Dungeons & Dragons Online Update 12: Vaults of the Artificers Announced

Another even-numbered update for Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited has been announced, and with it comes a new challenges system, the ability to earn the Artificer class through favor, the long-overdue ability to share platinum across your account, new armor appearances, and more. Here’s a new in-house Q&A to help shed some light on the new challenges system:

Kyle “FordyTwo” Horner: Why did the DDO team decide to do Challenges with Update 12?

Ian “MadFloyd” Currie: Well, I think one of the reasons we wanted to do Challenges is we took a quick temperature reading with Crystal Cove. I think any game going on as long as DDO has can always use a little infusion of a different game mechanic. All our dungeons are very unique and different from each other in that they’re all hand crafted. And we’ve got wilderness areas and raids, but we just wanted to bring something different to the table.

One of the things that I really wanted to see was more gameplay that gives players agency to control their outcomes and actually do more planning, which I think appeals to a lot of min/max players. It’s not unlike an MMO in general where you say, “Well gee, what do I do today?” One of the greatest things about MMOs is you do have a lot of freedom in deciding what you want to do at any given moment. But, a lot of the times when you’re in a dungeon and there are good reasons for this, because we’re trying to tell a story, etc you’re reacting to what the designers are throwing at you while trying to travel from A to Z.

With Challenges, you have goals that we’ve set, but the degree of success in accomplishing those goals is really put into the player’s hands. There’s some discovery and some learning about how the rules within each Challenge works, but once you do understand them, you can hopefully work them to your advantage. And the fact that they theoretically unfold differently every time because they’re more akin to small strategy games makes it a really interesting variation for players.

Kyle: So Challenges aren’t meant to supplant questing and story, but instead another way to play DDO.

Ian: That’s a very good point. I think our bread and butter are hand-crafted quests. Challenges are really just additional flavors. We know that Challenges aren’t for everybody. We know that even though Crystal Cove was very successful lots of positive feedback there’s no one thing that will unanimously appeal to everybody, and we recognize that. It is the case that in Update 12 we’re only offering Challenges and there are no additional story quests, but subsequent updates won’t just be Challenges. We may return to Challenges, and we’d like to because we think they’re fun to develop and play, but we’ll see how the player reaction goes.