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GDC 2008: Gleemax and D&D Insider Interview - Part Two

Posted February 29th, 2008 by Cody Bye

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

Answers by Dylan Mayo (Development Manager for Digital Games at Wizards of the Coast) and Ilja Rotelli (Director of Online Media for Wizards of the Coast)

For many MMORPG players, our first entry into the roleplaying game arena was behind the kitchen table playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Today, we finish off our interview with the developers of Gleemax and Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and we talk about the character generator, third party games being produced for Gleemax, and other novel ideas. However, make sure you’ve read through the first part of our interview if you haven’t yet, then head back here for the epic conclusion!


This is the way D&D is currently played.

Ten Ton Hammer: What sort of functionality will the D&D Insider have when creating your character for an online game?

Dylan Mayo: Once you’re a subscriber and have the full database, you’ll be able to do things like dragging feats onto your character. Let’s say you declare that you’re a level 15 Tiefling Warlock, you can then look on the character generator and see all the feats that are available to you based on your actual skills and prerequisites that you have.

It’ll be bi-directional forth the character, so you can go back and forth with the feats and skills you select.

Ten Ton Hammer: What other character customization options are available to players when they’re creating their D&D Insider mini?

Dylan: Basically, it’s a bunch of preset armors, weapons, effects, and lighting that are available to the players. For example, you can set a guy to have a particular hair style, then set the color tone of the hair, the highlights, and lots of other details.

Ten Ton Hammer: So will your mini change when you get new equipment?

Dylan: It doesn’t link that way. The visualizer is a separate app to build a mini.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to customize the mini the way you want to. Everything is on sliders, it’s not just simple click through options. So when you’re posing your character you’ll have a full range of motions that you can go through.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s more like an action figure?

Dylan: Right, and you can pose them however you want. When you get done you can save him and when you get to the virtual table you can just “pop” your mini down and he appears there on the table.

We have a bunch of pre-made monster sets that will be available when you first sign up to make things a bit easier. There’ll be things like kobolds, orcs, and goblins that you can just throw out on the table. After that, we’ll have other sets that will be made available to players, but we haven’t decided on a business model on the additional sets.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is D&D Insider going to be singularly designed for Dungeons and Dragons, or will other games be able to make use of the client?

Ilja Rotelli: In June, we are launching D&D Fourth Edition and D&D Insider as a platform to play Dungeons and Dragons. That being said, we are certainly considering using the same tools to support other games.

Gleemax hopes to bring all of the WotC products into a digital realm.

Ten Ton Hammer: So if someone from White Wolf wanted to create a version of Vampire: The Requiem using the D&D Insider tool set-

Ilja: We would certainly consider it. I’m awaiting a phone call from White Wolf…. *laughs*

Those are some of the examples of first party games that we are developing, and that’s not the only thing on our plate either. We have a game called Uncivilized: The Goblin Game, which is in development and is a game that explores a different way to enjoy a fantasy setting.

To compare it with another game, it really has a lot of similarities with fantasy football. We’re designing Uncivilized to be a turn-based multiplayer game that you enjoy for around 15 minutes a day. In the game, you’ll be giving instructions to your clan of goblins, and then the next day you’ll show up and find out what your goblins actually did.

Goblins – by their nature – are a little dumb, and so you’re never sure whether they’ll actually follow your orders exactly or not. The more they are trained; the more intelligent they become, and the more they will follow your strategy.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will players need to actually manage their goblins every day?

Ilja: No. It’s like fantasy football, and the more you micro-manage, the better you do. You’re certainly free to skip a day or two though, if it’s necessary.

In the game, each clan of goblins has its own mission as well. If you’re the leader of the Dragontamers, my job is to find a dragon egg, hatch it, train the baby dragon, and make sure it learns that your goblins taste bad while the enemy goblins taste good. At the end, when the dragon is ready, you send him to eat all the other goblins and you win the game.

Each clan has its own strategy and tactics in the game, so you can keep on exploring and playing different games to figure out the strategy behind each clan. Uncivilized has an amazing amount of depth, like what our customers are used to from WotC, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how this new business model will perform when we launch.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about board games or other strategy games?

Ilja: We are bringing a bunch of board games from our Avalon Hill team to the Gleemax system. So players will finally be able to play 24/7 multiplayer games using Gleemax with titles like Axis & Allies, Acquire, Robo Rally, and Vegas Showdown.

We’re also expanding the Magic IP, and we recently announced two Magic-based games. They’ll have different game mechanics than Magic itself, but they will be an expansion of the Magic IP and the characters will be moving in the world of Magic. One of them is for PC and the other is for Xbox Live.

This is what the original Gleemax looked like in Magic: The Gathering..

Ten Ton Hammer: And third party games?

Ilja: As far as third party games are concerned, we actually attended the Game Developers Conference this year because we were sponsoring the Independent Gaming Festival. There are a bunch of people out there that are small developers and have great ideas for gameplay, but don’t have the means to publish themselves. This is especially true for fantasy gaming.

So what we want to do is find these people, provide them with marketing support, have a page where people can download the game from, and set-up an e-commerce infrastructure that helps them sell the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you trying to reach that target demographic that you’re shooting for? These players may be occupying there time with a massively multiplayer game or some other form of entertainment; how are you going to get that player back into the WotC games?

Ilja: We’re going to be using a broad range of marketing techniques because on one hand we already have a strong thriving community for our games, but there are still players out there – especially in the video gaming community – that aren’t familiar with the Gleemax / digital initiative project.

We’ll be teaching all of our existing consumers about the existence of Gleemax through Wizards.com, and we have the entire back-bone of Hasbro around to help support this project in the long-run.


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!