Dungeons & Dragons Onlinehas been taking players on adventures throughout Eberron, The Forgotten Realms, and beyond for an impressive 16 years now, outlasting countless MMORPGs that have risen and fallen over the last decade. Despite the game’s age, it still enjoys a loyal and engaged community ofDungeons & Dragonsfans and continues to develop expansions and gameplay balance overhauls based on player feedback.
Game Rant sat down withDungeons & Dragons Onlineproducer Amanda Grow to discuss the game’s newest expansion, Vecna Unleashed, which will pit players against one ofD&D’s most infamous antagonists. Grow spoke about the new content players can look forward to in the expansion, and also weighed in onDDO’s design philosophies, its place in the MMORPG industry, and what’s next for the long-running MMORPG.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RELATED:Best Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns for Beginners
Q: In Vecna Unleashed, players will be dealing with one of D&D’s most notorious villains, Vecna. What was the team’s thought process behind this expansion? Were there certain narrative or gameplay goals you were focused on?
Grow:We sort of introduced Vecna in a previous expansion at a time when players weren’t really expecting him. They knew that they were going to the Isle of Dread, which is a very infamousD&Dsetting, but what they didn’t know is why they were going there. So once it was revealed that it was Vecna, we knew that this is such a well-known villain that we had to have a big story with him.
We also felt that he was a very compelling villain that will allow us to bring to a head one of our longer ongoing stories around the Codex of the Infinite Plains. Players have been following that storyline for quite a while. Even though it’s nice that inDDOyou don’t have to have been following along for each of the expansions for it to still be a fun story where you feel like you understand what’s happening, for players who have been with us and have been following the antics of the Codex this will be a time when they start to get some story payoff for that as well.
So for us, we knew thatVecna is such a powerful entitythat it was going to be a very extra planar adventure, which is appropriate for our players now considering how notorious and powerful they’ve gotten at this point in their adventuring careers.
Q: Can you talk about some of the new enemies and challenges that players will be facing in this extraplanar adventure?
Grow:This is an interesting time in the story for players because up to this point in some of theD&Dsettings, it’s very typical to see really powerful beings and gods coming right at you and interacting with you, but in the Eberron setting – which is sort of the home base where players are inDDO– that’s not as common. The gods are sort of off doing their thing, and you’re mostly dealing with our followers. In this update, Vecna is such a threat to therealm of Eberronthat they actually do get to engage more directly with some of these really powerful divine beings in a way that’s not typically happening in the setting.
So we’re very excited about that because it means that players who really want to get in-depth with the dynamics of deities inD&Dor any Eberron fans out there will be able to engage with beings like the Traveler for the first time, who has in the past only ever been hinted at, or getting more direct with Lady Vol or the Lord of Blades.
We’re also really excited to take them to some new places because these beings are very powerful, it also means that some of the places that you’re going to have to go to engage with them are more extreme than usual. For example, you’ll get to go to see your very first glimpses of what’s called the Glass Plateau and the Mournland, and you also get to go to the Elemental Plane of Water. There’s even a little bit of adventuring into the astral plane.
Q: Players will be exploring the campus of Morgrave University in the City of Sharn in this expansion. How does Morgrave stand out from other areas players have encountered?
Grow:Up to this point, players have been to places like the Towers of the Twelve in Eberron, which is sort of the cross-continental arm of research for arcane scholars. In Morgrave, you’re getting more of that. This is a much more established university, it’s much more grand. There are a lot more characters in general than what you would find at Towers of the Twelve. The scope of Morgrave University as a place is massive.
Sharn is a very vertical city and players have been experiencing a bit of that in some of our past expansions, but if you jump off of a roof in Morgrave, you float down to a whole other level and there are more NPCs, and you’re like “Oh wow,this place is really big” and very beautiful. We wanted to really give it that feel of a very big, well-established campus with a lot of grandeur to it. So I feel like in this update, it really hits that note.
Q: Are there any features or updates arriving with the expansion that you’re particularly excited about?
Grow:We wanted to verify that there was a little bit of something for everybody. One example of that is we’re doing a bit of a balance pass on a host of classes at once. In the past, what we’ve tended to do was sort of vertical. We’d pick a class and rework it top to bottom, and it’s a big overhaul. But sinceDDOhasso many races and classes, it can be a long time before we finally get around to yours.
