There's a lot that's familiar in Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, and some differences too, which will be obvious right at the start. For instance you can roll your character and dress them up (there's a myriad of choices of hair style and colour, plus different noses, lips and facial markings) as a dwarf, elf, halfling or human. Missing are the gnome and half-elf, replaced by a new race, the warforged. Now warforged aren't mere flesh and blood, they're more of the nuts and bolts variety. Instead of clerics taking care of the healing duties for this race, wizards do the repairs.

All the familiar classes are on offer. As well as a cleric or a wizard you can fashion a barbarian, bard, fighter paladin, ranger, rogue, or sorcerer, and you can choose to multiclass as well. There is also the usual array of skills and feats to pick and choose from and a short list of spells for spellcasters. You expand your repertoire of these extras as your level increases although levelling is a slow going affair in Dungeons & Dragons Online. To make it more encouraging each level is broken into 5 ranks and you can visit the trainer on reaching each rank to allocate any points or skills/feats you've earned.