Turbine Lead Content Engineer on D&DO, Sean Lindskog, has penned a third Designer Diary for GameSpot:It's no easy task to build a massively multiplayer game that lives up to the Dungeons & Dragons name. Players of the pen-and-paper D&D game surely have vivid memories of many an epic adventure. This was our challenge for DDO--how can we re-create this feeling in an online game?
Early on in DDO's development, we outlined some high-level goals for the player experience.
The first design goal was to create the ultimate dungeon crawl. I'm really fond of the old first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons modules. The centerpiece of many of these was a bunch of interconnected rooms, each with some deadly menace awaiting your arrival. It might have been a cavern, a labyrinth, a tomb, or a castle, but it probably had a bunch of rooms, passageways, and little numbers, which the dungeon master used to look up room descriptions and secretly plot your demise. Ahh, good times! No D&D game should have anything less than an incredible dungeon crawl. |