With Dungeons and Dragons Online now free-to-play in its Unlimited guise there’s no reason not to take a look (unless the 3Gb+ client download is a problem), and Massively have a splendid post with some common questions for new DDO Unlimited players that’s well worth a browse. Your intrepid KiaSA team have also been investigating, and discovered a couple of things.
Firstly, free players only start with two character slots, fine for having a poke around in the game but maybe slightly restrictive for alt-o-holics. You can buy more in the store, but when Melmoth bought some points to unlock the Monk class he found he had two extra character slots; it turns out that purchasing points upgrades you from “free player” to “premium player” with a few extra perks (though obviously not as many as a “VIP” subscriber), including the extra character slots, which is nice.
Secondly, the European DDO site seems to be a bit quiet about this whole “free to play” business (though I confess I haven’t looked too deeply), but not to worry, the sign-up with Turbine seems to work absolutely fine from here as does buying points with a UK credit card. Turbine have even been kind enough to set up an unofficial UK server. See, if you’re a keen student of Eberron lore, you may think of Khyber as the Dragon Below. If you’re a Brit (or at least a Brit of a certain age, I dunno about the kids and their newfangled wheely trainers and hippity-hoppity music), Khyber can only mean one thing, so when there’s a server called “Khyber” in the list I’d be most surprised if the majority of British players didn’t pitch up there. To make us feel more at home, Khyber even has specific NPC voicing; on the other servers when you first meet an NPC rogue on the beach he has some generic accent. On Khyber, he’s voiced by Dick Van Dyke: “Gor bloimey luv a duck do what gert yerself up the apples and pears me ol’ china” he says, “stone the crows it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong we’re in right Barney and you’re borassic, but I’m a diamond so I’ll let you ‘ave a Mick[1], Council[2], House of[3], John[4], Aardman[5] or bus[6] for nuffink, knees up Mother Brown doin’ the Lambeth Walk oi!”
[1] Mick Jagger – dagger
[2] Council Tax – great axe
[3] House of Lords – longsword
[4] John Napier (inventor of logarithms) – rapier
[5] Aardman Animation – falchion
[6] bus nun weave-weave-cheese arm-rave of glider mane – plus one guive-guive-guisarme-glaive of spider bane
OK, that’s a lie, he’s the same on all servers and just has a slightly dodgy Lahndahn accent, but the tutorial does offer ample “lovely pair of melons, miss” opportunities.
RE: EU
Codemaster are the ones in charge of DDO in Europe. For a reason or another, Codemaster didn’t transition to the new freemium model. Even more interestingly, Sakura – the ones in charge of DDO and LOTRO in Japan – decided to close both of Turbine games in Japan. With the promises of freemium, that should be something to reassure Sakura or at least convince them to give it a try but, instead, they closed doors.
It makes you wonder what’s going on.
PS: Most Europeans are on Argo and Thelanis, or so I heard.
Ha ha indeed! It’s worth the download just for the Rogue who Melmoth calls “Sid James in Halfling form”.
@Borror0 That is rather strange; maybe the in-game shop presents a lot of international legal problems, but the beta period was surely long enough to at least try and sort something out… curious.
@Stabs Hwah hwah hwah! (Hmm, the “Sid James laugh in text form” might need some work…)
@Zoso
Even more strange, we waited ten whole months between Module 8 and Module 9 (aka as DDO:U) because of Atari delaying the release, and Turbine had been working on DDO:U for over a year at that point.
It’s not like Turbine didn’t have time to prepare the transaction with Sakura and Codemaster.