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Kate Paiz: We’ve been working on the Monk for a really long time. It was probably around a couple months of dedicated animation time to get the basic set integrated into the game. We’re definitely going to spend some extra time to get them tuned and make sure that every race – male and female – makes sense when using the monk attacks. All in all, end to end, it was probably at least a couple of months

Kate: What we do is build the animation for one race, then we replicate that across the races and tweak it to make sure it applies to each individual race in our game. We don’t want to go back and reinvent the wheel for each race, but we always want to make sure that the animation is appropriate for the race. For example, the Elf is lighter and more graceful than some of the other medium-sized races, and thus we need to make sure that the animations look appropriate on them.

Kate: I don’t think the Monk is any different than the other classes in terms of the auto-attack option. I mean, it really comes down to personal play style. Some people really like the first two attacks in their combo chain and prefer to play with those, and that’s often what you get when you click-spam. You often don’t get the third, fourth, and fifth attack in your combo chain.

But if you turn on regular auto-attack or hold down the right mouse button, it will generate through your whole combo chain. If you just continue clicking, you can space the clicks appropriately to get your full combo chain, but you can also circumvent it. Many fighters tend to go back and forth depending on what weapons they’re using and issues like that.

Kate: *laughs* You’ll have to talk with the designer, Steve Muray, to get the details on those, because I can’t just pull all the details about the Monk abilities straight off the top of my head. (Editor’s Note: And we will certainly follow-up with Steve to get those answers!)

However, what I can say is that we want to be as true to the PHB as possible. I know we incorporated as much of the PHB as possible into the class. We used the Oriental Adventures supplement as an opportunity to explore and expand rather than change the basic elements of the Monk. It’s very much meant to represent the class you play and experience in the pen and paper game.

Kate: The Monk is really meant to be a hand-to-hand comparable to a Fighter. He’s someone who can do a lot of damage dealing and can withstand an assault in battle. However, this is also subject to what sort of enhancements you place on the Monk.

Many of our enhancements that you choose are specifically geared towards the decision of either being a sturdy shield that can take damage or a major damage dealer or the speed in which you’re attacking. With the enhancements, we really allow players to customize their characters and fill where the Monk falls into the party. However, at high levels the Monk is really meant to be a hand-to-hand version of the Fighter.

Kate: Not yet. We have May 2008 as our target month, but we don’t have a date within that month yet.

Kate: Yup!

Kate: We’re not quite ready to talk about this yet. I will say that we’re going to be spending some time in Three Barrel Cove, and that means that naturally we’ll be doing some pirate type stuff.

Kate: We certainly had a lot of really enthusiastic players that were certainly excited about the whole thing. If you look on YouTube,  there are a bunch of neat videos uploaded that highlight players experience of the event.

It also drew a lot of attention because of the type of event it was – one with a permanent effect on the world. In the end, we just went for it to see how the players would react, and I think the response has been positive enough to warrant similar types of events in the future. We want to bring more of these live events into our worlds, and I think this is the first step on innovating in that department.

Kate: It took about 10 weeks of active development for a rather large team. That’s certainly not the size of team that we have on our modules, but it was definitely significant and drew talent from a bunch of different areas.

I’m really proud of the way it came across, and REALLY happy with how the player response has been to the event. But it was a significant amount of work, and we were happy to move on and focus our attention on the Monk and the rest of that.

With our ongoing series of interview with Kate has no-end in sght, is there anything you'd like to ask to the producer of DDO? Let us know on the forums!