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The folks over at GameSpy have released a review of D&D Insider. Read all about it here:
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/867/867920p1.html
...or, if you are at work and GameSpy is blocked:
[SBLOCK=The article]Dungeons & Dragons: 4th Edition Comes to PC
Soon, you'll be able to manage old-school D&D games from your PC. We get ready to dive into the dungeons once again.
By Patrick Joynt | April 18, 2008
Wizards of the Coast will be releasing the 4th edition of the hallmark RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, this summer. The company was kind enough to give us an early look at the game, a one-on-four with some of the key team members for 4th Edition, which gave us a chance to see how the new edition is bringing D&D into the digital age and the realm of online gaming.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, One d20 at a Time
From a design perspective, the most shocking change to 4th Edition is its explicit resemblance to MMOs -- specifically, World of Warcraft. Classes now explicitly fill one of five roles in combat, mimicking the MMO trinity of healer, tank and damage guy. Powers are being designed to be usable more often so that you don't have to call a halt to the adventure for the wizard to sleep eight hours. And enemies are being designed with a more careful eye to the hit points and damage relationship.
Another change involves damage output. Currently, D&D enemies' hit-point pools and damage outputs can spike oddly for a given level of difficulty. In 4th Edition, enemies will be distinguished by flavorful but easy-to-adjudicate abilities, hopefully making encounters easier to design without having to check the math on every enemy yourself.
One of the biggest issues facing Dungeons and Dragons is the difficulty of getting players together for a few hours every few weeks as its player base gets older and busier. It's tough enough to get a group of players coordinated for a dungeon raid online, but imagine if you all had to actually go to the same place, in person to play. The horror! The solution, for Wizards, is in its Insider service.
There's Nowhere to be But Inside
Insider is a new optional digital subscription service that will, when complete, include access to a wide variety of content and tools. The cornerstone of the service is a subscription to the PDF versions of classic D&D magazines "Dragon" and "Dungeon." "Dragon" covers more broadly interesting topics such as new weapons, classes, or archetypes, whereas "Dungeon" is a dungeon master's tool, offering adventures, maps, and enemies. Both are reassuringly content-heavy.
Insider also comes with a map-building tool, a dungeon cartography set with numerous tiles that you can easily drag and drop onto the dungeon grid. Initial tiles include basic walls, doors, pits, and popular variants like walls of fire and spike pits. More tiles will become available as the product line goes on. There's also a simple-to-use sketching tool, so you can doodle something on the fly if needed. Most of these tiles are also 3D, so when you're done building your dungeon you can turn it into a more visually interesting 3D one for your players.
The tiles revolve around the key feature of Insider: the ability to play digitally. In the maps you've assembled, players can manipulate virtual miniatures, make their dice rolls, and play the tactical level of D&D almost as easily as if you were all in one room together. With integrated voice and text chat, the program becomes an easy-to-use, centralized solution for playing D&D without having to get an entire group into one room.
In addition to those tools, Insider also includes access to an online rules encyclopedia, which will be kept up to date with all of the crunchy bits as the D&D line expands. A character builder will walk you through creating your PCs or NPCs and exporting them to a digital or pen-and-paper character sheet. A miniature builder will let you use a broad set of customizable options (that will expand in time) to create the perfect virtual version of your hero; you can use that miniature in the dungeon tile system, export a custom jpeg of it, or just use it as your wallpaper.
Overall, the Insider suite is one of the most promising integrations of the D&D experience and online functionality we've seen. However, we have one major concern: price. Virtual monster miniature pricing hasn't been set, but an Insider subscription (that is, Dungeon and Dragon magazines, access to the rules encyclopedia, and use of the character builder, virtual mini builder, and dungeon creator) will run $15 a month, or $10 a month with a subscription. Although we recognize that Wizards is putting a lot out with this software, the price point seems really steep at the moment. Perhaps we'll see a reconsideration of the price before Insider launches. [/SBLOCK]
Man, I don't know about those screenshots. The background images look really good IMO, but the 3D renderings of the characters themselves isn't working for me. That said, it is still the best-looking dragonborn I have seen so far. (Click images to see full-size versions.)
I can already sense a disturbance in the force, over GameSpy's mention that 4E has an "explicit resemblance to MMOs -- specifically, World of Warcraft." As soon as I read that paragraph I immediately thought "oh man, here we go again."
