Why Archetypes?
There are a lot of great reasons to go this route, and we'd love to talk through some of them to help explain why we're angling in this direction.
1: Making new classes is hard - both technically and design-wise. There are only so many D&D classes in the books and the ones that are left retread old ground considerably. We'd never be able to make Class 16 without significant overlap with existing character options, something that feels bad from a design perspective and worse from a player perspective. Tons of great design space is locked up already and we needed a way to go back and fill in our gaps.
2: Technically speaking, this is a lot better than making new classes for a lot of reasons due to how DDO's engine functions. There's a ton of work to get a new class up on the LFM panel, for example, that with Archetypes we simply do not need to do. It prevents our UI from becoming bloated in a variety of places. It also prevents player information overload - rather than having 30 classes, sticking to our current 15 means they're still easily recognizable at a glance UI-wise.
3: This allows us to revisit design space that our existing classes touch upon and give it the love it deserves. If an existing class sorta-supports an archetype, this is a way for us to build that idea out and give it support in a way that doesn't mess with existing builds and archetypes.
4: Archetypes are easier for us to build than regular classes which means we can release more of them more frequently. It also means that we can do weirder things with them - if our ideas don't pan out, design-wise, we're not wasting years of work on a risky idea that doesn't land. We can take more risks, which feels great for us and will likely turn out some insane and unbelievable results.
5: Archetypes give us a great way to schedule revamps and retooling of existing class features. We have historically had a hard time pinning revamps down to a set schedule, but this gives us a great way to order and organize our class initiatives. For example, (and we're going into this later down in this post), Dark Apostate releases alongside a revamp of Divine Disciple. If we're building a Archetype, that's a great time to shore up other parts of the class we're building on - since it all fits together into one cohesive whole.
6: Archetypes are an experiment to see if they resonate better with the players than new Universal Trees do. Universal trees are a struggle to design because they need to appeal universally across many builds - and these are the exact opposite. We want to build narrow, flavorful, high-impact and interesting options that players can choose from, compared to Universal Trees that everyone can access on top of an existing class split. This definitely isn't to say that we won't ever make more Universal Trees, but for right now we're trying this new direction to see if it lands better.
