Touring with Turbine: DDO's Challenge-Packed U12
Editor-in-Chief Chris "Pwyff" Tom went on an in-game tour with DDO's Fernando Paiz and Erik Boyer to challenge himself on Update 12: Vaults of the Artificers. Mini-games ahoy!
Challenges ahoy for Dungeons & Dragons Online! With Update 12: Vaults of the Artificers on the way, I caught up with Executive Producer Fernando Paiz and Producer Erik Boyer to go on an in-game tour of DDO's new and unique content. Originally, During my tour I was told that DDO's Update 12 would be launching on November 9th but, according to a forum post from DDO's MajMalphunktion, the build may still be pending approval from DDO's QA team, so we might see a release date later than the 9th (sorry everyone!). That being said, it's never too late for some Turbine Touring, so let's get on with Update 12!
In Update 12, players won't be out to thwart evil baddies in traditional dungeons; instead, they'll be facing off against each other for high-scores and record times in the House Cannith Challenge Pack. While Turbine likes to call their new content "challenges," I think the term "mini-game" better defines what the DDO team is going for. Fans who remember the popular Kobold mining mini-game that was featured in DDO's 5th Anniversary celebrations will be happy to know that these hilarious Kobolds are back with two new maps, as well as two entirely new mini-games in this enormous challenge pack. On my tour, we focused on the two new mini-games being introduced, although I'll admit that I now wish I could have gotten a peek at the Extraplanar Mining map being introduced for Kobold mining. That sounds like grounds for some extreme mining festivities.
The first challenge I went through was called "Dr. Rushmore's Mansion," and it was basically an enormous game of hide-and-seek, but with puzzles, locked doors, power-ups and timers all adding to the frenzy. The basic premise of Dr. Rushmore's Mansion is to track down and defeat certain boss monsters that are hiding in various rooms throughout the Mansion. Unfortunately, getting to those monsters requires you to open doors, many of which are sealed. Opening doors requires crests, which can either be found in breakable objects, or looted off of monsters, or even as rewards for solving puzzles. The whole challenge also happens to be timed, but if you can open doors with crests, you can extend that timer to push for more objectives.
Unfortunately, because our tour was limited in time, we weren't able to push really hard to fulfill as many objectives as possible, but it's a simple testament to the fun of the challenge when I felt a twinge of regret for letting my timer run out. By the end of the mini-game, I was already thinking of ways in which I could improve my overall time while hitting more objectives. If we had split up in the beginning of the maze, could we have covered more ground and therefore unlocked more doors? What if we had spent more time trying to get all of the puzzle crests and less time exploring? It was easy to see the inherent replayability in Dr. Rushmore's Mansion as players will want to devise their own perfect runs.