D&D Online - Sola's Dev Diary - Wilderness Quests

Turbine's D&DO forums has a new dev diary from Sola on creating better wilderness areas and quests:

Prior to launching DDO we really focused on building great dungeons and I’m very happy with how the dungeons turned out. However, this left the wilderness areas of Xen’drik less well developed. A few months back, I set out to build a new, better kind of quest model for our outdoor areas.

What are wilderness areas?

When I talk about wilderness areas, I mean places like Tangleroot Gorge, Three Barrel cove, and the Menechtarun Desert. These outdoor areas usually lead to some dungeons – the way that Tangleroot leads to Splinterskull, for example. Wilderness areas don’t really have a true quest – just “encounters” which give a bit of XP. Unfortunately, they tend to be underplayed, because the XP and treasure for encounters are (in technical game design terms) crappy.