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

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.

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.