Dungeons & Dragons Online Interview
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Next our conversation drifted to the future development of DDO. Here, David and Derek discussed the journey to Level 20 and beyond. I asked about epic levels, prestige classes, and the challenge of implementing them:
David: "I see DDO reaching Level 20 at the end of 2007 or early 2008. It is my private goal for next year to introduce two new classes [editor's note: he confirmed they would be druid and monk], and then start planning ahead for epic levels and prestige classes in the second half of the year."
[Editor's note: At this point, there was some murmuring in the room, and Eckelberry conceded that his plans were ambitious but reasonable and that everyone on the design team had personal goals they worked on together.]
David: "Adding the last few levels to 20 will not be that hard from a design standpoint. A lot of the work is designing the spells for the clerics, wizards, and sorcerers. By the time we reach Level 17 and have all of the Level 9 spells in the game, the last few levels will be about dungeons."
Derek: "Yeah, then the question becomes how many dungeons it takes to get players to Level 20."
David: "But when we start talking prestige classes, we have to decide how that's going to work. We're already discussing it here internally. I mean, if we go by PnP [pen-and-paper] rules, technically you'd want to be a ways under-capped so that you can select a prestige class because prestige classes effective count as levels. So we have to decide how that will work--whether it's some sort of alternate advancement of just epic status.
Another thing we have to do is make sure we get enough of them ready to go at once. Prestige classes are not very general, so we can't just launch three or four. It'd be, 'Welcome to flame 9000 on our forums.' Again, my private goal--that I guess I am making public now--is to have 8-10 prestige classes ready at the same time. That way no player feels like he doesn't have one for his class or build."
