Quickly becoming one of the most consistently updated MMORPGs in the industry, Turbine's DDO team is back with another ZAM tour in Update 3!

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.

One of the coolest things about Update 3 definitely has to be that it really shows how much Turbine cares about its players. How do we know this? Well, Updates 1 and 2 were actually in development a little before the re-launch of DDO as a free to play MMO, so, in this way, Update 3 will be their first update where the team has worked entirely with their new business model in mind.

The result?

Update 3 is almost entirely focused on DDO's free-playing demographic. All four of the new instances being introduced are entirely free to all players, with one level 13 instance, two level 15 instances and one level 18 instance. All of these dungeons are designed to fix the "progression gap" that players said was present in the game for those who don't want to pay a single penny. In particular, if a player doesn't buy any DDO adventure packs at all, Turbine wanted to make sure that these players would still have ready access to higher level dungeons, and that's what Update 3 is all about.

In addition to these four new free dungeons, Turbine has removed those extremely confusing "leveling sigils," which were basically little runes that players needed to either buy from the store, or find in-game, that would allow them to advance to the next four levels. Turbine thought that these sigils would work well as a brief introduction to the DDO store, but players were hitting level four and getting confused, and many assumed that you were required to buy something at the DDO store at level 4. With this change, it's Turbine's way of saying that they're committed - even to the players who don't want to pay a cent.

The final overarching change that Turbine added for most of their dungeons was the "Casual" dungeon difficulty. Before, the difficulty was known as "solo," and it tweaked the instance to make it easier for the solo player running through. Unfortunately, if players found solo difficulty to be too difficult, there really wasn't much they could do. Now, with the 'Casual' difficulty, players can bring as many friends and hirelings as they want, so they can play as Casual or as Hardcore as they want.

To get back to our tour, we began it all by walking through the market, where I quickly noticed that… it was nighttime! Fernando Paiz, Executive Producer of DDO and my guide, noted that the team had added some nighttime hours for the city in order to improve the game's immersion and to show off some fancy light work. While there are, currently, no secret quests only available at night, the team does note that it's a simple matter of working it in if they so wish.