Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach (Second Look)
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The favor system works pretty well. DDO has definite (good) quests and (bad) quests in terms of the experience and equipment you receive from them, but the favor system gives you a reason to try all quests, and at higher difficulty settings to boot. Plus, if you accumulate enough total favor, you unlock the drow race and a sixth character slot on the server on which you're playing. The drow race is fun, because it gets better attribute point bonuses than other races, not to mention the potential for a natural Spell Resistance 20, but because it's the new and trendy race, that means half the population seems to be drow right now. Turbine also added some new spells (like (firewall) and (dimension door)) and enhancements (including ways for spellcasters to get critical hits with their spells), and, in total, the changes have helped the game. They've given players a new reason to play existing characters, and they've given players new reasons to start over with new characters. That's about as much as you can ask from a game's updates.
What's Coming Up
Turbine has already announced an update for September that will introduce a new line of quests involving House Deneith and duergar dwarves. Other things I can only speculate about, but since about half of the races and classes got new spells and enhancements in Module 2, I think it's safe to assume that the other half will get new things in Module 3, whenever that comes out (probably in October or November).
I've also heard some rumbling about new player-versus-player (PVP) content and an increase to the current level cap. These changes have me worried a little. Right now at level 10, some characters can reach attribute values of 30 (in a system where 20 was supposed to be good). What happens if the level cap is increased to 12 or 20, and better equipment and higher level enhancements are added? It would have been nice if Turbine had showed a little more restraint with their equipment (for example, you can get +3 strength gloves at level 5 with no problem), and had planned a little better for future updates, because I don't see how they can do anything but further escalate player power even more than it's escalated now.
As for PVP, that seems like a bad idea altogether. What makes DDO unique right now is that it's a cooperative, group-oriented MMORPG. Turbine has already added some (solo content) for low level characters, and if they add PVP content as well, that will just start the game towards being like every other MMORPG on the market. Worse, once PVP comes in, you just know that Turbine will have to try and re-balance the classes, and, from my experience, that never goes well.
Conclusion
In some ways I'm optimistic about DDO. Turbine has shown a willingness to add new content to their game, and the new content has worked out pretty well so far. But in the process they've shown that they're helpless when it comes to designing an interface (somebody needs to lock them into a room and force them to play Blizzard games for a month), and they've shown that they don't have much regard for the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition rules that the game is purportedly based upon.
Turbine also has a problem in that it takes less than a month to advance a character to level 10 and to see most of the quests in the game. Their character development system is rich in ways to create characters, and so you might want to try out a few variations.. but I just don't see DDO right now as being a fun game to play over a long stretch of time. There just aren't enough things to see and do, and so once you've taken a couple characters to level 10, that's just about it. But if you don't mind that your MMORPG might wear thin after only a couple of months, then DDO can be some solid fun in the meantime.
