Beardy
By Tilted Kitty

When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I was sent to boarding school. The usual sort of thing happened; I was the geeky looking one in my class so tried to keep my head down. I wasn't much good at sports, although I did make a good winger at rugby (something to do with being quick on my feet and good at running away...)

And then I discovered that instead of sports practice on a Wednesday afternoon, I could go to the Wargaming Society...

I discovered that several people there were people I already knew. Some of them were sitting around a table with bits of paper and strange shaped dice. So I asked about it, and whether I could join in.

Several hours and a level two Half-Elf later, I was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons (first edition, red box). I've been playing similar games all my life; some of them far more advanced than even "Advanced D&D (edition 3.5)" is now.

Nice calves

I played the first RPG games I could get on computer - I was a particular fan of "The Bard's Tale". And when home PC's became available, I played 10Rogue for days, eventually even figuring out a method of saving my save games so they wouldn't disappear when used (like they did), giving me essentially infinite lives! I played "Eye of the Beholder" when it came out, and thought it was the best thing since sliced orcs. And more recently, I got into "Guild Wars" and "World of Warcraft".

So imagine my pleasure when I found D&D had made the next leap, that of MMORPGs.

To be honest, my PC is a little low spec for the game, meeting the barest of minimum requirements to play. But I thought "What the hell" and installed it.

The game is based on the later rule sets, so character creation is not so much rolling dice (as it used to be) and more adding points to stats. Once you've chosen your race and class, you can customise the way you look in detail, down to colour of lips (for female characters). Which is nice, but nothing overly new. After that, you choose a name, and the computer will create a set of stats for you, based on the most popular (I think) for that class, allowing you to jump straight in, or you can fiddle to your hearts content with each detail.

So, finally I got into the game proper. Said "OooOOOh" at the obligatory nice new graphics (very nice by the way). Went through the usual training type mission to learn the interface. Got into the main "newbie" zone. And started trying some quests.

There is only one thing I discovered that in the slightest annoyed me. After the first couple of quests, you really need to group up, which is a pain when you like soloing occasionally. So when my first character kept dying, usually at the hands of a small kobold type, I kind of got disheartened and dropped it to try a tougher class.

I now play a big green "Warforged" barbarian, who looks like a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the stone guy from the Fantastic Four. Which is kind of cool, especially since I've not seen a single other character that looks quite like me. And since I started getting invites to groups, I no longer have to search for teammates to quest with - they search for me. And to be honest, I like that a bit better than soloing now - you can build a well-rounded team and take on pretty much anything to start up with, whereas you can't if you just solo.

The game is much like Guild Wars in the way it deals with "Instances". Initially at least, you won't find anyone but the group you are with when you're exploring the tunnels under the city. Meaning you can't rely on the kindness of strangers, but also forcing you to work as a team. But aside from that, it's not really anything like Guild Wars.

It's got a taste of World of Warcraft, in as much as you can select from five races (for some reason Half-Elf is missing, along with a few others, but you do get Warforged) and eight classes. But aside from that it's not much like World of Warcraft.

It sticks to the spirit of D&D admirably - meet up with other players in town, or more often, in the pub, and go off and kill some stuff whilst looking for something, with subplots revealing themselves as you go. Which for an ex-P&P player is one hell of a nice touch. They've got rid of the loot problems - items in chests are preassigned to players before the chest is opened, so there's no arguments as to who gets what, although I've seen a human get an "Oil of light repair" while I was playing a Warforged (oils are for Warforged, potions are for non-Warforged when it comes to healing), which didn't make much sense, but he just gave it to me anyway. Which is another nice thing. So far, the players in this have been more polite, more helpful and just generally more pleasant than in any other MMORPG I've played.

It won't appeal to anyone expecting something like World of Warcraft or Everquest. But for an avid pen-and-paper fan like I was, it's absolutely brilliant. At least until the servers overload...

April 2006

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