While Chris "Pwyff" Tom usually handles our tours of the Dungeons & Dragons Online updates, this week I stepped up to the plate to take a look at Update 10's features with members of the Turbine team. Led by Design Director Ian Currie, Executive Producer Fernando Paiz and Producer Erik Boyer, I got a crash course on the latest content that is now live in the game for VIP members.

Keep reading after the jump for all the details from my personal tour of Update 10: Reign of Madness!

More consistent than any other MMO team in the industry, the people over at Dungeons & Dragons Online have been hard at work to get Update 9 out the door and, as usual, I met up in-game with DDO's Executive Producer and Producer, Fernando Paiz and Eric Boyer, to check out what's to come on April 27.

When it comes to gauging the success of specific MMORPGs, while most tend to focus on opening week sales and subscription numbers, for me, the sign of a really great MMO lies in how the game evolves over the years. On that note, probably one of the best examples of an MMO that knows how to continue evolving is Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online, and this year seems like it will be no different. I met with DDO's Executive Producer, Fernando Paiz, and DDO's Producer, Eric Boyer, for an in-game tour, to check out DDO's big plans for their 5th anniversary celebrations.

Whenever I think about some of the huge advances made by Dungeons & Dragons Online since its shift to free-to-play, my head just starts to spin. Just the fact that Turbine is still maintaining its aggressive promise to deliver content on a near-monthly basis is impressive, but if you remember that this is in an industry where half-year to one-year content gaps (I'm looking at you, Aion) are common, you'll realize just how good Turbine has become at keeping its customers happy. But enough of that: today is another Turbine tour day!

Whenever I think of what makes an MMORPG "great," it's easy to pick out the obvious categories: unique content, sharp graphics, fun game play, the list can go on and on. Surprisingly, however, if you were to really consider what keeps players in their favorite MMORPG (and, if found lacking, can also be one of the major reasons why players quit in droves), a lot of the time it can be something as simple as having frequent content updates. Take, for example, Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online and the huge success they have had over the past year. While many would attribute this to DDO's free-to-play shift, I'm certain that at least part of its growth can be attributed to the fact that this reborn MMORPG has received a startling six content updates since last year.

It's only been a few months since the last time we went on one of our official Dungeons and Dragons Online content tours, but the team has certainly been hard at work since then. It's no secret that Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine's other flagship MMORPG, has chosen to follow DDO's shift to a free-to-play subscription model, and much of the reasoning behind that change can be traced to the stunning popularity of Dungeons and Dragons Online. After all, it isn't every day that one of the most popular subscription-based MMORPGs in the industry decides to transition into a more competitive market (the free-to-play one); unless, of course, you have the perfect trailblazer to follow.

When an MMO undergoes some sort of rebranding or re-release, it typically goes through a "honeymoon phase," where the development team, all afire with gaming passion and motivation, just keeps churning away to get new content out and prove to their loyal fan base that their game deserves a second chance. The problem with this ultra-motivated development phase, however, is that most MMO companies that go through it tend to fall to the wayside after a month or two of hard development and, soon after, they're back to their one-update-every-six-months schedule, except now they have to keep up a monthly newsletter that was created at the apex of their enthusiasm.

Well, in the first month or two of DDO's re-launch as a free to play game, there were a number of skeptics who thought that this business model transition marked the beginning of the end. Turbine, however, has done something very odd in the past half year. You see, they've gone and taken their hyper-motivated "honeymoon phase," and they've cleverly decided to keep it up for the next year. Already having released two content updates over the past five months, with an additional three mini-updates every other month, DDO has grown an immense amount with its new life, and we here at ZAM were invited to check out their third major content update in five months.

These days, it seems there is very little in this gaming world that we players can rely on to be timely and dependable. Expansions get pushed back all the time, and the new fad in MMO release dates is to set one date and then release the game three months later. Of course, we don't mind if these delayed schedules also mean higher quality end products, but this certainly doesn't mean that a consistent and reliable development schedule is not something we appreciate.

With this in mind, if you were to speak to any fans of Dungeons & Dragons Online before it went F2P, timely and consistent updates would have been the furthest adjective from any of their lips. Back then, Turbine was heavily mired in the quagmire that is business negotiations, and, despite having already completed work on the much famed (and much delayed) Module 9, it was a whopping nine months (how fitting!) before the player population saw anything on their end. Flash forward to today, however, and Turbine's consistent monthly development schedule has been one of their greatest strengths in rejuvenating the franchise, and it was with great pleasure that they invited us back to check out DDO's Update 2, and the conclusion to their two-part story arc with the nefarious 'Dreaming Dark."

It was only a week ago I visited the universe of Dungeons & Dragons Online to check out how the game had managed to make the transition from its former pay to play model, to its current free to play micro transaction model. One important thing that I noted in my write-up was that when most MMORPGs make that shift from pay to play to free to play, development cycles and development "quality" tend to go down. If you don't believe me, feel free to check out games like Sword of the New World, a game that made the same shift as DDO, but ended up with zero updates for almost a year after the shift.

Of course, there are other MMOs that have made a much smoother transition, but DDO comes with a more awkward past, as the famed "module 9 update" ended up taking almost nine months to see the light of day (and the module was ultimately released with DDO's F2P shift). In this way, when Turbine announced that the free to play DDO would see more development than when it was subscription based, you can imagine how sceptical some people became.