Thursday, July 3, 2014

Less Than One Year

Did you know that there are (currently) three, officially licensed, D&D multi-player online games?  All of them free-to-play.  The first, oldest, and best (IMO) is DDO.  The second is Neverwinter (NWO), and the third is one made as a phone app - Arena of War (AoW).

DDO is based on the 3.5 Edition rule set, NWO on the 4th Edition rule set, and AoW on...well, I have no idea.  Being a phone app they took D&D to a completely different style of play.  Basically, you selected one of several pre-made characters, tweaked the looks (albeit on a very limited basis), and then jump right in to fighting classic D&D monsters in, well, as you might have guessed, an "arena".


DDO has been around for over 8 years, NWO just recently finished it's 1-year anniversary event, and AoW was released in October of last year.  It has evolved somewhat over the last 9 months, adding 'companions', and the ability to "power-up" your companions, to name a couple.  They also added new "events" that, while they have the same basic play style, have an "adversary" that has special attack abilities.  But if you haven't downloaded AoW, I wouldn't bother at this point.

Why?  Because a notice was sent through the app yesterday that on August 31, AoW will be "retired and the servers will be turned off".  It won't even make 1-year.

Kind of makes me wonder just how bad someone had to screw up to not even last one year....