Dungeons & Dragons Online (and Guild Wars: Factions)

[Smoke]

It lacks polish. World of Warcraft is incredibly polished. I'll explain it in a way that most people here will understand. It's like going from playing a first party Nintendo game (WoW) to playing some 3rd rate 3rd party game (DDO). While the 3rd party game might be fun you first have to get past the horrible, horrible presentation. Not only is the interface horribly ugly it's unintuitive. Take the focus orb. To basically do anything you have to first click it so it's in your focus orb. Then you can look at it or use it. So I first have to put a weapon in the orb to see what it's stats are. And there's loading screens everywhere. I was surprised that I had to go through a loading screen to go in the tavern. It wasn't that big or detailed of a tavern. There weren't very many characters in it. Why couldn't it just be a part of the map? I don't have to sit and look at a loading bar when I go into a tavern in WoW. I also hate the graphics. It has more technically advanced graphics but that doesn't make up for the horrible, horrible art. One of the first things I noticed was the giant ugly blue arrow over the heads of quest givers. It was way too big. And ugly. They ripped off WoW but couldn't do a good job of it. Also, the characters are ugly as sin. You can pick all your facial features like eyes, nose, mouth. That's nice but the character will look ugly regardless. The worst though is that your hair looks pasted on like it's a wig. Oh and elves just looked wrong. They look like they took humans and just made the model thinner without thinking about proportions.

Finally the game isn't even trying to be a real MMO. It's more akin to Guild Wars where you have a hub and everything else is instanced. Oh but they're still going to charge a monthly fee like an MMO.

If you want an online D&D game get Neverwinter Nights or NWN2 when it comes out. If you want a psuedo-MMO get Guild Wars. If you want an MMO get WoW. There is no good reason for DDO to exist.