silentcorner

TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game (now owned by Wizards of the Coast) has often found it’s way into computer games, including many online variants such as the old school MUDs, the loosly D&D based Everquest online world, and the more recent Bioware’s officially licensed Neverwinter Nights which takes a more literal implementation of an online version of the D&D core rules, allowing small groups of players and a dungeon master to play D&D online using a loosly based version of the core rules.

Announced at E3 this year (as seen referenced over at extrasonic) is an announcement that Turbine Entertainment Software is now planning to start development on Dungeons & Dragons Online, a massive multiplayer persistent world of D&D and officially approved by Wizards of the Coast.

My first reaction on hearing this news is that this is gonna be a flop. It is still my opinion that taking something that works really well in one medium (in this case D&D being a pen-and-paper role-playing game) and translating it in it’s entirety to another medium (persistent world computer game) is usually a poor idea, and you end up with a product with a lot of shortcomings caused by the changes required to make the product work on the new medium. Neverwinter Nights (NWN) works pretty well, because it’s not trying to be something completely new, it’s really just creating a visual tool for the game, and some automation of how it’s run, but even NWN has several shortcomings, oversimplifying many aspects of the game, making it for me, more suited for afternoon-long campaign adventures, not multi-year long grand campaigns usually played in D&D. But Dungeons & Dragons Online I don’t see as being much more than another Everquest, and it almost seems like they are banking on the name bringing more players in than the gameplay. Campaigns in D&D often involve large sections of strictly role-playing where your character is likely a key point in the storyline, whereas in an online world, things often turn into repetitive hack-n-slash to get your experience points faster than the next guy, and you are nothing more than another Joe in the countryside killing nearby fauna. Pen-and-paper RPG’s are successful because your imagination is the only limitation. The rules are open for interpretation allowing you to come up with some amazing scenarios. An online computer world is generaly very rigid in what exactly you can do, and what reaction is caused by it. D&D does not work well when you heavily restrict the scenarios that can be realized.

Some of it may be just me. I prefer to see new innovative ideas being implemented on new media captilizing on the new media’s restrictions rather than being limitied by it. I’m not as interested in seeing companies riding on the coattails of already successful games in other medias that are not as well suited for the new media. I think the “killer app” of the online world is not going to be a rehash of an existing gaming system, but rather something completely new. However, Turbine has a couple years to prove me wrong (they are shooting for a 2005 release) and I expect I’ll be keeping an eye on the developments.