DDO Unlimited Update 3: Removing the Barriers

We test the latest update to Turbine's free-to-play MMO.

Last week, Turbine released a major update to its free-to-play MMORPG, Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited, offering more free high-level content to its players. If you haven't really been following it, DDO was first released as a subscription-based game in 2006, but was later re-designed as a free-to-play game and re-released as DDO Unlimited late last year. It seems that the move was a wise one, revitalizing a game that was fast losing its place in a crowded market and at the same time, raising the bar on free-to-play MMOs. In fact in its new niche, DDO won the nod of several online publications as the Best F2P MMO of 2009.

The game's original design actually fits the F2P model like a glove, allowing the developers to package adventure areas and either offer them for free or sell them as premium dungeons. Those who choose to keep paying a monthly subscription fee have access to all the premium areas, but the new model gives those who are willing to spend more flexibility in deciding where to spend their money. At the same time, it opens the doors to those who didn't want to pay a subscription fee for one reason or another. As expected, there was an influx of new players, breathing life back into Stormreach.

This latest update is the third since DDO Unlimited was launched last September, and Turbine promises more. According to Adam Mersky, their Director of Communications, a total of six updates are lined up for this year.

This is the first update designed since the F2P relaunch.

"This is the first update where we really had, from the beginning of the design cycle all the way through implementation, the advantage of reacting to the players' feedback since launch," adds Executive Producer Fernando Paiz, who showed us through the new high level content. "Updates 1 and 2 of course had a lot of small changes in reaction to player feedback but the heavy design on those were done well ahead of our launch for DDO Unlimited."

The biggest issue they've addressed here is the lack of free content beyond level 12. In Update 3, they've introduced four level 13-18 dungeon quests, which effectively provide enough content to get to level 20. They have also removed the need for leveling sigils. The game previously required players not paying a subscription to use a leveling sigil in order to advance every fourth level. These sigils were available as loot options after completing certain quests or by looting chests in some dungeons; the easiest way to obtain them was through the DDO store. These two changes alone have opened up the game substantially and any player can now conceivably advance all the way to the level cap without having to spend a single penny.

Turbine is giving away a great deal of content in this update.

Why is Turbine doing this? It's no secret that "free-to-play" doesn't mean that game companies are spending money without getting anything in return. Ideally, an F2P game offers the most casual of players some enjoyment for free while successfully enticing the more dedicated ones to subsidize the free players by buying items or perks. Otherwise, there's no money for further development, the game stagnates, and eventually dies of atrophy. So, you would expect an update to introduce more stuff for you to buy, not more free content. Well, perhaps in this game more so than in any other MMO, character advancement is only a by-product of experiencing the content, and as they introduce more premium high level modules in the future, it benefits them to have a bigger potential market if the new breed of free players were also at level cap.

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