Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Dec. 04, 04)

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Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Xundau, Community Relations

Anyone worried about the 'lack of interest'?

As some of you have apparently noticed, we've been pretty quiet about this game, especially considering that (1) we've been working on it since summer 2003, and (2) we're releasing late next year.

Don't worry -- this is all intentional. As part of our initial planning, we weighed the costs and benefits of going more agressive with publicity (e.g., a lot more articles and interviews, a big E3 showing this past year, the community site going up much earlier, etc.) vs. the costs and benefits of being a little more low-key about the whole thing.

In the end, we decided to go with low-key, and I have to say we're pretty happy with how things have turned out so far. We have a core community of passionate and dedicated fans (with the occasional dissenter) who know and understand the game, resulting in a very good signal-to-noise ratio on our forums. And our dev team is able to focus almost entirely on development (putting together a demo for something like E3 is a pretty major undertaking), which will ultimately result in a better game.

As we get closer to beta and then release, we'll start making more and more noise. In the meantime, everything's copacetic -- or better: we're currently number two on MMORPG.com's "Most Anticipated" list.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

Anyone worried about the 'lack of interest'?

There's some truth to this, in that most games offer the same basic mechanics, features, and similiar executions of those features; expecially at the moment to moment game play level. Find mob, press attack key, watch animations and numbers, rinse, repeat. This is where I feel D&Do will really shine; it doesn't play like any MMP on the market, and it's content layout is drastically different.

This is, however, a double edged sword; many people want a D&D online game which either plays exactly like the pen and paper game, exactly like a current MMP, or exactly like another current D&D game. Certainly, many publishers want this as well; EQ but better seems to be the safest model.

However, we do not follow these paradigms, and we may loose people because of it. But that doesn't really concern me, because if the possibility space of what these games can be is not expanded, the market will not grow; and providing a unique experience will make those that do enjoy what we create stick with the game for a very long time (and hopefully tell thier friends). The model used for current MMPs is based off of text muds written over 20 years ago; but we are no longer in a pure text medium, and the possibilities of expressing these experiences are far greater than the offerings we see on the market today, and many of the carried over conventions are outdated.

That said, it's a tricky balance for a developer; you can't be different for the sake of being different; and you don't want to be so far from what people expect that they dismiss it before they understand it. You need to choose your divergence wisely, and for the most part I feel we've managed to do that with this product. It's going to be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over beta and release. I'm looking forward to it.

[ December 13, 2004, 21:41: Message edited by: chevalier ]