With this update, what we wanted to try instead was to target some small fixes across the board through several different classes, targeting little pain points or pet peeves where players have been saying, “Hey, I really wish that this had changed.” As we’ve tried to do a slice across a whole bunch of classes, lots of people get to experience some interesting build choices and improvements. So anybody will be able to access that.
We’re also really excited about a small feature for newer people. One of the things that we’ve always liked aboutDDOis the fact that in some games, it can feel like “Oh, if I haven’t been playing for the past few years, I’m never going to catch up to people, I’m not going to know what’s going on, and I don’t even know how to get going.” So we’ve adapted the existing reincarnation system. If you’re coming into this content, and maybe you’ve taken a break for a few years, you’re still always going to find people to play with because people are always looping through the content, essentially. There are going to be people at your level.
If you’re somebody who’s coming in because you’re like, “You know what, I just gotta start again, I don’t even remember where I left off.” We’re trying to update the tavern keepers in the early part of the game to help you out to say, “Ah, you got some choice paralysis, you don’t know where you want to go next. Here, I’ll give you a list that you could pick from and you know what? If you still don’t even know what you want to pick, I’ll just pick one for you. Here, go do this quest.”
RELATED:Wizards of the Coast Responds to New Dungeons and Dragons Book AI Art Controversy
The idea is that people will feel a little less overwhelmed when they’re coming into a game like this that has so many different choices of content where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, where do I even begin?” Particularly because all of them are meant to be understood as standalone. If you don’t play the entire story arc, it doesn’t hurt you, you’ll probably enjoy the full story, but if you’re like “Which story do I want?” the bartender will help you out. So this is the first iteration of that and we’ll continue to expand it if people like it.
And then what’s already come out for folks that have engaged with the presale is the Macrotechnic which is our first Epic Destiny that we’ve added as a new Destiny. We had redone our Epic Destiny system a year or two ago, and people really were enjoying it, so now we’re adding additional Destinies. This one is themed around that sort of arcane magic-meets-technology field.
For the first time, if players are using this Epic Destiny even if they’re not fromthe Artificer class, it’s going to let them tap a couple of abilities that in the past have only been available to Artificers. We should see some really interesting character build experimentation, which is something we know our community is always excited about.
Q: With theD&Dmovie,Baldur’s Gate 3, and evenStranger Thingsintroducing many new people toD&D, has this caused you to pay special attention to the new player experience in DDO?
Grow:That’s part of it. While we have a faithful, long-playing community, they are always going to need people to play with and the only way that that’s going to happen is if we make sure that the earlier experience in the game still gets some love so that the person who is coming in can feel like they can mesh with everybody else and that they know where to go, and they know what to do.
Compared to the game as it existed in 2006, there may be modern gameplay conventions that have changed in a way that we need to either help you understand a little more because games aren’t using the same style as us and make sure that we’re helping onboard new players. We always attempt to look back and go, “Okay, how, how is this experience still holding up now after all this time?”
As you said,D&Dis just continuing to surge in popularity, right? We just hadtheD&Dmoviecome out, and we all really enjoyed that. There’s just more and more interest inD&D, and so for us, we need to be here to catch all these newD&Dfans that are growing their love of these settings and growing their love of these types of rule sets and gameplay.
Q:DDOis affectionately known as an “old-school MMORPG.” How do you toe the line between staying true to that old-school vibe, while also keeping in mind modern MMO design conventions?
Grow:One of the things we think about is the infrastructure around the game. For example, we just did a major overhaul of our in-game store where people get items. We also have been doing updates to our website, or updates to our email, all of those supporting features are things that you need to keep refreshed. Players are going to be comparing you to every other product, and that’s the first impression.
So if back in 2006 everybody was collecting first names and last names on the signup and maybe now most products aren’t doing that. If you’re still doing that, it makes you look kind of weird, and people might not want to try you. You need to be watching for the intro that people are getting from most games and then tune it a little bit to ensure it still feels familiar enough.
Then once they hit the things that are less familiar, they’re ready for it because they’re like, “Okay, there are these elements that are specific to this game,” like resource management or the fact that we have a reincarnation system or the depth of the character builds or anything like that. They’re a little more ready to receive that difference.
We also try to think about, “Are there any mechanics that we have that maybe back in the day, people really understood them, but now it’s not going to be so understood? Can we tune a little bit, but still manage to keep the flavor of what a person is expecting out of a moreretro MMORPG?”
