Turbine pushed Module 7: The Way of the Monk onto the live servers this morning! Looks like an awesome content update, and will likely be the impetus to get me back into DDO a little this month. I’d already downloaded the pre-patch and had DDO updated today while the servers were down, so that when they were back up I didn’t have to download as many files to make the full update official. Nice touch, I hope they continue with their new downloadable pre-patch policy.
Turbine put up the full patch notes, but I’ll just touch on a few of the nice ones that caught my eye.
- Monks have been added to the game as a new playable class! No idea how appealing the monk class will be to me, but adding new classes to games is always a good move, and I look forward to grouping with some.
- Class trainers will now teach characters of any level, and will warn you if you are about to multi-class. I don’t multi-class (yet) but I appreciate being able to use any trainer rather than remembering which trainer in which city ward trains which levels.
- Two new raids have been added to the game! Woohoo! I don’t have any characters raid-worthy yet. I think my Wizard might be a level or two from starting the Vault of Night series, which ends in the Red Dragon raid, though not having been through that yet I don’t know if I’ll be able to actually do the raid at the same level as when I start the first quest. Either way, I’ve been terribly excited since the beginning to see how DDO handles raids, and I’m so glad a huge-ass red dragon will be the first. The two new raids introduced today sound very cool and I look forward to playing them someday.
- Once a day quests have been added to the game. WoW strikes again! DDO daily quests… hmm… I’ll have to check them out for sure. The patch notes specifically mention low-level characters, so I’ll be interested to see exactly what level bracket equates to “low-level.” With any luck, Koriander will be able to run them at level 7, although he’s as squishy as squishy gets and has difficulty soloing gnats…
- UI Improvements. Several improvements in several areas of the UI went live today, and are they ever nice! Kudos to the first step (on the DDO side) of what looks to be an ongoing overhaul of the Turbine Engine’s UI system.
- Three-Barrel Cove is now a wilderness area! The original Three-Barrel Cove was something akin to an outdoor quest hub. A small pirate town with some pirate mobs outside the pub to fight and a few quest NPC’s scattered about the map, including quests for The Fire Caves, which was a really fun dungeon. The last area that received the “wilderness area” treatment was the Waterworks dungeon. Afterwards, Waterworks was still Waterworks, it just had the new wilderness area-specific quests. Three-Barrel Cove on the other hand, has been completely revamped! Every aspect of the zone, from the town to the terrain, is completely new, and it’s nothing short of incredible! The zone looks to be roughly the size of Searing Heights and the other new wilderness areas, so plenty of exploring to be had!
I thought I’d read that Module 7 would also introduce a completely new tutorial experience, but I just created a monk and was taken to Smuggler’s Cove and did all the exact same content I’d done last year on my other characters. Arriving in Stormreach in the Wavecrest Tavern was humorous, as everyone else had also created monks! It was like a city-wide pajama party! 
For more fun details, hit up Massively, they did a huge Module 7 preview treatment last week, with interviews, screen shots and videos!
Tags: DDO, MMORPG
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Neat. Didn’t they upgrade the graphics engine and stuff not too long ago either?
I admit, I’m tempted to try it again since I’m sort of ‘blah’ on AoC and WoW is losing its appeal… somewhat.
What server are you on? (just in case)
They updated the water textures to the same that LOTRO uses, so water looks sweet in Eberron. They’ve also made some new skies for some of the places, and the outdoor wilderness areas (have to specify since the Waterworks *dungeon* is now a wilderness area) have day/night cycles just like you’d see in a real MMO.
I’m on the Thelanis server. Fire off an IM or something if you give it a try. I play DDO extremely casually, but I’d love to actually make some progress. I do plan on making a bit of a return (minor guild drama or no) this month.
No idea if I will actually play the monk I made or not. I only did it to see the class creation and new tutorial area (which apparently didn’t make it?) for the game. I rolled a drow monk, but after running around town I must admit the absolute coolest monks of all are the dwarves! They’re hilarious! More so than Guild Wars’ Mhenlo NPC, dwarf monks in DDO truly deserve the title Chunky Monky.
I can’t wait to group up with a fat little dwarf monk and watch them kick kneecaps!
Edit: Apparently dwarves also get a feat bonus, so they actually make the best monks? I just thought they looked awesome (in a funny way) but I guess there’s a legit min/max reason to choose a dwarf.
So the graphical enhancements were just to the water textures? That’s disappointing. I thought they were doing a huge overhaul or something.
Ah well. I might still give it a look as I thrash around looking for a MMO to play.
I might be wrong, but I think I had a (Halfling) Ranger on that server.
The water was the first in your face obvious thing I noticed they updated several months ago. They added some anti-hitch code which may have been graphic-related. Basically it seems they make tiny leapfrogs with the Turbine Engine. They’ll make an improvement in LOTRO then it shows up in DDO a few months later. DDO gets an engine improvement and it shows up in LOTRO, and so on. For the most part they seem to keep the engine builds close in parity with each other. I do wish they’d re-work the trees in DDO however; get those things blowing in the breeze and such…
What I’m really curious about will be if the DDO engine will get the new enhancements that the Mines of Moria expansion are bringing such as dynamic lighting and the dual height-map technology? DDO already makes great use of lighting, shading, and particle effects for spells and traps. Dynamic lighting would up the ante on eye candy.
This looks really cool not sure why I cant get into DDO its just odd the way combat works. But the monk looks cool and I kinda wish they would add this class to WoW. For example in Scarlet Monastery, the monks there. Make it a human class and make them super proficient in hand and blunt weapons. Something like that.
I seem to be missing something in DDO though that stops me from playing it maybe the lack of solo content? Not sure
They’ve actually gone through a large chunk of the quests and added a solo mode to them. But D&D was always a group-based RPG, thus DDO is best played in a group as well.
I love DDO’s real-time combat, but I wish the melee people would pay attention. They’re just click-click-clicking away for like 10 seconds after the mob is dead. It ain’t Diablo, folks. But it’s fun having collision detection and “tanks” (D&D doesn’t technically have tanks but whatever) can shield block to prevent mobs from running through to the casters, etc. Most importantly, I LOVE the casting in DDO. The only D&D character I ever had was a Wizard (I was normally a GM, very rarely got to actually be a player) and I’ve been major disappointed with casting in every MMORPG. I mean seriously, click a button and wait on a progress bar? I don’t see Harry Potter waiting around for several seconds, he just waves his wand and says a word and BLAMMO! DDO finally gives me that feel — I want to cast a spell, I just cast it, none of this standing around waiting on progress bars crap.
I had hoped to do this myself, but I can’t solo Three-Barrel Cove at level 7 with a Wizard and during the early afternoon didn’t have any guildmates to go snapping screenshots, so…
Here’s a DDO forum thread with screenies of the old Three-Barrel Cove taken just prior to Module 7.
Here’s a Module 7 gallery on WarCry with the new Three-Barrel Cove (and other stuff).