Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Nov. 21, 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

Alternate Character Death Option

Hi Folks,

I can say with great confidence that limb loss won't be part of D&D Online -- it's never been major part of the PnP D&D rules, IMO, although I'm sure plenty of people have house rules for limb loss and other types of permanent injury.

Sharn: City of Towers

Hmm, Amazon's still showing it as "Not yet released" -- I also stopped into my neighborhood B&N yesterday and I checked for the Sharn book, but they didn't have it.

Anyway, I'm sure that there will be several copies of the book floating around here by the end of the week. Hard to say if we'll be using anything from it, since we don't have it yet.

Anyone else have it? How is it?

System Requirements..?

Hi Folks,

We haven't announced the system requirements yet, and we probably won't do so until we're much closer to release.

That being said, our core system guys are really talented, and the engine they've built is very scalable -- our current build runs fine on today's mid-range machines, but when all of the bells and whistles are turned on, it can push a top-of-the-line system.

And sorry Rampart -- no Amiga client is currently planned

Spells per day

Exactly. If you're going to solo, you'll probably want to have some kind of healing available. Healing potions will definitely be an option, although we don't expect them to be a dime a dozen.

Also, keep in mind that our level, content, and game systems designers are all doing their thing with the healing limitation in mind, so the lack of regenerative healing shouldn't be an overwhelming problem for an individual or party that plays smart and prepares well.

Beta testers!!

The official release date is still "late 2005." We haven't announced anything more specific than that.

Greeting everyone.

Welcome to the forums Zentar, and, um ... easy there, Filio

Your comments about character customization got me thinking a bit. It seems that a lot of developers have looked at the balance problems of some of the early commerical MMORPGs, and decided that allowing players to gimp their characters was a bad thing.

In order to prevent this, some of the more recent MMOs have decided to group characters into broad archetypes (tank, healer, damge-dealer, etc.) and limit character choices in order to ensure that each character can perform competently in their archetype duties. While this means that there are fewer gimpy characters, the side effect of all of this (as you pointed out in your post) is a cookie-cutter effect where many characters seem virtually the same.

I'd just like to let you know that we're not going that route. Our character creation and advancement systems adhere pretty closely to the D&D rules, so you should expect to have about as many customization options as in PnP, which is a lot. If you want to try an unconventional build, that's your perogative.

Of course, this means that it will be very possible to gimp your character: as Nik said in another thread, if you want to multiclass your fourth level wizard into a wizard 4/sorcerer 1, we're not going to stop you. If you want your heavly-armored fighter/cleric to burn three feats on Stealthy, Skill Focus: Hide in Shadows, and Skill Focus: Move Silently, we're not going to stop you.

Hey, maybe you have a master plan that'll pay off down the road, or maybe you just have a cool roleplaying reason for doing something like this. Or maybe you're just a masochist. In any event, we're going to give you the freedom to create the character you want to create, gimpiness be damned.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

Jason Booth's latest Dev Diary shows promise!!

if that kind of stuff interests you, there's quite a bit more of it on my blog:

http://jbooth.blogspot.com/

Jason Booth's latest Dev Diary shows promise!!

In one sense, it's further optimization; because rather than optimizing for a single situation, your optimizing for all of them. However, an extention does exist after optimization, which primarily involved using sub-optimal stratagies or placing artificial bounds onto your experience.

I do this in Street Fighter II a lot; see, I've been a hard core street fighter player for around 15 years now (I own the hyper fighting edition in the rec room at work). I often put restictions on myself when playing as an additional meta-goal; I'm going to beat this person, but only using light kick. Or I'll let them choose the button I use. Either way, it forces me to explore area's of the possibility space which are sub-optimal, or at least, not the primary path of least resistance. I did the same thing with the original Tony Hawk, by playing through each level and trying to complete all the goals in a single run. In Tony Hawks case, the game didn't provide as many goals as it did repeatable fun experiences, so I created goals to keep myself playing.

Street Fighter, for me, was a little different though. It provided such a rich possibility space, with so many layers of depth, that playing it became as much of a function of habit as one of competition. This makes sense, because the actions we do a lot become part of our subconcious means to releave stress; they become comfort habits; some people do it with cleaning, biting thier nails, or even means which appear extremely unhealthy (screaming at a spouse, binge eating). I do it by laying the smack down to anyone and everyone with a single button.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

Prisoners for servants in my castle?