There’s definitely been a learning curve but I appreciate howDDOdiffers from many of the other MMOs that I play.
Grow:Sometimes it’s just about the way you describe yourself to people, too. If we’re at a point where if I say, “Hey, we’re an action RPG online,” and they’re like, “Well, I still don’t quite get what you mean.” If I have to, I’ll say, “You know what? We’re afantasy escape room, but you can play with five other friends and as many escape rooms as you can think of because we’ve made so many.” And if they’re like, “Oh, yeah, escape rooms. I know what that’s about,” because we’ve got traps and puzzles and all this.
So if that’s what it takes to help translate to them what kind of experience they’re going to have in the product, sometimes it’s about updating the language so that I’m able to better communicate what you’re going to experience when you come into a game like this.
Q: Compared to its earlier days,DDOhas become more solo-friendly. How do you approach the balance between being accessible to solitary players, while still encouraging and rewarding trademarkD&Dgroup play?
Grow:One of the things that we’ve always been very cautious of inDDOis the ability to let a player scale the amount of challenge that they want in any particular experience. If you are going to play a dungeon by yourself, you’re probably going to play on Casual Mode. If you’re gonna play it by yourself, but you’re willing to take a little bit more risk, you can probably get one of our AI hirelings to help you.
Then once you start going into Hard Difficulty, Elite Difficulty, Reaper Difficulty – which is what somebody might consider likea Nightmare Mode– or our new thing that we’ve been doing the last few years which is our Hardcore Seasons where you get one life, and that’s it, and if you die, you’re out of the contest.
By allowing people to scale how tough they want the experience to be, that’s what really allows them to tune the size of their group. With some content, you might go into it and go, “Okay, this is really hard, but I really want to see the story or I want to earn the certain item that I’ve always wanted for my build. Now I’ll go and find a couple of friends to help me play it on this tougher difficulty.”
But if I’m somebody that’s like, “Look, I just want to be able to play by myself, I don’t want to interact with anybody else, I want to read the story, I want to solve this puzzle on my own,” then you can play on the difficulty that allows you to accomplish that.
It’s nice that pretty much all of the content is accessible, it’s just a matter of determining the challenge level and number of players involved.
Grow:Exactly. And that changes as you play, too. I’ve found that some people as they start off the game, they’ll start in Casual and Normal, then as they get more and more skilled with it, or they really find a character build that just really suits them, then they’ll tune it up. They might be playing solo on some of those really tough difficulties that other people might be needing groups to play. It’s all about “What doyouneed,” and you can tune it as necessary.
Sometimes you can also step it back, you know, there’s nothing that says that just because you played this dungeon over here on Elite, the next one also has to be Elite. You’re choosing what you need as you go.
Q: As you mentioned,DDOhas been around since 2006. What do you feel have been some of the biggest changes for the game over the years?
Grow:I started playing basically two months after the product launched, and then I joined the company a year later. So I have definitely seen it through all of its various incarnations. Obviously, the really, really big one is when it went free to play. When the product first started, it was subscription only, but once we went free to play that really opened it up for that choice where somebody’s like, “Hey,this game is so hard. If only I had a couple of extra healing potions I could keep going,” or “Hey, I really want some cosmetics” or whatever you needed. Suddenly that choice was available to you at whatever scope you wanted so that was obviously huge. That was industry-changing.
And in terms of gameplay, sometimes it’s the little things. It’s things that we managed to figure out even now that we couldn’t figure out a long time ago. We were missing certain tech to allow us to have cloaks or mounts and rather than just giving up on that, years later we were like “No. This is something that really affects the enjoyment of the game, we’re going to figure out how to put this in.” For other games, if they had that from the get-go, it was like “Cloaks? What are you talking about?” But for us, it was like “Yes! Cloaks!”
Also some of our changes to the way we do content. We’ve tried lots of different ways of doing raiding. I liked the way thatDDOraids worked because I originally came from one of our sister games: I used to playEverquesta long time ago. To me, a raid meant I had to get 50 people and get super organized and I just wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. SoDDOhad these more bite-sized raids where I could get a much smaller group of people together to take it on, and still have really cool mechanics, really cool monsters, but it felt like I could take that in chunks. It was just a different style that I really enjoyed.
