The recent announcement of Dungeons and Dragons: Eberron Unlimited surprised me. Studios don’t flip their MMO pay-to-play structures often. But that’s exactly what Turbine is doing. They’re replacing an old model with a hybrid: one that allows players to rock out in DDO for free and buy optional stuff.
When I spoke with three Turbine employees yesterday afternoon — DDO senior producer Kate Paiz, director of communications, Adam Mersky, and DDO executive producer Fernando Paiz — I asked why Turbine put the game on its head. Turns out it’s as simple as predicting the future: Turbine sees hybrid MMO models as the future of MMOs.
I also asked Turbine if they saw DDO: Eberron Unlimited the same way I did: as the best free-to-play MMO. Fernando Paiz didn’t shy from the question:
“That’s absolutely our intent — to go out there and be the best and, we would argue, be the first premium MMO to really hit the free-to-play space with all the features that you might get out of a triple A game,” he said. “There’s a robustness of the feature offering, there’s things like DX10 graphics and a level of support and updates that you won’t find in your typical free-to-play game.”
Hit the break for the full interview.
DESTRUCTOID:
I read in the press release a quote that said, ‘major new content is coming.’ I supposed that excluded the free to play business, so what exactly are players going to get into in Eberron?
Fernando Paiz:
Are you asking for the distinction between what a free player will get versus a VIP or are you asking for a little more detail on what new content is also coming out with this release?
Yeah, just more detail on the new content.
Fernando Paiz:
Okay, yeah, so [sic] will include two content packs. The big one that our loyal players have been waiting is going to Shavarath, which is the plain of battle. This will be high level content, which will be primarily what folks will be playing to get their characters all the way up to twenty, as well as some of the other high level content we added in previous releases.
This module includes a large wilderness area, which is, again, sort of the Devil’s side — the Devil’s battlefield — in this plain of battle. Shavarath is a place where there’s been a war raging for thousands of years between the Devils, the Demons and the Archons, who are essentially the angels. And they’ve been in a state of conflict for a long time. And, as the players, of course, we know that the devils have been attacking Stormreach. You know, that culminated in our big live event last year where they blew up the Marketplace Tent. So they really did a big number on the citizens of Stormreach, and this is where we get to take the fight back to them and get our revenge.
Wow. OK.OK. That was a lot to digest. I’m sorry, I’m not that versed in DDO.
Fernando Paiz:
No problem. I can go into some of the more technical details of what’s in there, as well. This does include a raid and several quests, as well as a large wilderness area, which goes with the level cap increase, which is a big part of that.
There’s a ton of new features that are also in this release. It’s not just about content update and a couple of features. We’ve done a comprehensive polish pass over the whole game. There’s some big things like UI improvement and combat control improvements. We have a new UI scheme that’s going to be the default, better visual feedback for when you’re in combat, greatly improved solo ability with some improvements to our hireling system and something that we call “challenge scaling” where the dungeon challenge will actually adapt to the size of the party that’s attempting it.
And, as I also mentioned, there is some other content that comes in there as well. We said there’s going to be over a dozen dungeons in the release between the high level and low level content.
Why make DDO free to play?
Fernando Paiz:
This has been one of the big questions that we’ve been addressing, of course. The answer is a combination of things: one is that we’ve been looking at this business model for a long time as a company, strategically, as far as this is something that we know that we want to experiment with. We believe that the future of the MMO industry includes some form of pay-as-you-go scheme or hybrid models, and for this game we’ve opted to do a hybrid scheme.
As we started looking into that, one of the things that we came to realize is that we felt that DDO was already a very good fit for this model. We’ve talked about how we really see this as a natural fit for the IP, even. Going back to the days of TSR and the original D&D where you would buy the rules book and you might play a couple of adventures there, and, then, at some point, you and your group would go and buy a new module, and then you’d adventure with that new book. And, then, maybe you’d enhance your experience with going to buy some miniatures or different things like that. And really the player had that ability to do that when they and their group were ready. In some ways, we’re emulating that original business model for the IP and bringing it to the online game.
What other games did you look at? Other than DDO?
