Dungeons & Dragons Online Module Six Interview

Ten Ton Hammer had the chance to grill Dungeons & Dragons Online senior producer Kate Paiz and lead designer Stephen Muray about the MMORPG’s next major update.

Q: From what I can gather, you are planning to release a large new update in the very near future. Can you tell us about this?

Kate: Absolutely. Our next release is going to be Module Six, which will be our fifteenth live update. The module is called the Thirteenth Eclipse, and it’s scheduled to release sometime in January. In this update we’re going to be introducing a completely new storyline centered around the invasion of an army of devils into Eberron. The players are going to have to combat the devils on an all new landscape called the Veil of Twilight as the Plane Shavarath is being interwoven into the very fabric of the player landscape.

Steve Muray: We’ve got a bit of an advantage in the Eberron campaign setting in that planar travel is very easy for the players. The players will be able to take the fight directly to the army of Aritreckos (excuse the spelling). You’ll be able to face off against the Barbazu (the bearded devils), and the armies heavily armored shock troops.

Kate: One of the things we’re really excited about in Module Six is the raid that is going to be introduced into the game. We’ve determined through player feedback that our gamers are really looking for an activity that is open to all levels and player types. Therefore the raid is going to be much more of a total experience rather than one singular fight that the characters take part in. There will be a variety of areas that you’ll fight through with a whole collection of mini-bosses that you will have to fight through.

As Steve mentioned, the Barbazu is going to be one of the lieutenants in the army and players will also encounter an Orthon as well, which is an incredibly brutish demon killer (the devils hate demons) and very tough to beat. Both of these lieutenants will be stepping stones on the way to the overall raid boss, which we’re trying to keep under wraps for the time being.

hat said, the whole raid is going to be a much bigger experience and will hopefully be open to a larger variety of players.

Steve: I’m very excited about our new raid. It’s really an encounter for everyone and it’s the easiest raid to get into since Tempest Spine. On top of that, the raid is significantly lengthier and more complex than many of the previous raids. I’d describe it more as a raid zone than a simple raid encounter.

We’ve also gone into a lot of effort to allow players to customize the loot that they’re going to be getting from this raid using eldritch sites as a prototype for our upcoming crafting system. It’s very flexible; there are hundreds of thousands of permutations of raid loot. This allows everyone to acquire exactly what they’re looking for out of this raid.