RELATED:13 Strongest D&D Villains, Ranked
I also really enjoyed the settings that we’ve been getting to go to. Originally, we were just Eberron, right? It was just 100% Eberron. But when you think aboutD&D, you think about all the different settings. You’re not justin the Forgotten Realmsor you’re not just in Ravenloft. For most people that likeD&D, you always had characters going a little bit everywhere. For this group, we’re going to do a campaign here, but now we’re going to change it and go over to Ravenloft temporarily.
So now that we are able to take the players to otherD&Duniverses, that was a big change because you really feel the difference in the visuals and the flavor of the places like when you go from Eberron, which has got that magepunk feel then step into Forgotten Realms, you’re like, “Wow, this is this is quite a change.” and then you go to Ravenloft and it’s Gothic Horror and you really feel the difference. You can have a taste of whatever you were in the mood for that night.
Q: That’s something great aboutD&D, it’s a multiverse with a ton of variety. Obviously,Baldur’s Gate 3is huge forD&Dfans right now. What isDDO’s philosophy when it comes to crossing over or making references to other games in theD&Dspace? Do you have relationships with the otherD&Dgames likeNeverwinter?
Grow:The vision currently is that each game is kind of its own thing. Think of us as each like a Dungeon Master, like Amanda’s the Dungeon Master of this incarnation of all these differentD&Duniverses, and thenNeverwinteris the Dungeon Master of what’s going on in that flavor of it.
We all are following the same general guideposts that are coming from our greatpartners at Wizards of the Coast, where they help us understand what’s truly canon. So that way we all agree that in this universe, a certain monster is always called such-and-such or in this universe, Elminster is known to have done the following things.
We also have some amount of freedom to then twist a little bit and say, “Well, in our campaign setting, maybe Elminster did this other stuff,” and that may or may not get referenced at all in other products. We have some things where you’ll see us kind of overlap on “Yes, this city exists, and yes, this history exists, but then when I play this game, these events happened.” So I think it’s kind of neat because you don’t feel like you’re fatigued. If you hear a story about, say, the Red Wizards of Thay in one game, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you know everything that’s going to happen with the Red Wizards of Thay in a differentD&Dgame.
That, to me, is a strength because it means that if you have a very big passion for certain settings, or certain types of creatures, or certain locations, you may go and see all these different multiverse flavors like “This is how this location was interpreted here, but over here, they said that Eveningstar was like this.” It’s fun to see that it’s almost like string theory for D&D at that point.
RELATED:Dungeons & Dragons: Every Casting Class, Ranked
Q: There are a lot of great MMOs on the market, butDDOmaintains a loyal community. Why do you feel players are drawn toDDO?
Grow:I think part of it is gameplay, some of it is the way that we run the game. Gameplay-wise,DDOhas a really fun dynamic of being able to sit down and quickly play basically like an escape room with your friends or by yourself. It’s easy to take a pause and go make your dinner or whatever it is you have to do. So that makes it really easy to come back at your own pace because there’s so much choice. You’re like, “This is what I’m in the mood for right now, and I can really adapt.” I feel like that’s a huge, huge component of what makes a person go “Oh, I really love playingDDO.”
We’ve always tried to be really aware of the things that people are excited to see, or what mechanics they want us to improve or to update, or ways that they would have more fun. So we attempt to be very engaged with them.
I think that’s another part of it. If you’re playing a game where you feel like, “Hey, if there’s something about this game that I think could be even more fun if I tell them, they might actually do it!” You feel like you have a little bit more agency, it’s more of a community at that point. It’s really important to have that social connection, even when you play solo, there’s still that feeling of, “I know that there’s going to be these items on the Auction House from other people that are putting it up there, I know when I’m standing around in a public area, I’m going to see so-and-so’s really cool mount ride by me.” I think it’s a really important part of what keeps people coming back.
One of the things we noticedduring the pandemic, was that we got this huge surge of players, and many of them hadn’t even been around for a couple of years. I would talk to people and ask “What brought you back?” And they would say, “Well, I was feeling really isolated, and playing this game let me tap into that feeling of being with everybody, and feeling like I was going somewhere and doing things and accomplishing stuff with people. I could get my build just tuned the way I wanted, or we could beat this dragon or whatever it was I needed to do.”
