TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ilja Rotelli: Last year, we were looking at our entire analog business and really examined that alongside our implementation with the Magic Online campaign, which was extremely successful. Our goal was to really discover how the newest generation gets into gaming. A few years ago, I used to pick up a magazine, have a friend tell me about a game, or go to a hobby game store to see what I should be playing

Today, the younger generation is way more into the internet, and so we really want to find a way to reach out to them and introduce them to the hobby gaming industry. We had the whole company brainstorm about it, and we came up with the Gleemax product.

Ilja: Gleemax, at its core, is a social networking website. You can think of it in terms of MySpace or Facebook. It’s a place for people to meet other gamers and a hub for user generated content to be shared within the community. But there are really three components to this whole digital equation. One is the social aspect where you can create your own personal page with your profile, upload pictures, send messages to other members, and more.

The second component is the editorial aspect. We’ll have a magazine-style page inside the website where our editors produce R&D pieces, review other games, and generally talk about the industry. But we also want to mix that with user generated content by having scouts that go through the user-created pages and scoop up articles and editorials from the users to feature in the magazine-style portion of the interactive content.

The final component is playing games. Gleemax will feature a game portal that is a mix between first party and third party software. For first party software, we will of course feature Magic Online, which is due for a software update in the near future. It will basically have a streamlined interface and user experience. For example, the store will be integrated into the whole client rather than having part of it on a separate website. Just an overall better experience for the user.

Ilja: The other big thing that comes out this year is the Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s what Dungeons & Dragons Insider is all about. Fourth Edition is the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons that allows players to play completely on the tabletop, online, or at any point they can mesh the two.

So say you hate computers and don’t like the internet, you can choose to just sit around the kitchen table and play the game. It’s the best edition of the game for that sort of gameplay. We removed complexity where it was hindering the experience of the game, and added or preserved complexity whenever it meant interesting choices. For example, character generation was kept fairly intensive because you want a wide variety of options to create the character vision you had in mind. But grappling in the old 3.5 game took a long, long time, and we wanted to do away with that.

That said, you can also play the game on the computer. Now there are two ways to play with a computer. You could either use as a computer as a tool for running a live tabletop game, with players on their computers or the dungeon master using one computer to track all the important information. Or you could go completely on the computer if you want to by going online and playing with a virtual tabletop.

Ilja: Dungeons and Dragons Insider will require a subscription, and then we will provide the player with a set of tools that are designed to enhance your experience with D&D. The tools include a character generator, the virtual gaming table.

The character generator allows you to build a 3D avatar of your character, and people who have played MMOs should be familiar with this sort of technology. We feel that our engine is going to be superior to everything you’ve seen so far, because we have a strategic advantage in that our characters will not need to animate. In D&D Insider, we want you to create a tabletop miniature, and so we give lots of options to the player in terms of how they want their character to look visually. Skin tone, armor, weapons, background, and poses are all used to create the perfect picture of your avatar. Once that’s complete, you can print it out for your kitchen table or take your mini to the online realm and use it for the virtual tables.

Ilja: You can pose it, but at the end of the day you have a miniature that you’ll be moving around your virtual kitchen table.

Ilja: The virtual gaming table includes a dungeon creator in which a dungeon master – in a few minutes – can put together tiles to create a dungeon and then project it in an atmospheric space for the players to see. However, only the dungeon master will be able to see the whole dungeon; the players will see only where their light sources allow them to see.

This allows for a completely new way to play D&D, because there’s this big problem in D&D where you either draw the whole map as a dungeon master, spoiling the exploration experience, or you have to wait and draw the map every once in awhile as the players explore further into the recesses of the dungeon. That problem is automatically solved on the computer because the technology allows you to show only the part of the content you want to show the player.

Ilja: Absolutely. You can also think about the potential for user-generated content. It’s just phenomenal what people will be able to do.

Ilja: One thing I’d like to clarify about DDI; we don’t necessarily consider the client a game. It’s really a set of tools we provide to the players to play a game of D&D. That’s where I feel the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and MMOs stands.

The act of creation and imagination are way less powerful in an MMO than they are in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. MMOs let you customize your character, find new armor and loot, but the freedom of imagination where all you have is your mind does not exist in the MMO space.

I think of Dungeons and Dragons versus MMOs the same way I think of books versus movies. A video game is a movie where D&D is a book. The book lets you imagine a world by presenting you with just words, but with the movie I’m watching the imaginative creation of someone else.

The intersection between players of MMOs and players of Dungeons and Dragons is huge. It’s undeniable. D&D is the roleplaying game that started it all, and an MMO is a way to experience a type of roleplaying game.

Ilja: Definitely. When we think about competition, we think about anything that takes away from our potential customers’ time and money. The exercise for us is to stay relevant to a new generation while reintroducing our products to customers that may have had a change in lifestyle.

The majority of ex-D&D players – who we call the “Illumini” at WotC – are the people that were playing D&D years ago when they were 13 years old. Now these Illumini have children and are teaching their own kids to play the game. However, we need to stay relevant to them because of their changes in lifestyle that may be taking them away from the game: moving away from friends, finishing college, etc. We want to be convenient for them to keep enjoying the game that they’ve never stopped loving.

When DDI is released, they’ll no longer need their friends right beside them to play, all they need is a computer and an internet connection. And that’s how we’re remaining relevant.

Do you think Gleemax and Dungeons and Dragons Insider will compete for the time and money of MMO players? How will this affect MMOs? Let us know on the forums!