Never content to rest on their laurels, Dungeons & Dragons Online is bringing in some unique content for their fifth anniversary! Follow along with Chris "Pwyff" Tom as he takes a look at the festivities.

Speaking of the Halloween Event, however, Turbine is quick to note that it has learned some key things from the event, like how players were unhappy with the high turn-in requirements that remained persistent throughout the weeks. As player interest dropped off after the first few days, however, it simply became more and more difficult to constantly meet the turn-in requirements. This time around, the original number required to unlock the rest of the event will be fairly high for servers to 'race' to finish, but subsequent event requirements will be much smaller, to accommodate the latecomers.

After turning in and unlocking the next part of the event, Euphonia unlocked a new instanced event involving kobold mining in the Crystal Cove. The basic premise of the event is that players will have about twenty minutes total to protect (and guide) their kobold miners as they collect crystals. Players can set waypoints for their kobolds by placing and re-placing incense torches along the cave paths and the kobolds will simply go down the path, mine their crystals, and come back.

There is a lot of room for depth, however, as there are also tons of opportunities for players to upgrade their kobolds and increase their efficiency, not to mention the waves of invading baddies that will constantly be trying to take out your kobolds. Buying upgrades will cost crystals (the very resources you are farming!), and the monsters get more difficult as your crystal farming progresses beyond 100, so players will need to devise unique approaches to getting the most crystals with the least number of headaches.

Finally, throughout all of these activities, players will be earning a wide variety of materials, like dubloons, crystals and stolen jewels (from the invading monsters) which can then be used for lots of new and unique equipment.

Through all of this, I couldn't help but be impressed with Turbine's constant push to create unique content, and a kobold mining/resource management minigame certainly qualifies as that. Looking to 2011, there are plans to create a lot of content that caters to all level ranges, in addition to some new crafting revamps on the way. There is no reason for hardcore DDO players to feel snubbed, however, as there are still a lot of plans to keep the high level progression scene constantly moving forward.

All in all it really does look like DDO has a bright future ahead of it, and I can certainly say that, if their next five years look anything like their first five years, we should all expect DDO to be around for a long time.