It makes you feel really good when you’re working on a game like this, and you hear that you’re able to have that kind of impact on people’s lives. I think that’s really the testament to what keeps a game likeDDOand some of our other products in the Daybreak family going for so long. That really strong community.
Q: Speaking of the community and player agency, have there been any major changes that come to mind that came from player feedback?
Grow:There are always tons of them, and some of them are little things where somebody will mention some weird imbalance with a very particular feat for a very particular class, and we’re like, “Oh, you know what? That doesn’t make sense. All right, let’s try to tune that.” I think you’re gonna see several of those changes with this balance pass on the classes as we really tried to look at the things that the community keeps bubbling up.
Settings are another huge thing that is influenced by what we hear from players and what excites them. We just did a survey recently where we were like, “Hey, here’s all the settings we could go to, how do you feel about them?” and so far, it’s been right on the money, everybody’s like, “Yes, we want to go here, here, and here!” We’re like, “Okay, that’s good because that’s what we thought you wanted because we’ve been reading your stuff and hearing your comments.”
Way back in the day, you basically only had tomonitor a forum. Now, people have so many different vectors to give us information that you have to be listening everywhere, because people have live streams and people are on many different social networks, and people are on our internal forums. You have to be able to aggregate all of that together. We try to scoop it all up, and look and say, “What do players want to do? Where do they want to go?”
So the next places that we’re gonna go are a direct result of that feedback from players saying, “Yes, let’s go here.”
Q: You mentioned howDDOgoing free-to-play back in the day was a pretty big moment for the game, and in fact was an early example that others in the industry have followed. How do you approach the balance between enticing players to invest in the game, while avoiding incidents of “pay to win” and things of that nature?
Grow:What we’ve always tried to say is that you may either give us time, or you can give us money, as long as it’s not something that is truly about your skill. I always joke that the store is more about, “Pay to not fail so hard” as opposed topay to win, because I guarantee you that inDDOthere are dungeons where I don’t care if you bought infinite res cakes and infinite healing potions, you still can’t beat that quest. So I think that’s part of it: we don’t try to tune the content to rely on the resources of the store being the thing that helps you get past it.
What we want is for the store to catch you if you’re really struggling, but for a skilled person, the people that really care about those dynamics and are like, “You know, what? I know how to play this, I’ve got a great build, I know how to do the timing of this puzzle, I’m going to do it.” So a big part of it is making sure that the relationship with the store isn’t about, “Oh, I need the store to accomplish things.” That’s not what the store is there for. The store is there to help anybody who’s like, “I want to love this game, but man, I don’t have the skill.”
Another thing is just listening to what players talk about where they’re like, “My life would be 1% better if you had this option for me” and we look at it ,and we go, “Okay if we give you this option, is this gonna break a bunch of stuff? Will this be okay?” We do analysis on it, and then we go, “Okay, this suggestion seems safe, let’s go ahead and put this in and see if people will find it useful.”
It was a big challenge for us because there were a couple ofother free-to-play gamesin the market around the same time as us, but they had been built to be free to play from the beginning, they had always had a store and content. For us, what was unique was our ability to retool a completely existing product that already was modeled around being a subscription game with an already established player base, and help them make that transition. It was a big success forDDO.
I think ofDDOas like a dragon phoenix, we’re always finding ways to keep it relevant, to keep reinventing itself, and we want this dragon to keep flying forever.
I like your point about not tuning the content to the shop stuff. A lot of early free-to-play MMOs back in the day were essentially impossible to make progress in without investing heavily because it was designed entirely around the shop.
Grow:We also tried to make sure there was another dynamic we had that not every game had, which was the ability to spend your time getting the points and not just your money. For some players, they actually are really good and have the time to go through and play the system that rewards you points essentially for your playtime.
We’ve had people who are like “Look at me go, I made it all the way to level cap and I never paid a dime!” and that’s great, you’re in here, you’re playing, you’re having fun with everybody else, and that’s what we want: people in here having fun with each other.
For the person that’s like, “Oh, I could not do that. I’ve got a full-time job and my kids and I don’t know where I would fit the hours in the day to do what you did, but I do have a little bit of money. I’ll go ahead and pay instead to use an XP accelerator or something like that.” So it’s about tuning how you want to engage with it, because in some games the store experience is just about your credit card, and that’s it. There is no engagement otherwise. We have lots of players that do a mix of both or one or the other. It’s just whatever you need.
