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DDO goes free-to-play but does anyone care?
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Turbine announced today that Dungeons and Dragons: Stormreach is being upgraded to Dungeons and Dragons: Eberron Unlimited and going free-to-play. Or, at least, free-to-play-limited-version. Ebberron Unlimited is being released later this summer, but you can sign up for the beta test on the DDO website.
According to the press release, the new DDO Unlimited delivers "heart-pounding game play featuring the industry's best combat system, a massive world with state-of-the-art graphics and gameplay, and a rich set of features that until now could only be found in premium subscription-based MMOs."
The press release also boldly states that "Free means Free!" And by boldly states, yes, I mean it was in a bold font. But the reality of it is that Free means Limited, at least to Turbine. While players will get access to the game, they won't get access to all classes -- so if you want to play a monk, you'll have to pay -- and the free content becomes more and more sparse as you level. DDO Unlimited? I guess it's true if you take away the "un" part.
Let's not forget that giving the Dungeons and Dragons license to Turbine goes down as one of the top mistakes in MMO history. I knew it was a mistake as soon as they said PvP wouldn't be included because they didn't want to go through the process of balancing it. Balancing it? The rules of Dungeons and Dragons are stated in the Player's Handbook and DM's Guide. What's to balance? Just code the rules.
Sadly, from what I saw in my brief stint trying the game, they didn't even build an MMO. They built a multiplayer game where you could hang around with a bunch of other people waiting for enough people to join an instance. I'm sorry, but games like Guild Wars and the ill-fated Hellgate: London are not MMO's. They are multiplayer games with a graphical representation of the multiplayer screen found in any multiplayer game.
Heck, Neverwinter Nights is more of an MMO. It's just too bad that Bioware gave the franchise over to Obsidian to destroy. (Let's all pray they don't do the same with Dragon Age: Origins!)
However, DDO Unlimited does have one major thing going for it: the price. Even if the free-portion of the game is something less than "unlimited", it might be worth checking out if you don't have anything better to do.
Just don't get your hopes up.
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