Prepare For Battle

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game that carries the official banner of Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons franchise. It is set in, around, and beneath the city of Stormreach, located in the Eberron campaign setting. Although the original RPG on which it is based has been around for decades, the Eberron campaign setting and Stormreach are fairly new to most players. D&D veterans seeking the familiar, comfortable gloves of Greyhawk, Ravenloft or The Forgotten Realms - home to PC game titans such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights - will need to make some adjustments. Eberron is still a Dungeons & Dragons world, but one not filled with the stories of familiar characters from the last 20 years. Indeed, in this respect, DDO is breaking fresh ground.

World of Warcraft, as the name suggests, takes place in the world brought to life by the award-winning series of Warcraft real-time strategy games. Players familiar with the events of the Warcraft series will recognize names and places in WoW, as well as witness the consequences of their own actions from Warcraft III. So it is no surprise that fans of D&D will gravitate towards DDO, while fans of Warcraft will be drawn to WoW. Both settings are packed to the ceiling with monsters stalking through dungeons, and treasure troves a plenty waiting to be discovered. The mechanics and presentation of each game, however, actually vary a great deal.

Dungeons & Dragons Online

The first step of the journey into any MMORPG is the character generation process. Strangely enough, the rest of your journey will be spent hiding all the care taken to create your perfect avatar - by covering it in armor and weapons - but you still want the face under the armor to be a unique creation of our own. DDO's character creator allows for a great deal of variety in appearance, and has many customization options that let players to really tailor the look of their characters. In contrast, WoW characters have little variation within each race aside from an unchanging facial expression, colors, and hairstyles. WoW character generation is generally a swift process, speeding you into the opening moments of the game and into the action.

All newly-born DDO characters begin in the same place, no matter what their race is, and all experience all the same quests through leveling. New WoW characters have six different starting locations depending on race, and the first twenty levels have some manner of unique content, promising more variety when starting new characters.