DDO: MotU literally bridges the gap between Eberron and the fan favorite Forgotten Realms campaign settings. The team at Turbine has done a good job at weaving a tale that incorporates elements from D&D cannon that allows them to create a pathway anchoring one realm metaphysically to the other.
If you like DDO, you will likely love this x-pack. Tons of content, including the best landscapes ever in DDO - the King's forest and the underdark. The music. sound, art and well content seems to have really hit their stride together. If you enjoy ddo, you will love this x-pack!
As MMORPG, this is the first and only one that respects the RPG part (I've played lots of them over the years). You don't need to build your char the same way everyone does, and you can still be usefull with different playstiles. That is FREEDOM. :)
The game is totally free and you don't NEED to pay to play, since if you are smart, you can play even solo and have fun (even on the challenging difficulty levels). :)
The game has a story that makes you feel YOU are the hero, and not just another guy. The dialogs are nicely written, the voice acting is better than most, and it's based on D&D 3.5 (not that 4th edition crap). If you like D&D, and you like MMOs, then give it a try. :)
DDO is how you are meant to role-play online. Although its appearance customisation is limited, building characters with stats, skills, feats and enhancements it is the most comprehensive character builder i have used in an MMO. You can make whatever play style you want and good players don't just need loot, they need good builds. DDO encourages teamwork and in fact is near impossible to play without a group of other players, this is no problem if you have no friends online to play with as the group finding window lets you join others in their adventures and you will make new friends.
DDO has lots of potential - but it will never come to pass. Here are some problems: 1) past level 6 or so you practically have to pay for the game. Most content will be blocked and of course that content offers items to help your character get stronger, so without the additional adventure packs or VIP, your at a huge disadvantage. 2) This game has a lot of buttons you need to remember. If memorizing 40+ buttons is easy for you, you can disregard this, for the rest of us humans, you will either spend a lot of time getting used to it or give up. I played this game for 4+ years and still haven't memorized everything. I'm also playing a fighter... who is one of the more simple classes to play, and I still have 4 bars worth of clickies. It's also very ugly. 3) unless you have lots of friends be prepared to die a lot. Finding a good guild is difficult, and without lots of friends or a good guild, you will be dead a lot since the game is designed mostly for players who have either played the game long enough to carry equipment from one character to their fresh one, or for those with lots of friends. 4) the download time is insane - it took about 4 hours before I could get in game. You also should choose a good server, the people on thelanis and sarlona seem to be the friendliest, unfortunately for me, all my characters are on argonesson, and I've invested to much time to start over on another server. Not that I will continue to play the game anyway. I'll talk about positives now: The story and voice acting are pretty good. The character customization is awesome and the graphics are decent... nothing great by todays standards, but for us old school gamers who can appreciate eye candy even if it's not the latest, its nice at times.
The Pros.
The good qualitys of this game are the ability to earn turbine points via favor from quests. The higher difficulty the quest, the more favor you earn. Each 100 favor = 25 turbine points. Which can be used in the ddo store to purchase things like adventure packs, or expansions, extra bag slots for more carry capacity, shared bank to trade or hold things between alts.
There are many classes, with races that can tailor them to your needs. There are multi-class options, and the class enhance tree's that come with them are entirely at your discretion on how you build your character. You can reset these enhancement trees within any public area at any time, no limit per day, but not in a wilderness or dungeon.
All of korothos island and the harbor zone's quests are free. Beyond that, there's very little to actually do as a free to play, player. So you can build your character up to level 10-12 before dungeons dry out. At this point however, you can make a new toon and retain all the turbine points earned. Doesn't matter what server either. If you can't make a new toon, delete one, and use its slot. You will still retain any earned tp, even if the character that earned it has been deleted.
There is a lot of content for this game, but sadly, there are balance issues.
The Cons.
There's no sense of achievement with this game. You simply do or don't. Developers have tried to fix problems within the game over the last 6 years, but have been unable to actually do so, without causing other portions of the game, entirely unrelated to what their trying to fix,. to break and cause more issues.
Hirelings work, for the most part. Don't ever get a cleric though. They are so broken as a hireling, that you may as well not have one. They often stand and watch you die. They often get all of the aggro despite doing nothing to aquire the aggro in the first place. Doesn't seem to matter if you hide them around the corner, or if they come into the fight late. Just the fact that cleric hireling is part of your group, is enough. Monsters will actually run to them directly, even if they can't see them and kill them. That's just one example of how broken they are.
Onto the biggest issue I have with this game. The test server and its use.
The only thing this test server is apparantly used for, is to see if whatever they are testing won't break other stuff with its use. Player feedback is ignored completely. Consequences of it being put into the live servers after they've determined it will not break any other game functions, is entirely on the players. As a player since 2008, i can truly say that this game has only gone downhill since then.
All the bugs that I have reported, with the exception of one which was actually fixed, remain this day. Attempts to remedy the issues with other major problems in the game, have resulted in failure to the extent that more problems were actually created in the attempt to fix the problem.
Customer service, well. I'd say don't bother. Hope you like being put on hold for upto 2 and a half hours.
The coders for ddo are lazy and inept. The customer service ****, They have yet to even fix their online ddo store. Every credit card attempt to buy a expansion pack has "Payment Failed". Its been almost 3 years now, that this has been happening and they haven't bothered to fix it. Wonder why.
I guess that's what you can expect when you hire coders, who are lazy, inept, and use homer simpson as a job reference. This game is slowly dying. The coders break more stuff than they fix. There's no testing actually being done towards any class balance. The difference between normal content and expansion content is huge, moreso on the monsters side, than gear or character.
This Expansion of DDO is a sham, a horrible disgrace, completely half-baked and not worth anyone's time or money. They still have not given me all of my pre-order bonuses. Horrible service, avoid at all costs.