RELATED:Dungeons and Dragons Reveals Biggest One D&D Playtest Yet
Q: Looking ahead for theDDOteam, are there certain aspects of the game you’re particularly interested in improving?
Grow:I feel like there’s a dynamic that we did a long time ago that we haven’t visited in quite a while, and I want to see if we can revisit it, which was that idea of community goals. I don’t want to get too deep into the details, but that’s one element that I’ve been wanting us to explore: community goals. There are many different ways to make that happen, but that’s one area.
Also, we feel like we want to continue toexplore more D&D settings. That was part of our survey. We’ve got this whole D&D multiverse, let’s see where people want to go in that multiverse. So we’re very excited because new locations always mean new cool art and new cool monsters. That’s what we’re excited about.
We are really excited about how players have been enjoying our Hardcore Seasons. When it first started, the whole thing was just “If you die, you’re out.” it has a leaderboard, and if you die, you can still keep your character and take them to the regular server after you’re done with the season. Then we were like, “Well, what if we have Hardcore Seasons where we really fiddle with the rules of the game, but we do it in a way that it’s not going to affect the regular servers, this is just happening in this contest?”
So last season, we did a treasure hunt where we went into these dungeons, and we placed a certain special gold chest, and we’re like, “Go find it, you’ve got one life, don’t die, but see if you’re able to find all these treasure chests," and people loved it.
We realized we can keep bringing in these really interesting mechanics where the people can go in and be challenged in different ways, and I think that’s a really fun opportunity for the players who get really, really good at the game, and they’re feeling like “Man, even on Reaper, I don’t feel like I’m challenged enough.”
When you mentioned the Hardcore Seasons, I was curious ifDDOwas interested in exploring more of that kind of seasonal offshoot gameplay, and it’s great that you guys are planning for more.
Grow:Plus we also have what we call the Redux that happens over the holiday break which is essentially where if you missed the season the first time around, you get a chance to try again later.
If you didn’t like a particular season, you’re not stuck with it forever, you can go, “Hey, I didn’t really like the fire season, but I really liked the gold treasure chest season, so I’m going to play in that season.” I think that’s a huge part of what’s really fun about it.
Q: Looking at the broader MMORPG landscape, are there any practices or mechanics you’ve seen other games do over the years that theDDOteam has decided to steer clear from?
Grow:We’re always really sensitive to flagging mechanics. Flagging mechanics are a great way for players to have a reason to want to play with other people, but if you tune them too aggressively, then you’re the person that’s stuck because you miss the one little mote and nobody else is on that part, and now you’re kind of orphan, so we’re always trying to be conscious of that.
Sometimes you’ll see a mechanic get introduced where the reason that the player is doing the mechanic is a little too obvious. Itbreaks the fourth wallfor us, the players when we experience it, and we’re like, “I very clearly understand what the developer is trying to force me to do.”
We don’t like our gameplay or our mechanics to feel that way. We always want them to feel like you’re in theDDOuniverse, and that it’s part of the play.
Q: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share aboutDDOor Vecna Unleashed?
Grow:What makesVecna such a great villainis the fact that he is secretive, and he always is one step ahead. So I’m hoping that players will get a little emotional catharsis with this one, because up to this point, they’ve always felt like they’re being dragged behind his plans, and so this was an opportunity by pairing up with some of the bigger deities to actually attempt to get in front of the problem.
That’s what we were really hoping to accomplish with this story, we want people to feel like they’re not just getting dragged behind this villain, and we really want them to go, “You know, what? I as a hero have been through a lot and seen a lot and I think if me and my friends get together, we can do something about you.”
But Vecna is such a great villain. I’m a big fan of Liches in general, they’re one of my favorite monsters, so I was really excited for us to be able to bring Vecna in and to see his cunning and players had a lot of fun in Isle of Dread figuring out the secrets.
We had added these extra secrets to a raid, and they were trying to figure them out, and then they just were trying and trying and trying, and they reached that critical tipping point where they were like, “Are we just insane? Did we just hallucinate that there’s actually a puzzle to solve here?"
Then they finally solved it, and they unlocked a whole other section of the raid, and you got this whole backstory about these extra characters that had been interacting with Vecna’s past. It was really satisfying to be able to bring in that level of complexity for this kind of villain. I’m really hoping people enjoy the experience of going through the adventures related to him this time.
[END]
