Pumping Irony

It looks like Turbine is finally stepping things up and developing tech simultaneously for DDO and LOTRO. For the past year or so, it’s been a situation of one team coming up with tech for their game then several months later it was added to the other. DX10 appeared in LOTRO, then awhile later in DDO. Some new rendering tech to reduce hitching appeared in DDO then eventually made its way to LOTRO (and still needs improvement! Badly!) LOTRO shipped with the ability for users to make their own UI skins, DDO added that much later. Just a few examples. But now it seems Turbine may be getting the engine builds in both games up to parity and developing new technology that will appear at the same time in both games – namely scalable instances.

Reading through the massive (I’ve heard it’s around 40 pages printed!) release notes for the upcoming Module 9, all quest instances (except solo and raids) will scale to the size of the group. When I first heard this mentioned on DDOcast, I initially thought they were eliminating the whole mechanic of selecting a difficulty level (Normal, Hard, Elite) in favor of scaling, but the release notes say otherwise; the group selects the difficulty then the scaling occurs on top of that when entering the instance.

Similarly, in Massively’s interview with Jeffrey Steefel for LOTRO’s 2-year Anniversary, Steefel mentioned that the Book 8 update scheduled for June will also have new scalable instances; the current working name for them is “skirmishes.”

I also noticed Steefel mentioned Book 8 will have “customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into these skirmishes,” which seems to have escaped most readers’ notice over the excitement of skirmishes and the post-Book 8 hints. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion they might be moving DDO’s Hireling tech over to LOTRO? I was a little skeptical of the need for AI companions in LOTRO but it sounds like (for now) they may be limited for use in the new scaling skirmish instances. Probably a good thing, the tech and the AI is still very much being worked on in DDO, and quite frankly LOTRO is having enough problems already with AI and pet pathing since Moria launched…

In other Turbine tech news, one of the big changes to DDO in Module 9 will be the new “soft targeting” system. Players can toggle this on and off, but when enabled will have a targeting system similar in some ways to Mass Effect. Just moving your cursor or the mouse reticule near a target will select it (though I think you can simultaneously keep another target hard-locked?). DDO is also getting a first-person camera. Previously the camera would only scroll right up behind your character’s shoulders, and for screen shots players would have to scroll all the way in then click the Hide skill to make the character duck below the camera. But that’s not all! DDO is also getting a new “shooter-style” control scheme, selectable in the options, which will remap a lot of the controls to make the game control and feel similar to how shooters do. I’ll hazard a guess that the control scheme will work in both first and the normal third person view.

Not only will the new camera, control and targeting scheme provide a whole new feel to DDO but I also can’t help but feel DDO is being used as a guinea pig to test various schemes for Turbine’s secret in-development console title. Despite all the rumors of DDO or LOTRO being ported to the 360, I just don’t see it. LOTRO is a traditional DikuMMO with all the hotbar and inventory aspects to the UI that would be extremely problematic on a console. Despite its emphasis on fast, visceral action, I find DDO to be even more cumbersome to deal with because it has so many abilities, “clickies” on most gear, switching items constantly… that just won’t cut it on a console. At level 8, my wizard in DDO already had as many hotbars onscreen as my druid in WoW did at level cap and raiding! I’ve only bothered to put a fraction of the stuff available to my wizard on the hotbars, otherwise it would be even more cluttered. LOTRO is Turbine’s cash cow right now, and they’re still working on a new UI sytem for their engine and games. As Steefel mentioned last year at, the core of their UI subsystem was written in 1997! Yet I’m supposed to believe they have a fully functional and brand-new UI system for consoles to handle their existing games? Sorry, not buyin’ it. Until proven otherwise, I’ll continue to believe that their console MMOG will be a whole new game, not a port of one of their PC MMORPGs.

Slight tangent, but I’ll just say that in the spirit of getting both DDO and LOTRO up to parity, the DDO team needs to get crackin’ on the UI. Out of all the UI’s I’ve ever had to work with in any MMOG, DDO is by far the fugliest. It’s functional, yes, but it’s obvious from all the work the team has been putting into DDO the past year (and Module 9 is proof of that) that they’re looking to reboot the game. It’s being given an all-new look and feel, starting with the new tutorial area added in Module 8 (Module 9 is adding full voiceovers to the entire Korthos experience, thereby fully realizing the Age of Conan-esque “the tutorial was a lie!” comparison. ) and the makeover to the Harbor. Module 9 is continuing this trend, with a makeover to the Marketplace. I know a lot of people who like to scale their UI intensely dislike LOTRO’s because it actually resizes rather than scales, which leads to a blurry and pixelated appearance. That’s one of the many things Turbine will fix in their UI 2.0 system but there has been no news whatsoever of when we might actually see that. In the interim, I’d at least like to see DDO’s UI get brought up to the same as LOTRO’s, so that when UI 2.0 does come out it can be fit into each game at once.

Speaking of rebooting the game, Jerry from DDOcast posted this morning that briefly, DDO.com was showing the game under the name Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unleashed. It’s been changed back now, but a quick search on the ESRB site does in fact show DDO under that name! (Interestingly, they also have the Forsaken Lands expansion that was instead released as one of the Module content updates.) Turbine has been hinting for quite awhile now that something “vast and mysterious” was coming to DDO. While I’d love to see them switch to the LOTRO engine tech for a huge seamless world that would probably bring in a lot of new players, doing that would be the equivalent to the NGE and I don’t think they’ll go there. What this probably means is now that Module 9 finally brings the game to D&D’s level cap of 20, they’re putting even more emphasis on new content and moving the focus away from the city of Stormreach into even more areas of Eberron. I’m hoping they make a compromise and take some of the existing zone tech from LOTRO, as well as Moria’s “dual height map” tech and give a nod to Age of Conan, adding population-limited public zones to adventure in.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under DDO, LOTRO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.