How many xp is that orc worth?

Taking a break from World of Warcraft, and playing a bit of Dungeons & Dragons Online instead, gives me the opportunity to compare. And while WoW is undoubtedly the better game in total, that doesn't mean it beats DDO in every single feature. Dungeons & Dragons Online has some features that would make World of Warcraft a better game, and some features where the approach is just different, an interesting alternative. But of course many things in the two games are the same, or they even copy shamelessly from each other. The LFG system WoW is introducing in the patch this week has been in DDO since the beginning, while DDO patched in an auction house and mailbox system in the last content patch which work just like in WoW.

One major difference between the two games, and one where we can argue which game does it better, is the way experience points are given out. In World of Warcraft you get xp for every single kill, plus an added reward for quest completion. In Dungeons & Dragons Online there are no kill xp, you *only* get xp for the completion of quests or sub-objectives in quests. And loot is handled in a similar way, you don't get much from killing mobs, all the good stuff is in chests, which are usually conveniently placed near quest objectives.

A long time ago, before MMOs even existed, I was reading a magazine on pen & paper role-playing games, and there was this cartoon: A band of adventurers sneaks through a dungeon, turns a corner, sees an orc, and somebody exclaims: "Look! 10 xp!". World of Warcraft plays a bit like that. It is what Scott Jennings (previously known as Lum the Mad) calls "killing mobile bags of improvement (MIB)". You don't care about the background story telling you that the orcs are threatening the village. You kill the orcs because each kill is worth a certain amount of character improvement in xp, virtual money, and loot. That leads to the infamous "farming", where you kill monsters without having any quest, just to grind the experience points and loot. World of Warcraft was a big step forward from previous games, which had even more farming and camping, because the WoW quest rewards are significant enough to encourage you to move from one place to the next.

Dungeon & Dragons Online takes the development to the next level, and makes killing an orc worth zero xp. Okay, there are quest sub-objectives telling you that you get some extra xp if you kill at least a certain number of orcs in that dungeon. But in many quests, if you soloed them as a rogue, you could sneak past many of the monsters in the dungeon and still get all or nearly all of the xp for the adventure, without fighting. Which makes sense from a role-playing point of view: You should care more about the objective of the quest than about how many monsters you kill.

But the way xp are distributed is not the only thing that changes the nature of the quests in DDO vs. WoW. World of Warcraft is a tactical game. If your quest is to get to the end of a cave inhabited by orcs and recover some item from there, you only need to find out how many orcs there are in one "pull", and how to beat those orcs. At the end of the combat you will be able to rest, fill up your health and mana to full, and the next pull will be basically identical to the previous one. You can continue that forever, going in circles, or you can progress on the shortest way to the quest target and back. Dungeons & Dragons doesn't work like that, because you can't recover your health and mana after each combat. You can only rest outside, or at rest shrines, of which there aren't many in a dungeon, sometimes even none. That makes Dungeons & Dragons Online a more strategic game. It isn't enough to know how to kill the first group of orcs. You need to learn how to make your mana or health last over many fights, before you can recover them. You can use healing potions, but they aren't cheap. And mana potions are outrageously expensive and rare. So even if you are a cleric (like my character) or have one in your group, your health recovery is limited by the cleric's mana.

All this makes you think more about the quest as a whole. You want to reach your quest objective, because that is where the rewards are. And you need to get there in an efficient manner, because your resources are limited. That allows for a lot more interesting dungeon design. Traps suddenly become a feasible feature, because losing some health from a trap has an impact. In WoW, if you got hit by a trap, you'd simply sit down after it and recover the lost health in a few seconds. In DDO a rogue's ability to find and disarm traps suddenly becomes interesting.

The disadvantage of the DDO system is that if you fail to finish a quest after having spent considerable time in it, you get no experience points, which is certainly frustrating. And instead of farming mobs, you farm those quests which you have found to be easy. Most quests in DDO are repeatable, and while the xp you get for them diminishes if you repeat them, you get full xp for doing it once at each of the 4 possible difficulty levels. Some quests I did at "solo" and "normal" difficulty while alone, and then repeated them at "hard" and "elite" difficulty in a group. That was easy xp, but not very interesting gameplay.

But an even bigger disadvantage of the DDO system is that making these quests strategic only works by making every quest instanced. You are never outside in the world meeting other players while killing mobs. You only meet other players in non-combat situations, can group with them there, and then enter a quest instance together. That makes the world feel a lot smaller. The part of the game where you explore the dangerous wilderness is missing. Which is why I still prefer World of Warcraft to Dungeons & Dragons Online. But playing the more strategic and interesting DDO quests for a while sure is interesting.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link