It's kind of amazing that this game is free. There was obviously quite a lot of work put into it. It has large, complex environments, a diverse range of monsters, hundreds of NPCs, each with at least one line of unique dialogue, and a wide variety of character options, covering much of the D&D canon.
The fact that the free stuff is part of a calculated business plan, designed to lure me in with a generous cornucopia of free content in order to upsell me on the game's paid content, does not at all detract from the impressiveness of Dungeons and Dragons Online's free version. Truly, we live in an age of wonders. If free DDO sometimes falls short, what were your options for free games in 1995? Jack and shit. Against that standard, this game goes so far above and beyond that it's actually quite dizzying to think about.
That said, for me at least, the Dungeons and Dragons Online formula doesn't really work. Wandering around the town, accepting quests, only to find myself shut out because the particular quest was premium only felt more frustrating than intriguing. And while I contemplated dropping a couple of bucks on unlocking a new class, the prices were so out of line with my expectations that they wound up ticking me off (I found the game experience with the different classes so uneven that there was no way I was going to spend 13$ to unlock a new one that I had no guarantee of even enjoying - I could easily buy a full game at that price).
It's funny, because I feel like I should enjoy free to play games. They open up gaming opportunities for people who don't have a lot of money. As someone who was formerly quite broke, I should appreciate what this means for the economically disadvantaged gamers of today. They allow people to pay what they feel the game is worth. An eminently fair and sensible arrangement. There is little upfront risk. I know all to well how much it sucks to spend money on a game only to discover, too late, that it sucks.
I can appreciate all of that, and on an ideological level, I approve of the existence of Dungeons and Dragons Online. Yet, there is some grumpy, perverse part of me that prefers to just spend 60$ on a game upfront and getting the whole experience, even if that means paying for a huge amount of content I'll never see (hello, Skyrim). The whole time I was playing DDO, I couldn't help thinking of Kingdoms of Amalur.
The two games are not very much alike on a fundamental level, but they share some structural similarities, being quest and loot driven fantasy games with an incomprehensible story, colorful aesthetic and open, yet linear maps (also, Kingdoms of Amalur is very clearly "inspired" by Dungeons and Dragons). And it seems strange to me that the game you have to pay for is the one that wastes no time hooking on its core gameplay, makes sure you always have something interesting to do, and communicates clearly that high-level gear is something worth coveting.
And maybe my confusion might seem obtuse, because of course the game that you pay for is going to give you more stuff than the game that you get for free, except that Kingdoms of Amalur is currently selling for 20$ on Steam and frequently goes on sale at deep discounts, meaning that with a little patience, you could get a whole world's worth of addictive MMO-ish adventure for the price of one optional class in a "free" game. From a consumer standpoint, the relative value of these things is so out of whack that I find myself not really understanding DDO's business model.
It just seems to me that if you're going to make money by selling optional classes and bonus levels, it would be better if the core game was more exciting. After all, a fast paced game isn't any more difficult to program than a slow-paced one, and if the free players are having a ton of fun, they should be more likely to drop cash in order to experience more novel and refined ways of keeping that fun going. The free game is, in effect, a demo for the part you pay for.
On the other hand, Dungeons and Dragons Online appears to be going strong (though nothing I saw in my 20 hours looked like it could justify buying the 200$ bundle of in-game currency) and Kingdoms of Amalur was, apparently, a financial failure, so it just goes to show what I know about the video game business.
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