Adam Mersky:
Well, I think it was more of — when DDO launched it was over three years ago and LOTRO was launched over two years ago. We wanted both of those in North America and Europe simultaneously. Since then we’ve been over to Asia and South Korea, Japan, China. And the games over there that we were competing against, they were much different. They were all these big free-to-play games so…
Turbine’s been around a long time. We’ve clearly been one of the founders in the States. We saw that there’s a huge opportunity here to start looking at alternative business transactions. We have to get into this space, and we said, ‘How do we go about it?’ We can import some games from Asia, we can build a new game around it. And, then, as we investigates more we sort of looked at DDO and saw that there was a fit here and sort of pursued that. So there weren’t other games or anything specific that we would talk about, you know, that we were planning on launching. I think it went as part of the whole, you know, though process.
This has been a pretty big strategic initiative for Turbine. The work’s been going on for well over a year to re-engineer the game to fit this model because, clearly, we couldn’t just — you don’t just slap a store on a game and say you’ve changed things, right? The game has to be designed around it and some of the features that we were changing were things that we were releasing to the live world like the revamped, new player experience and some of the things that we talked about last year with you when we were at GenCon, to some of the other things that are in the beta right now that players who sign up and get in can see or hopefully the rest of the world will get to experience later this summer.
What does this move say about DDO?
Fernando Paiz:
Well, what I think what it says about DDO is that we’re launching an exciting new chapter in the history of the service, and that we’re ready to innovate within the space and bring a ton of new players in.
This one’s kind of on the technical side. I noticed on the game’s website, and may have I read this incorrectly, as you gain levels if you’re playing for free, Eberron Unlimited, does loot decrease?
Fernando Paiz:
No. Absolutely not. So, the free players have the same access to loot as anybody else playing a particular piece of content, and as you’re playing for free, what’s going to happen is you’re going to reach certain, sort of, decision points where you might decide ‘do I pay for something or do I keep questing for it or keep making do with the content I have available to me right now?’
So one new element in there is something called ‘leveling sigils.’ After you reach level four, to proceed to level five, you’re going to need to find something called the “leveling sigil,” and that’ll essentially unlock the next range of four levels. Now that leveling sigil will drop as part of the quest rewards for a lot of the content you’ll have access to, and, again, players are welcome to just quest until they find it. Or, some players will choose to not do that and buy because they’re ready to move forward and they don’t want to wait.
Now, would you consider having DDO: Eberron Unlimited hitting other platforms, say the Mac or Xbox 360?
Fernando Paiz:
We absolutely consider it. We don’t have anything to announce at this time, but we’re looking into all of that.
You’re looking into it. Would it be safe to assume that your free-to-play model wouldn’t work on the 360?
Adam Mersky:
One of the interesting positions Turbine’s in is that it’s one of the few companies essentially operating three live games. And, you know, as we’ve talked about in the past, we’ve raised a big round of money last year, and started talking about some of our forward-looking vision. That was on a couple fronts. One was certainly looking at alternative business models, and so we’re executing on that with this announcement. Developing an MMO for the next-gen consoles, which we are not talking about yet, but we are deep in development on, and will probably make some noise about that this fall. Clearly, everything that we do for one game brings learning that we can apply to others. For example, we made LOTRO, the first game to take advantage of DX10 graphics technology and successfully implemented that and then were able to easily put that into DDO in sort of a thoughtful way. And, likewise, the learnings we have here about how in-game commerce works in a persistent online universe is certainly going to be something that will impact our design decisions when we reveal our console title.
DDO: Eberron Unlimited really does sound like the best free-to-play MMO. What do you guys think? Is it the best free-to-play MMO?
Fernando Paiz:
That’s absolutely our intent — to go out there and be the best and, we would argue, the first premium MMO to really hit the free-to-play space with all the features that you might get out of a triple A game. There’s a robustness of the feature offering, there’s things like DX10 graphics and a level of support and updates that you won’t find in your typical free-to-play game.
Adam Mersky:
We think that we’re bringing a full-fledged MMO to the market, we’re broadening that market by giving players a choice in how they consume these games. It’s no secret that the number one reason that people don’t play MMOs is the subscription so we think that we have found a compelling way to remove that barrier while not diminishing the experience for the hard-core players who choose to spend their money on this type of entertainment.
You said you might be unveiling something this fall, perhaps? Like the console title?
Adam Mersky:
Yeah. Right now we’re on target. Hopefully we’ll be able to show it to you and not just talk about it this fall so stay tuned.
Definitely.
—
Destructoid would like to thank Adam Mersky, Fernando Paiz, and Kate Paiz for their time.
