Eldritch buggery...

2 things..


1 - Hey all, new blog, yada yada.. Blame it on Sweet Gene, I saw his and felt ashamed at my massive neglect of socialization and doodling. I am a poor poor excuse for an art monkey. Consider me schooled.

2- Dungeons & Dragons Online SUCKS. Anyone who says it doesn't really should be sterilized immediately, and frozen alongside Walt Disney's delicious headcicle. The game design sucks, the art sucks, the engine sucks, and the UI sucks. Reasons? Examples? My god, can you actually ask for such things after playing that heaping Cleveland steamer?

Yes, the basic idea of how the game is supposed to work is interesting, and the narrator almost brings back some of that feel of table-top..

But c'mon!! They had 25+ years of art, story, adventures, & ideas to draw from, and we end up getting this laggy thing with a hundred people stacked up like cordwood in front of the tavern door because it's the only place in the world you can heal??... Then they take an already slow-for-this-age level based rules system, and make it freakishly slower to rise in levels and survivability.

Then to top it off, the one part where the limitations of the implementation could disappear, in the actual adventures, turns out to be mind-numbingly poorly designed things with a handful of occasional monsters, a bunch of knobs and levers, and the rare 'magical tetris built into the floor' to spice it up.. Where's the Tomb of Horrors? Where's the Temple of Elemental Evil? Where's the Keep at the Borderlands or White Plume Mountain for crying out loud??... They could've just copied existing adventures for a decade's worth of expansions, and they'd have been better than what they put in... So - very - very - lame.

Admittedly, it's quite safe to say I'm jaded to the extreme, but hey, I've been tossing dice longer than I've been tossing off, you do the math. With other fine MMO's like City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and WoW already out there, for Turbine to roll out something so obviously unbaked, and that feels like it was designed by people who thought Napolean Dynamite was a documentary, is simply not acceptable, and the market will undoubtedly punish them more than my rabies induced blogging could.

Honestly, they should've done what studios are doing with those horrible Uwe Boll movies, and not allow the public to see it until release, in the hope of getting at least enough sucker sales to pay the rent.

This is, however, the company that brought the world that exercise in the extremes of boredom, Asheron's Call, which single-handedly caused a massive tilt in gaming back towards text-based-adventures.. Do these people even own a copy of any other game?

In honor of DDO's undenyable lameness, I have turned my back on D&D forever, and handed down all my books to my 11 year old son, who, at least, should be perfectly content filling dungeons full of Lyger's and Bunicorns for another few years, before hormones force him to leave behind the blissfullness of a world without worrying how you smell.

OKay, sorry for the long rant.. I'd built my hopes for DDO up way too high, and the game fell tragically short beyond even what my jaded senses could believe.. I'd just hoped it would've provided even a smackeral of a taste of what once was something that kept my minds off the horrors of the public school system and abusive older brothers. Ah, sigh for those long gone sweet halycon days of pizza, mountain dew, and utter lack of mortgages and Honey-Do lists..

I promise, the next post will have art in it.