DDO: Eberron Unlimited Editorial

The Examiner has published a short piece about the new direction Turbine is taking Dungeons & Dragons Online. They seem to be pretty bitter about what Turbine did with the license, but at least concede that the free-to-play version "might be worth checking out":
Let's not forget that giving the Dungeons and Dragons license to Turbine goes down as one of the top mistakes in MMO history. I knew it was a mistake as soon as they said PvP wouldn't be included because they didn't want to go through the process of balancing it. Balancing it? The rules of Dungeons and Dragons are stated in the Player's Handbook and DM's Guide. What's to balance? Just code the rules.

Sadly, from what I saw in my brief stint trying the game, they didn't even build an MMO. They built a multiplayer game where you could hang around with a bunch of other people waiting for enough people to join an instance. I'm sorry, but games like Guild Wars and the ill-fated Hellgate: London are not MMO's. They are multiplayer games with a graphical representation of the multiplayer screen found in any multiplayer game.

Heck, Neverwinter Nights is more of an MMO. It's just too bad that Bioware gave the franchise over to Obsidian to destroy. (Let's all pray they don't do the same with Dragon Age: Origins!)