What sets Neverwinter apart from other online role-playing games? Do you think of it as an MMO or something different from that?​

We’re absolutely an MMO. We’re a free to play, action combat MMO. Those are the key touchstones for what we think will set us apart. With free to play, obviously the MMO market is skewing heavily that way. We’re trying really hard to approach developing this game the same way we would a subscription game. We’re trying to buck those preconceived notions out there from players that free to play is crappy, or free to play is eastern-style money-grubbing stuff. We’re developing a fun game in the same way that we developed our previous subscription models. We just believe that this is the right way to monetize moving forward with our genre.​

Action combat is our big focus for the moment to moment gameplay. We’ve made here at Cryptic Studios four MMOs that have done more traditional combat. So our take on action combat is obviously an in-vogue thing to be doing right now for MMOs. We feel like we’re approaching it in a more sure way. Other MMOs that are doing action combat take MMO-style combat in gameplay and skew it faster by lowering cool downs or changing to mouse-look targeting. We’re trying to make a fun action combat game and just happened to put that in an MMO setting instead of a third-person, single player RPG. In our totally biased opinion we feel that when we play our game versus Guild Wars or Tera, it feels more like an action game. And obvioiusly, D&D is a big pull for us. We’re in the Forgotten Realms, which is the most famous of all the D&D subworlds. There’s Dragonlance and Greyhawk and all of this other stuff. Forgotten Realms is where Drizzt and Wulfgar, all these iconic characters come from. The surrounding area is where Baldur’s Gate took place, so we’re able to leverage all that lore and built in fanbase a lot with this product.​

You’re also coming off of the legacy of a previous existing franchise in Neverwinter Nights. What elements would you say the game shares with Neverwinter Nights? ​

To be clear, we’re not Neverwinter Nights 3 or anything like that. We happen to take place in the same city of Neverwinter. We do, like you mention, get to call upon all the same backstory and lore. You’ll see locations that if you’re a big fan of Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2. It’s the same with the Neverwinter woods; we have zones that take place out there, there will be a lot of contextual similarities. In terms of the gameplay experience probably the biggest key we took from those games was our foundry system, which is user generated content. Those games had huge followings with their Aurora toolset, people modding the game and offering out new modules constantly and there’s still, last we checked, thousands of people still playing Neverwinter Nights 1 mods. So we have in our game the Foundry, which we just revealed at the last PAX. We did behind the scenes demos of it and showed people how users can make content in our toolset that other MMO players will get to play right in our persistent world. So you can imagine if you played WoW or something that running around doing a Blizzard made mission right next to someone else whose running around doing a mission that you have made in that world. So that’s a big take away from that first series of games.​

Are there some limits on that tool set? I remember that aurora toolset within Neverwinter Nights was pretty expansive in terms of giving a lot of options to people. Where do you guys think you fall in that sphere?​

So, our approach to the Foundry has been accessibility first, but power as well. The thing with the Aurora toolset is that they’re all so complicated you have to watch hours and hours of tutorials just too even make anything. So what we wanted to do is strip that away a little bit. I think there have been a couple of videos that we put out that show a little bit of editing, but you’ll be able to see how easy it is to get in and move things around. We’re really trying to make it so you don’t have to watch those hours and hours of tutorials. That’s not to say we are shirking away from giving people a lot of control. Say you want a particular kit and you have a bunch of L turns and T turns and straight hallways and you can snap them together like Legos and you drop in what monsters you have in there. You can change the text on those monsters, and you can change the name of those monsters. The approach to how the user interfaces all this is that we’re really trying to push that accessibility angle, but still have a lot of that power and control that people will be expecting coming from that legacy of the Aurora toolset.​

How have you approached implementing fourth edition D&D rules into an interactive video game setting?​

That’s been a really interesting challenge for us. One of the things that D&D Online has done, the other Dungeons & Dragons game, is they took a literal rule-set translation, although I think they used 3.5. And to be clear, we’re not specifically a fourth edition game – we are a Dungeons & Dragons game. So we use a lot of the same name-space and we use a lot of the emotional context of what the power is supposed to be. So for example, cleave – which is every fighter’s first ability for the most part – it’s an ability that is intended to attack multiple enemies in the arch in front of them, we’re not worrying about whether it is 2D10 plus weapon power or anything like that, but we’re making sure that it’s evocative of that feeling so when you cleave in our game you’ll be swinging and hitting multiple enemies in front of you.​

Do you have things like at-will, encounter, and daily powers, or have you moved away from those distinctions?​

So we do actually have those, at-wills. When you play, those are bound on your left and right mouse click buttons. You can click those as much as you want; they are at-will. Your encounters have slightly longer cool-downs, and with your daily powers we still leverage an action point meter but it’s different for our medium. But yeah it’s based on those same core concepts.​

What about classes and races? I’m presuming also since it’s a D&D focused game that’s kind of your big delineating factor, choosing a race and a class?​

Absolutely, yeah.​