DDO Producer’s Letter

Executive Producer Severlin posted his latest Producer’s Letter on Saturday.

Greetings!

As we kick off summer, many things are going on behind the scenes in Dungeons and Dragons Online, and I wanted to talk about some of the fun things coming up for the game.

We have been doing a lot to combat lag in the game, and though we have improved the experience we have work to do. We are still looking into long lag spikes which we need to solve, and we are also working on some fixes for stacking effects that could be causing individual characters and the party they are traveling with to lag. Our investigations into server performance continue and this is our number one priority.

Drac Says – I would have to say for at least myself, the lag situation is much better. Anything else they can do is always good.

 

The next thing I wanted to talk about is some upcoming content; we are currently working on bringing you a new classic module experience! We are hard at work on our adaptation of Assault on the Slave Lords, originally presented in the A1 to A3 series of modules. We remember playing through the Slavers series fondly, and we want to bring these modules to life for our players with some of our own twists and turns. The dungeons will be offered at level 8 on Heroic, and will also have a CR 32 Legendary version as well.

Drac Says – well, this is NOT what I had thought it was going to be – The slave lords series is one of the classic modules for sure, I have many found memories of this series of adventures,Always great to see them taking a look at the “Classics”

You might recall, that when had our interview with Sev, he mentioned that the next classic, would be “Halloween” themed, he did respond to a question of this in the thread

~ Yes, plans changed for the classic module. We had some resource shuffling and we had to push out our original plans a bit. It’s probably something we’d like to revisit in the future.

 

As you probably know, we have already begun discussing the update to Cannith Crafting. Ever since we updated random loot players have been asking for an update to this crafting system, and the project is in full swing. It is a big system that will provide a good way to fill in gear holes as you level.

Drac Says – Interested to see how well they can pull this off

 

Players have asked about class passes, and the next two classes to be looked at will likely be Monk and Favored Soul. We are currently looking into the core code behind unarmed attacks and hand wraps to see if that needs to be revamped. We are also looking into giving Favored Soul its third tree. Both are big tasks, but we wanted players to know these are the next classes we are looking at once we are past Cannith Crafting.

Drac Says – Always good to see class passes

 

We’d also like to offer the players another open enhancement tree (like Harper) at some point to open up more build options, and we are looking to see where that might fit in.

Drac Says – As with class passes, enhancement tress are a great thing as well

 

We were fairly happy with the Night Revels festival in the fall last year, and this year we will be looking to add more haunted dungeons a maybe some other surprises. The festival was fairly popular so we’d like to expand on it a bit. We would also like to revamp the rewards for the mimic festival and bring that back; maybe with rewards, based on player feedback, that are less random.

Drac Says – I enjoyed the Night Revels, I do hope they add new dungeons, and indeed would like to see better rewards.

 

Another system we want to tackle is the augment system. Players have been asking for new augments, but the current incarnation of augments are created by hand as crafting interactions. We will be looking into the feasibility of moving existing and future augments into a new system that will work like the slotting system that our Legendary Greensteel crafting system uses. The technical complexity comes with how we will allow players to convert existing items to use new augments. If we can tackle these problems, then we can do some interesting things with augment slots and more regularly include augments as part of our ongoing loot.

Drac Says – As with crafting, BIG system, will be interesting to see if they can pull this one off as well, as so many things could go horribly wrong.

 

The far future has a lot of promise, and looking past the end of the year we would definitely like to bring Tiefling and Aasimar to our players at some point. Tiefling in particular is a popular race for Dungeons and Dragons and we would like you to have those races as options for your characters. We will need to determine whether we plan on including tails on Tieflings, and how the horns of the race will interact with helmets. Both of these are interesting problems to tackle and we have already had some discussion about them even though these races would be fairly far into the future.
We just wanted to talk about the long term plans we will be looking into, and we wanted to say thanks for joining us in game.
~Sev

Drac Says – Tiefling!!!! Yes Please.. Like yesterday!!!! 🙂 As far as the Tail thing, the NPC’s do not have them, so I don’t see why the players would HAVE to. And the horns, just make it so the helmet does not ever show.

 

So there we have it, Overall I would have to say this a good letter, and they have some great plans, I must say I’m dissapnited that we are not going to get the “horror” classic module *Cough Tomb Of Horrors* but as I said, have wonderful memories of the A series.

So, what’s your thoughts?