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D&D Online Unlimited Goes Gold
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After getting hit with a lot of word-of-mouth hype. I'd hoped to be able to talk about Aion today, following its beta test this weekend. Unfortunately, I'm having issues with the client, so instead, I spent the weekend playing the D&D Online beta.
Turbine announced on Friday that D&DO Unlimited has gone gold, and that they're shutting down the beta servers soon. Tonight, in fact, is their last big party before they turn out the lights, with an XP multiplier for all characters and a number of shenanigans planned.
I talked before about how D&DO has a different flow than the traditional MMORPG, and the further you get into the real game, the more obvious it becomes. It's honestly more of a real-time beat-'em-up than anything else, like the old Dark Alliance games running in an MMO-style engine, with real-time combat resolved by dice rolls. It sits, not entirely comfortably, between two genres. It uses a lot of the straight 3.5 game mechanics from D&D, with some streamlining to allow for the possibility of a solo game.
What's a bit troubling to me, as I mentioned previously, is the points system. The pricing system is up on the beta client now, and in general, anything you want costs between seven and nine hundred points. 900 Turbine Points equals $11.99 American, which gets you character slots, new races, new classes, and apparently stuff like healing potions. It's a bizarre setup which actually resembles nothing quite so much as EA's old microtransactions, and it makes me wonder just how successful it'll actually be. Making drow one of the pay-to-play races was a savvy business move, but on the other hand, when you put that many of your would-be players in a position where your selling points are behind a paygate, what's the reaction going to be?
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