You can still get perks by buying an item in the DDO store, or get the best perks by paying a subscription fee, but other than that the game is free to play.
The race / class restrictions are not as crippled as I thought they would be, some you buy, some you can unlock by doing in-game stuff.
Some servers are supposed to have active Roleplaying communities, but in general its just guilds and not an open atmosphere from what I have read..
Either way maybe worth checking out.. Dungeon crawling is the focus, but I haven't gotten real far so I don't know if the whole game is like I have experienced or not. But so far no typical wandering mobs in the general town area (although I haven't made it out of town yet) but I've seen others asking where to go thats NOT a dungeon to "kill some fucking mobs" so maybe its all like that.
Not necesarrily a bad thing.. Would be easy to port our namesakes over and do RP / Adventuring type stuff though. It's D&D based, obviously, but none of that pesky mechanical shit you have to keep track of manually.
I'd best describe its look and feel, like the general MMO interface. As far as how stats, skills, etc are presented and managed. It looks like Bioware's D&D licensed games, reminds me of Neverwinter Nights in terms of picking out your skills and feats and all that in the creation process.
Oh well, its free. just spreading the word. Here's a link that outlines the difference in the Free vs Premium vs VIP stuff
http://www.ddo.com/vip
If you have an existing turbine account, you should be able to request a Free Key from one of the support request pages. So you don't have to make a whole new account, etc.. Took me about a day to get my key.
There is a high-res & standard-res download client. I used the optional P2P distribution (not turbine downloader) and got a steady 1MB/sec downspeed, so it won't take you more than an hour tops if you have a really fast connection.