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D&D Online: It's Gonna Cost Ya
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From D&D Online's character creation system.
I got done screwing around with the new Trial of the Champion in WoW last night to find out that I'd gotten into the closed beta for Dungeons & Dragons Online. Later this month, D&DO is going to a microtransaction-based gameplay model.
When you fire the game up in its free-to-play mode, you receive a number of classes and races to choose from when creating a character. The basics - humans, elves, halflings, and dwarves; fighters, paladins, rangers, sorcerers, wizards, rogues, etc. - are free, along with a number of custom classes like war priests or a wizard sub-class that the game calls an Arcane Cannon. (With a name like that, you know it's good.) If you want to play a drow, a warforged, or a monk, though, or one of a couple of different prestige classes like the favored soul, or you want more than two character slots, that's when the microtransactions start to kick in.
I've used "Chinese/Korean-style" as an adjective to refer to microtransactions on this blog before now, and been called on it. It's still a perfectly descriptive term; that style of MMO is something where if you really want to stand apart from the crowd, you shell out the money for the purple tiger mount or something. I've yet to see one of those microtransaction-based games where you can pay actual cash for something with a distinct in-game advantage, and that's carried over to MMO-not-RPGs like Parabellum or Age of Victory.
D&DO is odd in that, while you obviously don't have to pay for it if you don't want to, the microtransactions actually apply to real content. Several dungeons are up for sale in the Turbine Store, along with the aforementioned highly-prized character classes. The drow elf is such munchkin bait that I'd imagine a lot of players will pony up the cash for that privilege without even really thinking about it.
Everything I've seen for purchase goes for somewhere between seven and nine hundred Turbine Points, although the cost in real money for those points has yet to be implemented in-game; the in-game store simply says there are no points packages for sale at the moment.
The game itself is still what it was. D&DO is interesting because while it's still very much an MMORPG, it's not the MUD with graphics that tends to characterize the genre. Instead, it's an attempt to institute as many of the 3.5 AD&D rules into computer-game format as possible, up to and including the lame-assed short-duration priest buffs that everyone tended to house-rule back to 3.0 standards. The focus is on modular adventures rather than grinding your face off, and in a perfect world, D&DO would have founded a sort of side genre. Instead, while it certainly has its fans, it's practically invisible.
(Here's an interesting if tangential side note. Like D&DO, Knights of the Old Republic is based upon the d20 tabletop system, to the point where you can call up the virtual "dice results" in a submenu. If The Old Republic retains that system at launch, it'll be a lot like D&DO is right now: adventure-based, modular, highly instanced, etc.)
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