Questions
by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
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Answers
by Kate Paiz, Producer for Dungeons and Dragons Online
Over the past week, the developers of Dungeons and Dragons Online:
Stormreach have been hosting a tremendously popular live event
featuring an invasion of the major city in the game by a horde of
in-game devils. Aside from this world changing event, the developers
have been hard at work creating the highly anticipated Module 7, which
will finally introduce the Monk class into the game. The Ten Ton Hammer
staff caught up with DDO’s producer, Kate Paiz, to see
what’s all in store for player in Module 7 and even churned
up some hints on Module 8 and changes caused by the release of
D&D 4th Edition. Enjoy!
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Module Six raised the
level cap and introduced the Pit Fiend, but Module Seven is going to
introduce the Monk class.
Ten Ton Hammer: First,
what’s been going on with DDO since we last talked at GDC?
finished up our fairly extensive “Devil Invasion”
live event, and we’re still hosting the price lock promotion
for any player that wants to change their subscription type to $9.99.
Once you lock into that price, it will be yours forever until you
unsubscribe. We’re pretty happy with how that’s
going and are happy to continue it through April 7, 2008.
We just did a welcome back weekend for previous players, and we were
happy to have those players return for the live events. The response
really made us happy, and the player chatter in the world has been
fantastic. Our concurrent user numbers have gone up, and we think that
we presented them with some great new story and content opportunities
for them to enjoy.
The big finale to our live event was this last Saturday (March 8,
2008), and there are now some new pieces of content that persist
throughout the world. (Editor’s Note: Go jump into the game
and check out the new content if you weren’t there for the
event. It’s a pretty impressive sight!)
Module 7 is moving along well. We’re doing a playable demo of
the Monk class at Connect ’08, and the players should
hopefully have a chance to play it a little bit. The animations
aren’t quite finalized – we’re going
through a few tweaks – but players will be able to see the
new class and how it feels compared to the rest of DDO.
On top of that, we’re doing the new high level wilderness and
raid for Module 7, and the newly revised new player experience that
includes a couple of new dungeons, wilderness, tutorial, and another
landscape if we get it finished up.
Ten Ton Hammer:
What’s the wilderness zone going to be? Is that going to be
more Shavarath content or something completely different?
wilderness is going to be based in Shavarath, but it’s going
to be underground. It’s going to actually have a combination
of atmospheric settings because we’re actually going to be
putting it under some of the city area. We’re hoping to get
two high level experiences out of the area, but Shavarath is definitely
our priority
Ten Ton Hammer: And the
level cap is increasing in Module 7?
is going to be the focus, and pretty much all of our character ability
folks are dedicated to that task. The level cap will definitely be
heading to 18 later in the year, but it won’t be in Module 7.
Ten Ton Hammer: Is
crafting scheduled for Module 7?
we’re going to be doing some more improvements to the
crafting system. Basically for Module 7, players will begin to be able
to start deconstructing items and collecting ingredients.
It’s a really, really big system and we don’t know
how much we’re going to be able to get out in Module 7, but
there will definitely be more coming in Module 8.
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Crafting will
continue to gain more depth as the Modules are released.
Ten Ton Hammer: So we may
begin to see more crafting stations throughout the world?
We’ve actually been debating the different locations to put
them, but we are going to be seeing more of them. Right now
we’re really focusing on showing players what can really be
achieved with the crafting system rather than just dumping the
thousands and thousands of recipes down their throats. But more of the
crafting system is scheduled to hit the game sometime in mid-summer.
Ten Ton Hammer: Lately
there’s been some confusion on the 4th Edition rule set. Some
reports from GDC listed you as actually having some of the rules in
testing; what’s the official stance on 4th Edition and what
should current DDO players expect?
this up. The 4th Edition rule set over at Wizards of the Coast is still
in beta, and they have yet to lock-down their own feature set. Nothing
is totally finalized as of yet. When we get the final set of features
that are going to be in 4th Edition, we’re definitely going
to evaluate them and see how they work with DDO.
important to us to stay current with Dungeons and Dragons and stay
relevant in the space. We’re on a mission to be the online
expression of a D&D game. So we have to stay as current as
possible.
all the sourcebooks and material we have now from D&D 4th
Edition is that some of the rules don’t translate all that
well into the online MMO space. We’re definitely going to be
evaluating every rule and prioritizing the changes that we may make in
the future.
That said, some rules definitely won’t be making their way
into the game. For example, I think Bards are coming out as one of the
core classes, and we’re definitely not taking them out of our
game.
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