When Turbine originally announced that Dungeon and Dragons Online would be relaunched as a free-to-play microtransaction title it was dated for this coming week, August 4. Unfortunately the developer announced only a week before the reboot that the the rebranded DDO: Eberron Unlimited has been delayed to early September.
According to Executive producer Fernando Paiz the company’s addiction to delivering quality content has caused the delay to September 9:
“While we are very pleased with the performance of the game and are excited about the response from the players, we are committed to delivering a high-quality experience. We feel that more time is needed to deliver on this commitment. As a result, we are delaying our launch to ensure that we can support the massive increase in players that we are expecting and deliver them a free to play experience like none other.”
A Turbine representative has since clarified exactly what caused the delay, a lack of adequate computing power (and some bugs):
“Earlier this week we were sure we were on track for the August 4th launch date, had advertising purchased for it, shifts scheduled, etc. Smiles all around, sighs of relief.. and then the flood of players during Monday’s live event on Lamannia showed us that no, we’re not ready. We need to add more capacity, we need to fix some late-breaking bugs, and as much as we hated to do it, we need to delay the launch date.”
Really? I didn’t hear about this. This is good because it means that they really care about the product and the community.