Dungeons & Dragons Online Interview, Part Two
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I brought up the idea that working at Turbine, a company with 3 other MMO titles currently in continuous development, had to be an advantage in implementing complex concepts like having everyone in the game be a hero.
"Oh, yes. The DDO team has a lot of veterans," he responded, "veterans back to AC1, in many cases. I know that that's where I started. It helps us because we can focus on the "What's happening next?" and really not play on the abstract anymore."
"The fact is, if we have any questions, we can go talk to other people in our building who are professionals in this business. It also helps that we're all building the same types of products, so there is a lot of expertise in-house."
"It also helps that we're working on a franchise," added Jason Wonacott, Director of Corporate Communications, who, no matter how hard I tried, continued to hush up Cardell from the really juicy stuff. "D&D is the most iconic game in the world, right? A lot of the team are hardcore D&D players themselves. With AC, AC2 and MEO, they all go back to some form of role playing. This game is kind of getting back to basics. In addition, the team just loves D&D, so you can imagine the enthusiasm. Many times, development becomes almost a religious discussion for you guys [the DDO team]. For the MEO fans, the empirical question is "What is Tolkien?" and the Tolkien lore. For D&D, it's "What is D&D?""
"So you end up bringing in a unique bunch of people: People that love D&D, and are also great game designers," continued Jason. "We've also had to bring in a 3rd set of people from outside the company, simple because we were adding new staff. So you get people like Paul Mock, our Art Director, who wasn't on one of our original projects, but has an amazing resume. We've been able to bring in Paul, and other great talent, simply because the fact that we're covering D&D."
