Dungeons and Dragons Online Interview With Turbine

Bruha writes "Dungeons and Dragons Warcry has posted its first interview with Turbine Entertainment's development team for Dungeons and Dragons Online, an upcoming MMORPG based on the famous role playing game. Many subjects are covered, including what rulesets will be applied to the game at release." It's a good look at the conversion process a game undergoes when taken from the tabletop and moved to PC.

Comments

Nice honesty

[Cipster]

It's like this - if we say four, and there turn out to be six, we're heroes. If we say six and it turns out to be four, we're scum.
I wish more game developers thought like that. Too many times they promise a ton of features but do not deliver.

Re:Nice honesty

[Dachannien]

In this case, the low bar they are setting for themselves will cost them a sale (and, I suspect, more than one). The main reason I didn't buy the new version of Pool of Radiance was because they did such a horrible job of bringing the 3rd Ed. rules to the screen, and fundamental to that failure was somehow being unable to implement basic character classes like "wizard".

Black Isle has done it (mostly) successfully with both 2nd (AD&D) and a variation of 3rd Ed., and created best-selling games in the process, so what's Turbine's problem?

Probably, though, the developers here are just pretty much screwed. Evidently, someone higher up in the MS command hierarchy has decided that releasing an unfinished MMOG is okay, because you can always allude to patching in new functionality in a patch, or better yet, put that functionality in an expansion for which you can charge the players more money. Well, I've got news for them - if you can't make a product that at initial full release will grip the player by the balls and won't let go, you're pretty much hosed, because other successful games in the genre (read: EQ) will eat you for breakfast.

Almost nobody will leave their successful characters in well-established games to try out a game that is vastly incomplete, and by the time the game is completed, the small number of players who did switch over will be high level in the new game, and nobody from the old game will want to abandon their characters for an environment like that. This is all because the fantasy MMOG market is nearly saturated, and the bulk of players of a new MMOG will be those who have already played MMOGs in the past.

On another note, why WotC didn't specify in their license agreement with Turbine that they would be required to implement a certain set of basic 3.5th Ed. features is beyond me.

Nice interview

[daeley]

That was a cool interview, albeit short. In the discussion that followed it, I enjoyed the comments about the dragon hoards. Instead of it artificially disappearing after x amount of time, though, it would be cooler if a crapload of other monsters and/or PC/NPC adventurers started showing up to get a piece of the action. Epic battles ensue, and the original dragon killers are already weakened by their first fight -- do they stay and fight it out in their condition or grab what they can and jam? In any case, sounds like D&DO is at least being thought out well.

Spells

[Lord_Dweomer]

I really hope they bring all the spells over. Granted, some can't because it requires too much direct DM interaction, but just once I'd like to see them implement Wish properly, or Prismatic Spray, etc. Also, I really hope this doesn't just turn into "D&D does EQ". The thing about D&D that made it fun is that the story revolves around you and your party. It's not D&D if you go out and just kill rats till you're level two, then off to kobolds. As a big D&D fan, of course I'm hoping this turns into something good. But honestly, after seeing everything else out there in terms of MMORPGs, I seriously doubt they will be able to pull it off. NWN is the closest we'll get to a suitable D&D translation to the net.

Re:Spells

[Kwil]

Please reconcile this:
some can't because it requires too much direct DM interaction
with this:
but just once I'd like to see them implement Wish properly

After admitting that you realize some spells require direct DM interaction, you then choose Wish to be one of the spells you want to see implemented properly?

Uh..what kind of lame wishes did you make?

Re:Spells

[Lord_Dweomer]

Actually I never made any lame wishes cuz I was the DM.

Not another one.

[readpunk]

Damnit. Am I going to have to rescue Tsukasa from another "world"? I am sick of all these new MMORPG's, don't the developers know what can happen!?

Say what now?

[bluemeep]

There's going to be a D&D MMO now? Oi. I can honestly say I long for the days when a new MMORPG was a huge deal that made cover stories in gaming magazines. Now there are so many that I can't go a week without hearing about half a dozen new ones promising to be "Everquest...but BETTER!!"

Teleturbies

[Aggrazel]

I just hope the people who are working on this game are the turbineites who made AC1, and not the ones who made AC2.

Re:Teleturbies

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people that made AC1 made AC2.

Re:Teleturbies

[Cipster]

Or the one who made Pool Of Radiance 2. Quite possibly my biggest gaming disapointment. After playing all the Baldur's Gate games, the most excellent Planescape Torment I had such high hopes....
I hunted down the game the first day it came out drove home popped it in and after 30 min of game play I was cursing at the monitor.

Will they survive with their thunder intact?

[Garwulf]

I hate to say it, but they might have quite the task ahead of them. With any new MMORPG, you're looking at facing the "been there, done that" syndrome - that's what you get when you're playing a type of game that's been around since Islands of Kesmai in 1985 (earlier if you count MUDs). With this game, though, Turbine may find it ten times as hard.

As far as MMORPGs go, they first have to deal with competing against the online juggernaut, EverQuest, which is already doing pretty much exactly what they're going to be looking at doing. So long as they realize that the key to success isn't so much game mechanics, but instead good gameplay combined with VERY strong community building, they can make a mark for themselves. But that's the easy part - I'm expecting that they already know that.

The big problem is twofold:

1. The class restrictions of Dungeons and Dragons are not actually terribly well suited for an MMORPG. In 3.5 Ed. AD&D, regular characters have a level cap up to 20, at which point they become epic characters and use different rulesets. This is fine when you've got a set story to work your way through, but an MMORPG doesn't tend to have one - it is a persistent world. This means that players will build their characters up, hit the limits, and then have nowhere to go. So, in order to work, the game will have to have upwards scalability beyond what is possible now.

2. They are going to have to deal with Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. This is probably the largest of the two problems, as NWN has not only been quite successful, but it is flexible enough to be a true role-playing engine. There are already several persistent worlds that fans have put together using the NWN toolset - why should a player pay a monthly fee to play on a persistent world when s/he can simply buy NWN and then log into any NWN Persistent World servers s/he wishes for free?

These are not insurmountable problems, but they will be issues that Turbine has to face. So long as the product is solid and based around building community, it should be fine. If it doesn't, though - especially if at the same time Turbine doesn't learn from the mistakes of the past - this MMORPG may fade very quickly into obscurity.

I'll admit it...

[WinnipegDragon]

I'm the sort of geek that this is made for. I've been staying away from MMORPGs simply because nothing has really grabbed my fancy (not even SWG). This however, is a holy grail. This will be the one to make me play online.

I think I'm going to have to get some sort of catheter.

Cautiously Optimistic

[mrboffo]

Have to say, maybe TSR/WOTC is on a roll with the video game thing. After NWN and Heroes, maybe they've started to get smart and go with some decent programmers who really love the game.