So after a weird bug after updating Firefox, I lost all of my bookmarks and went into the history folder to get some of the webpages back and noticed that the DDO page was listed as "Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited". As I'd never seen that before I checked over the webpage and noticed at the very bottom the copyright has changed from this:

Quote:

© 2006-2007 Turbine, Inc. © 2006-2007 Hasbro, Inc. © 2006-2007 Atari, Inc. All rights reserved. Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Eberron, Stormreach, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, and Wizards of the Coast and related logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast Inc. in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions, and are used with permission.

To this:

Quote:

© 2009 Turbine, Inc. © 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC © 2009 Atari, Inc. All rights reserved. Dungeons & Dragons Online, Eberron Unlimited, Dungeons & Dragons, D &D and Wizards of the Coast and related logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions, and are used with permission.

Notice there is no mention of Stormreach in the new copyright, so perhaps "Vast and Mysterious" is going to be us getting a more open world with more of Xen'drik to play around in. Of course there is a distinct possibility I missed something, www.archive.org only has DDO pages through September of '07 so hard to say for sure. Interesting to me nonetheless..

~G

Turbine changed its copyright notice a short time later...

That's not all, though!  If you go to the ESRB.com web site (the group that rates video games) and search for Dungeons and Dragons Online, you will find this:

(thanks to Big Dex for the idea.)

Interesting, no?  Look at the first game on the list.  Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited. 

So, what does this mean?  As of yet Turbine has not said anything about it.  Let's speculate with what we know:

- Turbine has expressed its desire to bring a marketing push to the game.  The company has also tested it's Turbine Download Manager on Lammania.  They will be hitting a nice "capping" point in Mod 9 with the level going up to 20.  There's been talk of a "vast and mysterious" thing, and "super secret" stuff that they just couldn't talk about yet. 

A paid expansion, perhaps?  Maybe.  Perhaps it could be a bit of a repackaging of the DDO game box to include everything up to Mod 9.  That would make sense, and even us veterans would probably want to pick up a new disc that had all the updates on it.  Perhaps it's just a remarketing of DDO.  Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach keeps the focus on the city, and we've already traveled far outside of the city's walls.  That said, there's certainly a TON of the Eberron campaign setting that has yet to be included.

If it was a paid expansion, could it include things like new races, classes or housing?  A lot of content outside of Stormreach?  What about Dungeons and Dragons version 4.0?  Turbine has said they wanted to essentially take some aspecs of it for DDO, but maybe this would be a revamp. 

- It's important to note that this isn't the first time an expansion has been discussed in regards to DDO.  Way back around Mod 3, there was an ESRB rating and word of a Forsaken Lands expansion.  Ultimately, Turbine decided to offer it as a free update to the game with Mod 3.  That brought the Menechtarun Desert and Demon Queen raid to the game, still popular stuff.  However, some retailers took pre-orders for it even after Turbine announced that there would not be the Forsaken Lands expansion.

- It's also important to note that this wouldn't be the first time that game-watchers first got word of a pending release through an ESRB rating.  IGN, Gamespot and other outlets have often discussed this happening.  It's quite significant to see this, in my opinion. 

I should note that I haven't asked Turbine for any kind of response.  Frankly, I don't see them discussing it until they are ready.  Maybe one of the news outlets can do some follow-up, and I'll link to it there.  I'll let you know if I learn anything.

I'm very excited by this, though!  Could be very interesting stuff.  Just want to thank the DDO community for essentially putting this together. 

Quickly, I also wanted to post up the latest splash screen to the game, for archival purposes if nothing else:




Here's a LINK to the video on YouTube.

All right, I'll have more later!

Jerry