The game is all about ridding the port town of Stormreach of monsters, and getting reputation among the citizens and achieving the status of a hero. Your doing quests, saving people that have been kidnapped, picking up treasures, avoiding deadly traps, and of course, getting your hand on as much gold you can. On the way you meet small kobolds, undead skeletons, and as your journey towards fame and fortune unfolds, the great red dragon awaits.

You start out by choosing race, class and abilities, as well as appearance from a wide spectrum of choices. There are 5 races: the skillfull humans, the wise elves, the cunning halflings, the stour dwarves and the mysterious warforged. When you have chosen your race, you can choose your appearance, and with all the various choices, it’s almost impossible to find someone in the game that looks exactly like you. You can choose, eye color, skin color, facial details, different sets of eyes and mouths, hair style, and even your nose. After your appearance is done, it is time to choose a class.

There are 9 available classes at the current date. bold Fighter, the valorous Paladin, the strong Barbarian, the stealthy Rogue, the wise Ranger, the healing cleric, the intelligent Wizard, the powerful sorcerer, and the Jack of all trades, Bard. Then you can choose to either keep the stats, which the game recommends, or customize it on your own. For those that have played the pen and paper version, you will probably want to customize your character, but for people who are new to the concept, you get a long way by choosing the stats you have already been given. However, if you choose to keep the stats, there is no way to redo them once the character is made, without making anew character. There are a lot of different stats that can customize your character. Everything from your normal strength, dexterity, constitution, intellect, wisdom and charisma, to how good you are at jumping, lying, sneaking, listening and much more.

The game starts off in a beginners area which, as you run along, displays tips on how to move, interact with NPC's (non player characters), open objects and doors, climbing ladders and doing various quests. Once done with the training, you take the boat to Stormreach and start off on your quest to become a hero. After a few quests that must be done a lon, you can start getting into parties and teaming up with other people.

As you get out of the beginning area in Stormreach and get to the more inner parts of the city, the real fun begins. Quests concerning koblods (small dragon-like creatures) in the sewers, and earning your reputation to get to the biggest part of the city begins. The quests are hard and require 3 or more players to actually be able to do them.

Quests are the main part of the game and looking for them is the key to success. In every part of the city, there is a main quest to get to advance to the next part, but as you go along, you find other smaller quests which can be done to get gold and experience. You also get a better view on the situation the city is in.

All quests are done inside special areas where only you and your party can be, or so called instances. This means that you can never meet any other person doing the same quest, if he is not in your party.

As you do the quests you advance in ranks and levels. at the current date, there are 10 levels. Each level contain 5 ranks. For every rank you acquire, you get 1 action point, which gives you a class specific feature. Clerics, can get better healing, sorcerers and wizards can get more spell points and rogues can get better at finding traps and sneaking around. You can also switch out action points each time you reach a level, but only 1 may be changed at any given time. 10 levels might seem very small compared to other MMORPG's where levels come at a lot faster pace. But due to the rank system, the levels are actually quite fun.

There is no Player versus Player combat, or PvP, in DDO, and this is what makes it so different from other MMORPG's. This means that you can’t fight another player that is playing the game.

The way of getting to the end level is hard and long, and is only doable if you get a good party, and this is ultimately what the game is about. Having fun with friends.

DDO is made in a 3D world and turbine has done a great job. Each class has its own video, describing what the class can do and showing a lot of spells and abilities the class possesses. The big customization you can do as you start to make your character is also visible when you start playing, so detailed in fact that I always notice a player’s eye color.

All details are very well done, and there are also random weather effects in the city of Stormreach, which makes the world look much more real. The characters and NPC's you come across also have very distinct features and act very much like a normal person would; breathing, looking back and forth randomly, sitting, standing without going through the furniture or walls.

The music is made up by anything from fast pacing combat music, to scary dungeon music, to the quiet, calm and happy music in the city. Every sound is triggered by an action or monster. There are different sounds for every weapon in the game, and there are also distinctive sounds when you miss, the monster parries or when you hit and get hit. But the most enjoyable sound of all is the dungeon master which tells you when things happen and what you can see in the next room. This is probably the best thing about the game, as you really feel you are playing the pen and paper version, more than a computer game.

The interface is pretty boring color wise, but where the visual lacks, the actual customization brings it to a whole new level. You can move everything around as much as you want to. You can get extra bars to put down weapons, spells, and skills, so you can perform your best. Everything can be arranged on hot bars, so you can switch weapons fast in combat. You can also rearrange the controls of movement.

The game is played in 3rd person with zoom. Though you can't zoom all the way in to first person and can’t see in front of your character either. You can choose between auto attack and normal attack which by default is the right mouse button. There are different keys for blocks and rolling around on the floor dodging blows.

The controls are easy to use, and you can use two different speeds of movement. Run and walk. Problem here is that sometimes when you run, you simply run too fast, and are in the middle of a trap before even noticing that the dungeon master tells you that you might look for traps before moving on, and this actually killed me a couple of times. The walk however is too slow. They might have made it easier by putting down the run speed a little, and the walk speed up a little. I solved this problem by always have sneak enabled.

The biggest problem with this game is probably the hardness of finding a group of players to team with. I often spent 2-3 hours looking for people, and when I found one, we used another hour to try to find more, and by that time, the first person had to go eat or go to school or practice or whatever real life issues that might come up.

Dungeons and Dragon Online: Stormreach, or simply DDO, is an MMORPG based on the famous Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition, and the campaign setting Eberron. Turbine has done a great job, with the help of Wizards of the Coast and made a game which fulfills the qualities of the pen and paper version. The fact that they don't have any PvP makes the game less attractive. The quests are hard, and requires groups, which they haven’t found a good enough system to actually be useful which makes the quests harder than they should be. They might have put up a channel that is called 'looking for group' or 'looking for players' instead of a social panel where you put in: "I need help with these and these quests", and hope that there is a few people that goes in and looks for it. The game will probably be a big hit among the hardcore DnD fans, but beyond that I'm not sure. If you do like questing more than fighting players however, this is a game for you.