Hi all!  There's some major new information out about Mod 6 today!

Turbine has given the folks at the video game ubersite Gamespy a major early look at The Thirteenth Eclipse, which the Gamespy article says is set to be released on January 30th.

Here's the LINK to their preview of the Mod 6 raid zone and other aspects of the mod - WARNING: there are some spoilers in here.

Here's the LINK to a new Dev Diary by DDO Senior Producer Kate Paiz!

Wow - there's some serious news in there!

Here's a cliff notes version of what I found significant:

- Turbine is using the story lines to start to implement Manifest Zones in the game.
- The raid zone (called The Shroud) has five sub-regions, which sound kinda like five new quests, but big.
- The zones are sorta loosely based on classic video games.  Gauntlet, Pac Man, Frogger...but only kinda.  They sound really sweet!
- Here's a quote from the Gamespy article: 

"When players first pop in, they'll be separated into the four corners of the maze and have to fight their way to the center to reconnect. Once they do, they'll meet up with four brutally tough bosses that need to be taken out. What makes these guys particularly vicious is that each has an aura that lends their own special ability to whatever monster happens to be in the area. One, for example, gives every creature a "Stoneskin" buff while another turns any weapon vorpal. Naturally keeping these four bosses together isn't even an option because they also give their special powers to each other."

  Holy carp!  Monsters with stoneskin and vorpals - they sound like us! 

- Unkillable flying blades.  What more needs to be said?

- In the video Dev Diary, Kate Paiz says:
 
- The raid will have five stages.
- She also says the Eldritch Device, Turbine's so-called "crafting prototype", will initially have 1200 recipies!  That's a lot.  Sounds like a pretty big "start" to crafting already!
- The crafting mechanic will get an upgrade during every content release this year.
- Monks are tentatively slated to be released in April!
- The devs are planning to update the player user interface (UI) in the second half of the year, including more customization abilities!

Yeah, so tons of cool stuff in there.  Check out the links!

IN OTHER NEWS...

- Keith Baker's newest book will be called "City of Stormreach" and will be an Eberron supplement for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.  It's available for pre-order on Amazon.com and other places as well.  It's described as "building on the plots and characters from the MMORPG Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach".  Yeah!  Speaking of Keith Baker.......STAY TUNED.

- DDOcast is set to make an announcement this week of epic proportions.  I should be able to "spill the beans" hopefully by the end of the day on Friday!

Yeah, so tons going on.  Risia also got what appears to be a minor update this week as well, so if you haven't checked out the Mod 6 outdoor area up there for preview, maybe now's the time!  These next few weeks are going to be huge times for DDO and DDOcast, I'm sure.

Jerry