It’s hard not to pay attention to any game holding a license for Dungeons & Dragons. With a rule set which has more history, play time, and testing than any video game could possibly hold the question becomes one of adaptation. In the past there have been a plethora of games for both console and PC which have made both excellent and poor attempts at designing game play around the original pen and paper RPG. As a huge fan of the original pen and paper game I am immediately suspect of such games and always approach my review with less trepidation but more of a quiet resolve to discover what sacrifices were made in order to make the game feel like D&D. The prevalent questions which race through my mind as I dig into the game are almost always the same but produce such drastically different answers for each D&D title. With Dungeons & Dragons Online being the first MMORPG, these questions were further broadened to encompass a few new areas as well.

I have high standards for any game that tries to call itself Dungeons & Dragons. I've been playing D&D since my early teens. During all that time, I've hoped for a D&D video game that would contain everything I love about D&D while handling all the math and numbers that can often times bog down a roleplaying session. In the passing years, many games labeled D&D came and went, but none of them succeeded in meeting this hope of mine. Then, earlier this year, I heard about something called Dungeons & Dragons Online. DDO was going to combine D&D with something else I had learned to enjoy recently: Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. I had hopes that this would be the D&D game I was waiting for, and I decided that the best way to ensure this would be to get in on the testing and give the development team my feedback.