No.

Turbine and all those involved a Request.

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A more honest response than you were expecting.

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Normally I don't reply to threads like this, but I'm making an exception.

A quick glance at your posts make it very clear what you want, which I can appreciate.

- You want to play solo.
- You want to play in Forgotten Realms.
- You want a slower-paced, as-near-to-100% faithful rendition of the D&D rules as possible.

Similarly, here's what we want:

- We want to focus on groups, and the way D&D classes are already designed to work well in concert with each other.
- We want to use the rich and unique world of Eberron to tell an intricate story using the factions and secret societies that populate and influence that world.
- We want to focus on intense conflicts and challenges, with tactical combat and group strategies required to overcome traps and enemies.

Both are valid approaches. Both are very much D&D. But they are very different games, and we're only making one.

We're unapologetic about our choice, and we understand that we can't be all games to all gamers. Take this fall and winter - there are a TON of great games being released, and I'm not going to play them all. (This makes me sad.) I just don't have the time, or the money, so I'm going to pick a few that most appeal to me.

This doesn't mean I think Halo 2 sucks. It's a great game, and I'm sure I'd love to play it, but for me, it just ranks a bit below Sid Meier's Pirates!, MGS3, Nocturne, and some of the *ahem* "relevant research projects" that I should play, if you know what I mean. With that in mind, maybe NWN is closer to the game you want to play, for an online D&D experience. But maybe, as time goes on and we get to release some more information and gameplay footage, you'll change your mind. We wouldn't have gotten this far without the blessing of Wizards of the Coast, and we wouldn't be going down this path if we didn't think it would be the best way for D&D fans to play together online.

Thanks for listening,

Nik

Beta testers!!

No news on Beta signups just yet, and if I were you, I wouldn't spend too much time looking for news until next year.

Turbine and all those involved a Request.

The combat speed and style is definitely the biggest departure from expectations. To be truly honest, I was a skeptic myself for a long time. But, here's the thing that's possibly not coming through from watching gameplay videos: although it's more active than your average MMP controls, it's not more complex.

It is interesting to examine console games, especially complex ones, from a UI perspective. They do everything they need to do with 6-8 buttons and directional inputs. That sort of ease of use is something that PC games are often missing - it's no fun to try to wrangle with different combinations of unreferenced 'shifts' and 'alts' when what you need to do is get out the wand, and do it NOW.

And as to your last comment, while Jason may more look the part, we all know I'm actually the evil one around here.

A concern on game design

Correct.

Vessekai, DDO Dev Team

Quiting in the middle of a dungeon

Our dungeon model is like a D&D module. In the pen & paper game, when a party enters a module, they're in it together, for better or for worse. You can't get reinforcements halfway through.

This way, we can balance our dungeons to be a challenge for a party. This balance is lost if the party can get fresh recruits or supplies at any point within the dungeon.

We acknowledge several issues that arise out of disallowing players to join a party who are already inside a dungeon. These are discussed below:
___________________

Problem: What happens if a player dies during an adventure?

Solution: In most dungeons, it will be possible for dead players to stay in the dungeon and rejoin their companions, via some means of resurrection.
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Problem: Sometimes players might have to quit the game before they finish an adventure.

Solution: We are trying to keep individual experiences (such as a dungeon crawl) relatively short. They may be anywhere from 5 minutes to about an hour long. You should only sign up to go on one of these adventures if you think you have time to complete it.

By keeping the individual experiences fairly short, we hope that players will commit to finish what they started. In case the players have to quit halfway through, we are considering assigning partial experience for what they completed up to that point.

Players will not be able to "save" halfway through a dungeon, like you can in a single player game.

Dev Diary: Peter Macdonald

This was exactly Pete's point - humor which doesn't "stay in the world" (i.e. it strays from the theme of the MMO) generally sucks.

That being said, I'm sure everyone will love our special Pokemon module.

Just kidding.

Quiting in the middle of a dungeon

Yeah, maybe I wasn't clear. You're right - a 5 minute dungeon crawl would be ridiculous.

