Dungeons & Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun didn’t waste any time following up on the announcement of Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark expansion pack, as they’ve already kicked up a Q&A with Adam Mersky and Kate Paiz covering the add-on’s basics.

RPS: I read my first D&D book when I was ten, Spellfire; played Baldur’s Gate, Planescape, Neverwinter Nights.

Paiz: Oh, great! Well, the big news is that we’re going to go to Forgotten Realms for the first time. You may recall we launched with Eberron just after Wizards of the Coast launched the ruleset for it; Eberron’s been great, it’s a world full of magic and technology, we’ve gotten to shape that world, it has its own flavour in the fantasy space. But since the day we launched DDO, we’ve had players saying (can’t we got to Forgotten Realms, PLEASE?) It’s the fan favourite, from the fiction and so many of the games, like Baldur’s Gate, have taken place there, so many of the stories and locales, that players long for. The establishment of what a fantasy game or setting meant to them, for so many players, was Forgotten Realms. This is a really big exciting change. Our expansion is called Menace of the Underdark.

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RPS: Is the Underdark under the whole of the Forgotten Realms?

Paiz: The Underdark is a huge expanse, it’s a whole realm in itself, an underworld beneath the overworld of Faerun, so we’re not going to Neverwinter, as you may know there’s another MMO in development. We’re going to a few other locales in Forgotten Realms. We’re going to land at a town called Eveningstar in Cormyr. Our players will be able to travel from our world, all the way to Eveningstar, venture into the Underdark and eventually see one of the Drow cities in there and face Lloth and her followers. It’s a pretty epic story for us. It kicks off with Update 13, our next major update that comes before the expansion. It has a series of quests, a free adventure pack, that kicks off the storyline that sets up the expansion.