Once again, Turbine has challenged the preconceived notions of MMO gaming with the growing success of DDO. But what's the future look like for the game? We sat down with Fernando Paiz to find out!

ZAM: What can you tell us about future plans and things that are coming down the road? Mid and long term goals?

Paiz: This year – for Update 7 – we plan on making the Half Orc class available in DDO.

ZAM: I *always* play a Half Orc…

Paiz: As you very well know, Half Orcs are the only race that has the bonus to strength, so they will be the strongest race in the entire game, both because of their initial strength bonus and some additional enhancements that they unlock as they level through the game. So get your strongest fighter, ranger, monk, battle cleric, favored soul…. whatever… builds ready  because these guys are coming in and we’re extremely excited to see what happens.

We also have some engine upgrades coming in towards the end of the year that will be able to allow us to run in DirectX 11 by either Update 7 or Update 9. Along with that, there will also be some performance improvements on the back end as well.

In addition, we’re definitely taking some time to get to some old player requests and polish touches as well. For example, we’re introducing the “Auction Search” functionality, which is my favorite feature that we’re finally getting done. It’s basically a text search for the auctions, and it’s *finally* getting done.

ZAM: And long term?

Paiz: For next year and beyond, we’re still making some plans concrete, but I think one thing that players can look forward to from us is a new type of content being added to the game. It is a new type of content system that will play a bit differently and be designed to be repeatable. It will scale to a bunch of different levels and have some form of indirect and direct competition built into the system.

I’ll leave it at that, because I’ve probably said to much already, but it’s something new that players can definitely look forward to in terms of content.

ZAM: Are you looking at additional classes that are still hanging out there and are some of the “core” classes in D&D? Like the druid, for instance?

Paiz: Absolutely. Druid’s next on the list for classes that we’re going to be pushing out, and it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll try to tackle the druid next year… but don’t hold me to that.

You or the players! *laughs*

We’ll give it our best shot, and it’s something that the internal team wants as much as the players do. We’ve got some additional races that we’d like to touch on first, I think, and then we’ll go back to looking at classes.

ZAM: So there’s another race besides the Half Orc that you’re looking at doing? Maybe like the Shifter or Changeling?

Paiz: We have a few others, but nothing to announce at this time. *laughs*

ZAM: I can see races being much easier to fit into the game than an additional class…

Paiz: They’re a different kind of work. A race is very heavy on art. A class is very heavy on systems design. It really depends on what resources we have available at different points in time, and some of the classes do require engine upgrades and that sort of thing to pull off.

That’s really been the case with the druid. We have the request in, and it should come at some point.

ZAM: I know players are always very curious as to why it takes so long to put a new class into the game…

Paiz: That’s one of the challenges behind building MMOs; as these games get bigger and bigger, each new thing gets that much more complex. So things like the pre-built paths we have for the characters or just balancing out the gameplay through twenty levels and multi-class character combinations, and then balancing the class so they’re not overpowered or underpowered… all of that is just incredibly difficult to do. It takes a lot of time.

We have to work on these things for six months at a time, because it just takes so much of our resources to support what we need to actually build these things. We’d absolutely love to push out more races and classes at a faster pace.

ZAM: Last question... have you seen any change in the player base and the community since switching to the hybrid system? You obviously had a very invested sort of player base before that directed a lot of attention to any new news about DDO… has that changed at all?

Paiz: There’s a whole lot more players – both active and coming in new any given month – and the fact that we have so many new players coming in to sample the game would lead you to believe that you have more players churning through the game. That said, we’re still growing and continue to do better every month. April was our best month yet in terms of players and revenue… so we’re on a great trend right now.

That said, we attracted a lot of different types of players that we weren’t getting before. It’s sort of an overused term to describe people as casual and hardcore – people don’t fall into buckets – but I’ll use them anyway in this case.

So we did used to have some very hardcore players that played enough that they were paying for their subscriptions. Now we really have opened the doors to a very casual sort of player that can only get online a few hours a week. I might argue that playing a few hours a week is still a great value at $15, but that doesn’t matter what I say, people have to make that decision for themselves.

By having that free-to-play model, it really brought in a lot more of the “casual” players that want to solo or simply play a few times a week. People want to be in a world where there’s a chance to make a social connection, but they don’t necessarily want to feel pressured into having to do that. And, it’s my hope that we were able to draw these players in without ruining the things that our veteran players loved about the original incarnation of DDO.

ZAM: Thanks for your time, Fernando, and I hope we can talk again soon!