There will be a few pieces of content in D&DO that a party can play through very quickly. These won't be the usual exploration and dungeon crawl scenareos, which make up the bulk of our content.

There are problems associated with a single dungeon that takes several days to complete. The biggest is that you would have to perfectly coordinate with your friends when to log on and off, so you could continue the adventure together. This sort of thing works out well in a pen & paper game, but not so well in an MMORPG.

We certainly plan to have quests / modules which take many days to complete. But these will tend to be split up into many discrete adventures which can often be completed in under an hour.

Quiting in the middle of a dungeon

Right! We're definitely trying to address this exact problem, by splitting large quests "in parts", as you describe.

World Impact

I'd just like to say that this is a very cool thread. There's some great debates about the possibilities (and difficulties) of bringing MMORPG content and world state to "the next level".

This is certainly a tough one. As you point out, it seems inevitable that the different members of a party may have different "histories" regarding a current quest/module/story arc. The game would have to choose one member's history, to continue the story from.

If you had to choose one person's history, perhaps the leader of the party would be a good choice. Other players could join the party, coming along for the adventure, and helping the leader solve her quest.

If the other party members were concurrently on the quest, they would make progress towards completing the quest as well. If they wern't on the quest, those party members would be treated more as mercenaries, joining up for a quick adventure, and a share of the exp and loot.

David Eckelberry, DDO Dev Team

A concern on game design

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Re: A concern on game design

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I hope you enjoyed it. I actually just had to go back and listen to it just to get a recap.

My answer to you would be: We have the same preference--making the core combat system as much like D&D as possible. For me, that's not just my preference, it's my assigned job... and a principal reason I was hired from being a designer at Wizards of the Coast to being a game system designer for Turbine.

So what does that mean? We want to make the core combat system just like D&D, yet the simple fact is that we aren't in the turn-based, DM-run world that D&D is. But the good news is that I think we've led you to a misunderstanding of how "combo attacks" work in DDO. These aren't combo attacks like those of some other MMPs. What combo attacks do is represent the increasing number of attacks that characters get from increasing their base attack bonus (or by using combat styles such as dual wielding).

Letting you behind the curtain a bit, when we began to consider the multiple attacks you gain from having a base attack bonus of 6 of greater, we faced two choices. We could speed up the character animations to represent the increased attack power, or we could, using the existing animations, attach additional combat "hook" into the animations. So imagine the character swings his sword forward and back at the enemy, or even across, down, then up. The lower level character gets only one possible attack out of that sequence, but the higher level character can generate multiple attacks out of that same animation. (And this lets us save speeding up your combat animations for things like haste, weapons with the speed ability, etc.)

Hope that answers your question.

I don't think we're in any danger of that. D&D has spawned any number of clones and lookalikes both in pen-and-paper games, but I think that there are things that have kept it unique over the last 30 years. Our mission is to continue that legacy.

Roleplaying between players is, of course, one of the best, if not the best, part of D&D. We want to do everything we can do to encourage roleplaying, between providing places for players to gather and meet one another, to giving players good reasons to group together, and offering NPCs that players can interact with using their own choices and character-based social skills. Now, all of that said, I think that the most important objective we must accomplish is to make the core DDO gameplay fun, interesting, and exciting. That's the focus of the interview that you heard. Because no matter how talkative or socially interesting DDO is, if it's not at the core fun to play, then we don't have anything to offer you. The best sort of roleplaying occurs as players face down the challenges we provide, soemtimes in ways that we didn't fully imagine. The best stories you and your friends will tell are those that you make. It's our commitment to make DDO the place where you would want to tell those stories, and to keep coming back to in order to tell more.

Thomas Oakstaff, DDO Dev Team

Quiting in the middle of a dungeon

For perspective, I'd like to compare this to the experience I've had in other MMO games.

If a critical party member left, it was necessary to leave the dungeon to get a replacement. That involved going to get them, traveling back to the dungeon, and then fighting your way back to the hunting spot. (assuming you hadn't lost it...)

This was often a time-consuming process.

Compare that to our model:

* Travel times will be short, so you'll be back in the dungeon quickly.
* You won't be competing for spots.
* You won't camp a spot for hours, so you won't have to get back to that spot.

Just my two cents.