GB Feature: Dungeons & Dragons Online Update 7 Preview

Turbine is gearing up to release their biggest Dungeons & Dragons Online update to date on October 20th, and earlier this week I was presented with the opportunity to take a guided tour of it. Rather than give you a quick summary of it, I’ll steal these two paragraphs from my brand new preview:

To give you a little background information, Update 7: Half-Bloods represents Turbine’s largest update to the game to date. Among the additions it’ll bring to the table are two new playable races (the Half-Orc and the Half-Elf), a brand new level 12-oriented adventure pack that spans three quests, a new twelve-man raid that’ll be playable by low or epic level parties, full DirectX 11 support, a significant renovation to the game’s UI panels and auction house, a handful of new character spells and prestige enhancements, and an ambitious live event that introduces a couple of new technologies that Turbine is experimenting with (more on those later).

When Turbine added the auction house to DDO, it was a huge boon to the game. Over the years, though, its current presentation has really started to show its age. As anyone who plays the game on a regular basis can attest to, finding an epic scroll, a particular suit of mithral armor, or a specific weapon effect takes quite a bit of legwork. With Update 7, the auction house will see two major advancements – the ability to search for an exact item name string (“Green Steel”, for example) and the ability to sort all item results by name, duration, current price, and buyout price. These advancements aren’t going to make things perfect (you still can’t search by specific imbued spells or effects not listed in the item’s name like you can in our equipment database), but they’re going to be very nice additions nonetheless. The sorting feature should help keep prices in line, too, as you’ll be able to search for Large Devil Scales and then purchase the one that shows up with the lowest price rather than buying out the first one you stumble upon.

I also managed to snap thirty-two new screenshots as we explored the new adventures, and as you’ll discover in my article, several never-before-seen U7 items are now available in our equipment database. Trust me, it’s a good time to be a DDO fan.