Pumping Irony

I ran through the entirety of the DDO’s New Player Experience today. I’ll split the Module 8 hands-on into two articles. This one will discuss the new character creation process, while the next one will get into the actual game within the new tutorial area.

To ensure a clean view for screen shots, I created a new character on the Argonnessen server. I have an ulterior motive for choosing that server, but I will reveal it at a later date. I’ve never played a D&D paladin either, so that is the class I created. For experienced DDO (and I presume, D&D) players familar with D&D 3.5 character creation, the original character creation system still exists, but I used the new system which has templates to prevent gimping your character before you even play it.

This will be image-intensive, so I will be kind and put a break here!

The new character creation system is a five-step process, with choices and options within each step.

Step I shows you which Style of classes are available: melee, spell-casters, or specialists.

I had decided to go with a Paladin so I clicked the Melee style, which takes us to Step II, choosing the character class within that style.

Once a class has been selected, we proceed to Step III, choosing a path for that class, which is a templated build. This is also where experienced players can skip using a template and click the Customize button to build the character to their own specifications. For this paladin I chose The Mighty Protector path, hoping it’s a combination of tanking with the ability to heal in a pinch.

Steps IV and V are the typical screens where we choose which race our character will be, then all the sliders and options to customize his appearance and give him a name, at which point we’re brought to the new DDO login screen:

The new login screen functions exactly like the LOTRO login screen: you can use the mouse to spin the character as well as zooming in and out with the mouse scroll wheel. The former login screen had no zooming and only spun the character by clicking the arrow icons. Nice change and very convenient.

Jerionn the paladin is now ready to begin his adventures… in the next article!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 1:15 am and is filed under DDO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.