Dungeons & Dragons Online Designer Diary #4

GameSpot has published their fourth designer diary for Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, this time with Turbine’s Ken Brown discussing what it took for the team to overcome certain design and technical limits. Check it out:

Enter the most important part: You guys. We’ve armed our players with the best arsenal we could to let you make Stormreach a rich, varied, and lived-in city. Instead of making a small set of premade faces to choose from, we opted to give you as much customization as possible. Dozens of eyes, mouths, hair styles, facial hair styles, eye colors, lip colors, facial markings, and piercings. When determining what skin colors we wanted, instead of making a few custom textures to choose from, the team developed a way to allow for an entire spectrum of colors. Once we allowed for so many colors, our character guy worked nonstop to make it so that every character will look as good as possible no matter what the color. Add to that every single shield, robe, armor set, and weapon we could imagine over the past year, and you’ve got yourself a community. And the good news? There’s more to come. We squeezed out as much as was technically possible for us in time for launch. However, you should know that we always want more, and if there’s something you want, we probably want it three times as much and are constantly working to make it happen.