On November the 8th, I had the opportunity to head across the continent to San Francisco for a Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach press event. The event itself was a success, as members of the video game press descended upon The Dragon Bar for the event. There, we had the opportunity to listen to a presentation about the game from Lead Designer Ken Troop, and to play the game hands-on.

Throughout the event, the developers from Turbine made themselves available, not only to help us out with the game, but also to answer our questions. Fortunately, I was able to corner Ken Troop for a quick one-on-one interview.

When I asked Troop why the game was so heavily instanced, he came up with a couple of answers. The first was that they felt that they “wanted to be faithful to our Dungeons and Dragons heritage”, and that the only way to do that properly was to maintain the feeling of a party through instancing. He also said that they are trying to eliminate many aspect of the classic model of MMORPGs which are “not fun”, such as ganking, camping spawns and general griefing, not to mention having to stand in line to fight the big monster at the end.