Dungeons & Dragons Online: StormReach

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Product Description

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach takes you into a classic fantasy world, for incredible MMORPG gaming. Travel to Stormreach for exciting adventures where you'll face impossible challenges and unbeatable monsters, all for fortune and glory. Choose from nine classes and five races, including the Eberron Warforged race - then enter ancient dungeons and complete missions to find gold, magic and treasure. Beware: Each dungeon has multiple paths to success. While a fighter is best off slaying the enemies before him, a rogue with Hide and Move Silently skills might be best off avoiding their notice. Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game to feature voice chat integrated into the service. Follows the D&D version 3.5 Core Rules. Gather in taverns to meet fellow adventurers, find new allies and quests, and rest up between battles Integrated voice chat lets you coordinate your team efforts more effectively

Amazon.com Product Description

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is not sprawling game you might expect based on some other online role-playing games. Set in and around the city of Stormreach, you will spend most of your time in the sewers and dungeons hidden beneath this supposedly civilized place, rather than traveling to the far corners of some over-large fantasy world. The gameplay in Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is designed more as combat-intensive quests, which means you will spend more of your time undertaking meaningful missions and trying to achieve specific sets of objectives than you will spend blindly exploring an expansive fantasy world. Classic Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) conventions, such as saving throws and critical hits, are at work behind the scenes, which allows combat itself to remain simple, fast paced, and packed full of action.

Combat remains simple, fast paced, and packed full of action. View larger.

Choose from various non-human D&D races, including elves, dwarves, and halflings. View larger.

The quests provide a good balance of combat with light, thoughtful puzzle solving. View larger.

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach lets you choose from the standard non-human D&D races, including elves, dwarves, and halflings, as well as one new Eberron race called the warforged. The warforged are wood and metal golems, originally created to be a race of soldier slaves, which have since gained their independence and who now live alongside the other races in relative equality. Once you have selected your race, you will need to choose your character class. Here you will find the core classes, such as the fighter, cleric, wizard and rogue, make an appearance alongside the more specialized classes, such as the barbarian, sorcerer, bard, paladin and ranger. With this accomplished, you are free to select your character's appearance, which is where the tough choices must be made. Finally, you must determine what your character can, and can not, do. While the game will suggest a certain set of ability scores, skills, and feats for your character, you're free to customize them in any way you wish.

As in other online D&D games, there is an auto-attack feature that allows you to relax and watch the action play itself out, but the real-time fighting -- which utilizes the right button on the mouse to control attacks and the shift button on the keyboard to control blocks -- adds a lot more excitement to the game. Your various spells and ranged abilities are controlled via hot keys. An auto-lock feature makes your ranged attacks a lot easier to manage, but you are still free to aim and fire on your own. Characters pay a four-point penalty if they attack while moving, though you can get around this penalty by using the tumble skill. This convention can take some time to get used to, given that some monsters in the game are highly mobile, but once you manage to get the rhythm of moving and attacking, you will quickly to learn to fight without being penalized.

In between all the fighting there is still a lot of exploring to do. The dozens of quests that Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach has to offer provide a good balance of pure, sweet combat with light, thoughtful puzzle solving, and they are structured in a way that keeps you constantly in motion. Whether you are searching out secret doors, swimming across an underwater labyrinth, fighting for your lives against sudden kobold ambushes, or smashing open barrels looking for treasure, you are always moving towards the end of your quest.

Each quest is rated in level, length, and difficulty, and you have the option of repeating quests at a higher difficulty level to face greater dangers and receive greater rewards. Unlike other D&D games where you earn experience from each individual kill, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach only lets you earn experience points upon successfully completing the entire quest. The game was designed this way to help avoid putting players through the typical grind of repeatedly killing the same monsters as a way to level up. All of the quests in Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach are singular "instances" that offer fresh challenges exclusively for your party; you won't be pushed into the middle of an ongoing quest that others have already started. Most quests can be easily completed in a reasonable period of time, although some quests are part of a greater, story-driven series that can take much longer to complete.

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach presents loads of opportunities for party-based dungeon crawling expeditions, all launched from a large urban common area. The taverns located throughout the city of Stormreach serve as social hubs, in which you can find other players to join. For chat capability, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach requires only a standard microphone and headset that allows you to talk, rather than type, to your party members. You get your first 30 days for free, after which you must pay a monthly fee to remain online.