Continuing in the F2P MMO introductions, I've been playing for a bit now. While I haven't ever played D&D, or really anything in the D&D universe, this game is pretty fun. One of the nice refreshing changes is that combat is more active. Instead of passive autoattack combat like in WoW, you have a more action based hack and slash and spell system, with two basic abilities on your mouse buttons and a number of special abilities around your WASD keys. (In other words, clickclickclickclickclickclick). Attacks can be dodged by moving out of the way, and lo and behold, something I've never seen in an online game: there's collision detection.
Another cool thing is the profession system. Instead of learning and performing professions yourself, you get a bunch of hirelings that do the work for you. For however many task slots you have, you can send a hireling to do something with X amount of materials, for X amount of time, and then collect the result/reward when they're done. Even more cool (dangerous) is that the professions system is accessible out of game, through any HTML5 capable web browser, including those on phones and tablets. So yeah, I've been checking on those at work every so often.
One thing though, is that the level and quest design is a bit meh so far. Go into instanced area, fight all the monsters, tap the glowing treasure chest at the end. I'm hoping that gets better as I go on. However, there's a system called The Foundry, where users can make their own quests. The ones I've tried are pretty fun, and it's like the players who wrote the featured ones play D&D, because I can imagine that kind of quest being played around a tabletop.
There was also a recent exploit with the auction house and one of the currencies, which necessitated a rollback and current disabling of using that special in-game currency (Astral Diamonds) to purchase the real-money currency (ZEN), so that sucks. We'll have to wait again before we can get the paid stuff through gameplay.
All in all though, it's a pretty fun game. I'm on the Mindflayer server as Kerreth@JusKF, playing a half-elf cleric. Level 13 so far.
