DDO: Eberron Unlimited Interview

Crispy Gamer has conjured up a five-page interview with Turbine’s Fernando Paiz and Adam Mersky about their recent announcement that D&D Online will become free-to-play.

Crispy Gamer: Will there be any drastic gameplay changes besides micro-transactions to cater to this new kind of subscriber?

Fernando Paiz: Yeah, there are a huge number of gameplay changes in this release, but I want to be careful in saying that they aren’t gameplay changes like (we’ve stopped selling cure light wounds potions at the in-game vendors because now you have to buy them in the Store.) We’re not taking anything away from the experience that’s there or the core gameplay that’s very fun already in what we’ve built for DDO already over the last three years. But we have added a lot of enhancements.

I’ll give you a few examples; we’ve added a new download technology, which you may have seen in our Lord of the Rings Online game. In DDO Unlimited, it’s a great fit and we’ve built a new player experience that we actually released in our last module built from the ground up just for this technology. Most players will get in-game and play in less than ten minutes. That’s very important for attracting this new casual player, getting in and playing with their friends very quickly.

We’ve added some changes to make the game way more solo-able. We had previously introduced hirelings, which are NPCs that you can hire to fill out your party. With this new release, the hirelings are a bit smarter, and you’re able to hire more than one of them at a time if you buy a special kind of contract called Gold Seals that are in the DDO Store. The game is just more solo-able to begin with..

We’ve added something called (challenge scaling,) where all the dungeons and the monsters in the dungeons will adjust their difficulty based on how many players are in your party. It’s always better to get another friend in your party, but if you don’t quite have a full party, or you’re trying to solo something, or duo it, or two people and a hireling or something like that, the challenge will adjust a little bit so that you don’t feel like the game is so punishing or impossible to get by unless you get six friends or you have to do pick-up groups, which is not everyone’s style of play.