Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

[0h 11m 36s] Ten Ton Hammer: Outstanding. Again, we’re just asking general questions now because we have about 48 people in the channel that I’m sure have a ton of really detailed questions that we’ll get to very shortly. But, for me, the hireling system is a game-saver, in terms of if you’re a busy gamer or maybe you don’t play when a lot of people in your region do. Could you talk about, just for people who may not be super immersed in the DDO experience, what are hirelings and how will the hirelings system improve with Module 9?

[0h 12m 11s] Kate Paiz: Mod 9 brings generally some AI improvements to the hirelings. The hirelings are meant to be the NPC combatants you can hire at your level (or if you choose, below your level, but certainly not above your level) to party up with you. Each player character can hire one hireling so a party of three players can turn into a party of 6 combatants. They range from being damage dealers to meatshields to the clerics, which are really beneficial to folks who have trouble finding healers or don’t have one in sort of their natural party environment. We make a joke actually that, you know, “BYOC” - bring your own cleric. For people that play in small parties it’s kind of become a truism because it’s really beneficial.

Hirelings come loaded with about 4 or 5 actions or abilities that are specific to them, you can tell them to stay or to come, to use that lever or go trigger that thing, stuff like that. Some of the stuff we’re going to get in Mod 9 is just general improvements to the system, we’ve been very happy with the way they’ve been received and we’re responding to things we see on the forums so we make sure they have fewer problems - the times where they do flaky stuff and you’re just like “Oh my God, why did you do that?!” My personal pet peeve is that they always stand right at the edge of the blade barrier, so we’re trying to build some code so they’re a little more aware that they’re getting whacked by those blades every time - they’ll move towards you if you’re sort of in the center or they’ll move back out of the way.

Those are the kinds of improvements that we have. We’re still looking down the road to introduce more classes, but we have the five classes right now - sorceror, cleric, paladin, wizard, and barbarian. We want to make sure those are as good as possible and that players are really experiencing the best that that system can offer before we start expanding out into rangers, rogues, or something that’s a little more sophisticated.

[0h 14m 27s] Ten Ton Hammer: One of the most exciting things about Module 9 is the level cap increase from 16 to 20. 20 is the obviously the natural level cap for DnD, do you view it as that in DDO? Will this be a kind of plateau for classes or characters?

[0h 14m 45s] Kate Paiz: Certainly there are a lot of questions about that for us. For sure, what we know is we’re going to take a break from continuing level cap increases for a while, we’re going to focus on classes and races, making sure that classes are as robust and enjoyable as possible. We expect to be doing a ton of more epic content and new stuff for people to play with. We’re not going to be, you know, immediately to 30, immediately to 40. We’re going to take a little bit of time to see how reaching 20 impacts the community and impacts other choices for the game so that it continues to grow and feel relevant and feel impactful.

[0h 15m 35s] Ten Ton Hammer: I see that people are already asking, “When will it be out?” I know you’re not willing to commit to a date at this point but maybe if you could talk a little about where you’re at in the production of Module 9?

[0h 15m 46s] Kate Paiz: Absolutely, yes, as you said, we’re not announcing a launch date for Module 9 right now. Our biggest focus is to get the preview on Lamannia as good as possible and we’ve found a tremendous amount of benefit already on Lamannia. We’re going to continue to run that preview experience until we feel like Module 9 is at that level of polish and readiness where we’re happy with it.

The level cap increase is tremendously large and it’s important to balance it to make sure that it feels right. Some of these cap improvements and refinements are things that we need to make sure are really solid before we release them so again, we don’t have a date but players can expect to see additional releases of bug fixes and some additional content is going to be coming out on Lamannia in the coming weeks. Those are the things we’re going to be focusing on - getting everything all ready for Mod 9 before we target a specific release date.

[0h 16m 45s] Ten Ton Hammer (Ethec): Alright, at this point I’m going to turn it over to Cody “Micajah” Bye who’s one of our editors here at Ten Ton Hammer.com, so Cody do you have our first question?

[0h 16m 56s] Ten Ton Hammer (Cody): I do indeed. The first question comes from Saximo, who asks: “Will Dungeons and Dragons Online quickly take advantage of DirectX 11, like what you did with DirectX 10 when Vista came out, when Windows 7 eventually hits store shelves?

[0h 17m 15s] Kate Paiz: DirectX 10 is a big thing for us in Mod 9, we just came out with it in the beta in Mod 8 and have done some additional improvements so I think that’s been our focus - to get DirectX 10 in good shape and working for everybody. And honestly I don’t have DirectX 11 much in my viewport right now. We’re always eager and happily working with our core technology group to make sure DDO and LotRO and our other games are cutting edge and relevant and pushing that envelope of what we can deliver in a premium graphics experience to our players as much as possible.

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