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Kate Paiz: We just 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.

Kate: The high level 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

Kate: Nope! The Monk 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.

Kate: Yeah, 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.

Kate: 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.

Kate: Let me clear 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.

It’s really 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.

However, what we know from 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.