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Dungeons and Dragons Online Alpha Registration
Evil Avatar (and everyone else) picked up on the registration announcement for the Dungeons and Dragons Online Alpha phase of testing. From the article: "The world of Eberron awaits your arrival, as you embark on the great adventures that Dungeons & Dragons is known for. Register through the members only area today -- and prepare to master this unique new online campaign world!" If any Turbine folks are reading Slash today, I'd just like to mention how much I like your logo. :)
They have two of the most coveted titles for upcoming MMORPGs and yet the level of excitement on various message boards is next to nothing.
They currently manage two of the least popular MMORPGs out there, AC1 and AC2. Both of which are going to offer expansions in the coming months.
The problem Turbine faces is that a good number of the current MMORPG crowd associate them with cheating and exploiting all because of their idiot choice of condoning AUTOMATED (but attended) combat macros (bots) in AC1. Combined with the fact that once they let the cat out of the bag people were no longer in the lore of their game and only in gaining experience. It has to be pretty sad when your GMs have to randomly check obvious bots to make sure someone is actually at the screen when they should have been actively preventing the occurence of automation in the first place.
Turbine had a great many good ideas but they squandered it pandering to their worst fans. They allowed one abuse after another and then to top it off hired some of the same people who wrote some of the automating applications.
The big question for Turbine is, can they get enough new to the genre players into D&D to start to change their reputation? How much will their current reputation hinder acceptance of these two new games. Last, is there any real anticipation for this game anymore?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I imagine it will indeed be turned based, but in an action-y display style that minimizes the fact that you swing, then the monster swings, etc - ala NWN style. Then again, what do I know - I'm just a humble kobold...
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
How does combat work in Dungeons & Dragons Online?
We're making a clean break from the "press auto-attack and wait" style of combat that has become so prevalent in today's MMORPGs. Our real-time combat system is designed to be fast and responsive, while still requiring tactical, coordinated decisions from adventuring parties.
Also see this: http://www.ddo.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18648&pos tcount=18
With Blizzard I could do everything I ever did with Decal. Including running bots. The difference is that Decal has a huge learning curve, you have to understand COM and shared memory space. (or be a VB weanie) With WoW, if you can do a little XML and just the basic OOP, you can write a plugin. BTW, I have written plugins for both for my own personal use.
And FWIW, the bug you mentioned in another post was the spike bug, making spikes and selling them back for a profit. After all the yelling, whining, and hand wringing, it really had no effect on the game. Particularly when they opened Verdantine long after it was fixed. Unless you were an eBayer trying to make money. Then it probably cut into your profits. On the worlds that were 'exploited', for many players (even ones that didn't 'exploit') the game got better. Players became more generous. But it's not like pyreal was scarce anyway, the loot profiles were very generous. I know I blew millions of pyreal gambling on VT trying to get gromnies for the mansion.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
See http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=products/eber ron/864100000, http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=products/eber ron/864300000, and http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=products/eber ron/177300000.
But I don't think that's the reason why. Disclaimer before I continue: I've nowhere near as much experience with Dragonlance as I do with the Realms-so some of these factors might not be applicable to Dragonlance.
First off, geography. Doing a FR MMORPG is a huge task, because you have to cover all of Faerun. Which you probably can't. So you have to set borders. WHERE? The Realms does not lend itself to setting borders on the areas you're playing in, and that's fine. The only place you could use without setting arbitrary borders would be the Dalelands, and that has its own problems(hugely detailed, too few cities, no metropolises, too undiverse a monster/enemy population). If you try and take on all of Faerun, you actually run into the same problem-you'd need to set arbitrary boundaries(sure, the Spine of the World's to the north, but how about the Endless Wastes to the east? Those are past the Sunset Mountains, yes, but you could easily get around them by going to the north of Lake Ashane and heading along the Golden Way).
Additionally, any MMORPG has to set itself from its competitors. Ignoring the system/rules options the developers implement, you face the fact that D&D is so old. It's especially apparent in the Realms, which is so old and so influential that a lot of Realms content(which has uniquely Realmsian twists and aspects near-always) has been ripped off and put in other games over the years(minus the uniquely Realmsian aspects and twists, of course). An MMORPG wouldn't preserve those aspects-and as such, it would seem tired and worn out to your average MMORPG player,even with the D&D Online name.
What's Eberron's responses to these?
1. Set it on Xen'Drik. Yeah, it's a continent, but not too large of one-and you can set boundaries wherever you like, it's that undetailed.
2. Be Eberron-infused with new concepts and a slightly different theme from what's out there-seem different from the rest of the pack.
3. (No, you didn't miss a paragraph above) Eberron is new. Eberron is undetailed. As such, Eberron can give the developers the freedom they need to develop their setting as they want to-they don't have to be constrained(see how well SWG did with that)
And of course they gain interest in their new setting-but I don't think that's it.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin