.

Since there are also items like crates that you can destroy, they occasionally break in battle when you hit them with your weapon. This is because the game is such that you don’t really have to focus on an enemy for you to be able to damage them. In close combat, this is very useful. You just have to stand in the enemies’ horders and just hit them. This way you hit several enemies at once. In ranged combat, however, it is useful if you set the focus, because it is better to bring the projectile to the opponent.

In addition to the attack options, you also have the possibility to block or dodge the attacks of the opponents. The dodges are then rolls that the character makes.

The environment affects the character. For example, you walk through water considerably slower when it reaches a certain depth. If the water slides down a slope and you want to run upwards, then you have the feeling that you can’t move forward at all. In the same way, armor has a negative effect on swimming and diving. So it is sometimes advisable to undress if you have to dive a longer distance.

What is clearly positive compared to other MMORPGs is the story. For each quest, you get small events in the dungeon, which continue the story a bit and create a certain atmosphere. Something like that has not happened in the big MMORPGs like WoW or Everquest 2.

Negatively I feel the translation, because this is only partially done. So there are German sentences in which the one or other English word occurs. One can only hope that this will hopefully be fixed with the patches at some point.