Touring with Turbine, DDO's Update 5: Airships!

It's time for another Turbine Tour! This time around, we checked out DDO's ultra-hefty update 5, which includes airships, party crashing and circuses... What more do you need?

It's only been a few months since the last time we went on one of our official Dungeons and Dragons Online content tours, but the team has certainly been hard at work since then. It's no secret that Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine's other flagship MMORPG, has chosen to follow DDO's shift to a free-to-play subscription model, and much of the reasoning behind that change can be traced to the stunning popularity of Dungeons and Dragons Online. After all, it isn't every day that one of the most popular subscription-based MMORPGs in the industry decides to transition into a more competitive market (the free-to-play one); unless, of course, you have the perfect trailblazer to follow.

DDO's ground-breaking success, however, can also be traced to the sheer dedication the team has in continually creating quality content for their beloved MMORPG. Your average MMORPG will introduce only a few updates every year, while Dungeons and Dragons Online is aiming for a whopping six updates by the end of this year. Fast forward to today and Turbine has kindly invited us, once more, to take a tour of DDO's latest content update (update five) and to show us exactly why DDO is considered by many (ZAM.com included!) to be the best free-to-play MMORPG in the market.

As noted earlier, this update marks the fifth major content addition to Dungeons and Dragons Online since its "re-release" in September of 2009. Update five also marks the midway point for Turbine's goal of releasing six major updates every year (since they began tracking their updates from September, and they released two updates in 2009).The team initially decided to name this update "Rise of the Guilds," but they titled it without actually consulting their legal department. As it turns out, there already exists a "Rise of the Guilds" name, and so the team has currently settled for titling their update "Guilds of Stormreach," although that may be subject to change. Either way, we sat down with Executive Producer Fernando Paiz and Lead Systems Designer Erik Boyer to check out the specifics of this great update.

To kick things off, the huge feature coming in update five is the addition of Guild Airships to the game. These airships can be considered somewhat akin to LOTRO's housing and guild housing system, but the DDO team has added some pretty awesome knick-knacks to keep everybody interested. First, the airships themselves come in six different models and under two "name brands;" the Windspyre models and the Stormglory models; both of which have small, medium and large sized airships for sale. The Windspyre models are essentially the "basic" airship models, as guilds can easily purchase these airships for gold, without ever touching the DDO store. On the other hand, the Stormglory airships, while they are are gorgeously designed, will cost players "Astral Diamonds" to purchase; Astral Diamonds, unfortunately, only being purchasable in the DDO store. In the future, as players show more interest in these guild airships, we could end up seeing even more designs making their way into the guild airship store.

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