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/867/867920p1.html
...or, if you are at work and GameSpy is blocked:
[SBLOCK=The article]Dungeons & Dragons: 4th Edition Comes to PC
Soon, you'll be able to manage old-school D&D games from your PC. We get ready to dive into the dungeons once again.
By Patrick Joynt | April 18, 2008
Wizards of the Coast will be releasing the 4th edition of the hallmark RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, this summer. The company was kind enough to give us an early look at the game, a one-on-four with some of the key team members for 4th Edition, which gave us a chance to see how the new edition is bringing D&D into the digital age and the realm of online gaming.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, One d20 at a Time
From a design perspective, the most shocking change to 4th Edition is its explicit resemblance to MMOs -- specifically, World of Warcraft. Classes now explicitly fill one of five roles in combat, mimicking the MMO trinity of healer, tank and damage guy. Powers are being designed to be usable more often so that you don't have to call a halt to the adventure for the wizard to sleep eight hours. And enemies are being designed with a more careful eye to the hit points and damage relationship.
Another change involves damage output. Currently, D&D enemies' hit-point pools and damage outputs can spike oddly for a given level of difficulty. In 4th Edition, enemies will be distinguished by flavorful but easy-to-adjudicate abilities, hopefully making encounters easier to design without having to check the math on every enemy yourself.
One of the biggest issues facing Dungeons and Dragons is the difficulty of getting players together for a few hours every few weeks as its player base gets older and busier. It's tough enough to get a group of players coordinated for a dungeon raid online, but imagine if you all had to actually go to the same place, in person to play. The horror! The solution, for Wizards, is in its Insider service.
There's Nowhere to be But Inside
Insider is a new optional digital subscription service that will, when complete, include access to a wide variety of content and tools. The cornerstone of the service is a subscription to the PDF versions of classic D&D magazines "Dragon" and "Dungeon." "Dragon" covers more broadly interesting topics such as new weapons, classes, or archetypes, whereas "Dungeon" is a dungeon master's tool, offering adventures, maps, and enemies. Both are reassuringly content-heavy.
Insider also comes with a map-building tool, a dungeon cartography set with numerous tiles that you can easily drag and drop onto the dungeon grid. Initial tiles include basic walls, doors, pits, and popular variants like walls of fire and spike pits. More tiles will become available as the product line goes on. There's also a simple-to-use sketching tool, so you can doodle something on the fly if needed. Most of these tiles are also 3D, so when you're done building your dungeon you can turn it into a more visually interesting 3D one for your players.
The tiles revolve around the key feature of Insider: the ability to play digitally. In the maps you've assembled, players can manipulate virtual miniatures, make their dice rolls, and play the tactical level of D&D almost as easily as if you were all in one room together. With integrated voice and text chat, the program becomes an easy-to-use, centralized solution for playing D&D without having to get an entire group into one room.
In addition to those tools, Insider also includes access to an online rules encyclopedia, which will be kept up to date with all of the crunchy bits as the D&D line expands. A character builder will walk you through creating your PCs or NPCs and exporting them to a digital or pen-and-paper character sheet. A miniature builder will let you use a broad set of customizable options (that will expand in time) to create the perfect virtual version of your hero; you can use that miniature in the dungeon tile system, export a custom jpeg of it, or just use it as your wallpaper.
Overall, the Insider suite is one of the most promising integrations of the D&D experience and online functionality we've seen. However, we have one major concern: price. Virtual monster miniature pricing hasn't been set, but an Insider subscription (that is, Dungeon and Dragon magazines, access to the rules encyclopedia, and use of the character builder, virtual mini builder, and dungeon creator) will run $15 a month, or $10 a month with a subscription. Although we recognize that Wizards is putting a lot out with this software, the price point seems really steep at the moment. Perhaps we'll see a reconsideration of the price before Insider launches. [/SBLOCK]
Man, I don't know about those screenshots. The background images look really good IMO, but the 3D renderings of the characters themselves isn't working for me. That said, it is still the best-looking dragonborn I have seen so far. (Click images to see full-size versions.)
I can already sense a disturbance in the force, over GameSpy's mention that 4E has an "explicit resemblance to MMOs -- specifically, World of Warcraft." As soon as I read that paragraph I immediately thought "oh man, here we go again."
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