Dungeons & Dragons Online Producer’s Letter

There doesn’t appear to be any indication that Dungeons & Dragons Online will be slowing down following its 10th anniversary celebration earlier this year, as the newly posted Producer’s Letter brings word that 2016 will still ferry in a new adventure pack based on the classic D&D module Assault on the Slave Lords, an overhauled Cannith Crafting system, a design pass at the Monk and Favored Soul classes, and more. There’s also a tantalizing bit about the Tiefling and Aasimar races being added to the game for player characters sometime after the end of 2016, with a post-letter tease that a playable Kobold race is even being considered:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.