Interview Neverwinter: What To Expect In the Upcoming MMO

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Tags: Andy Velasquez; Cryptic Studios; Neverwinter

Game Informer has an interview with Andy Velasquez, lead producer of Cryptic Studios' upcoming MMO Neverwinter.

On what to expect:

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.

On Neverwinter compared to Neverwinter Nights:

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.

On the game's adherence to the D&D ruleset (or lack thereof):

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.

Yeah, indeed.

I'll try to take a sip every time he says "action combat".

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MMO? In the news section? Can we have some standards here, please? Pop that monocle back in, Infinitron, and find us some worthy news to discuss!

Here:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/374932/gja-skyrim-voted-the-best-rpg/

He claims DDO has a literal translation of 3.5.

So, this game is going to be the shittiest shitfest that ever shitted a shit?

D&D and action combat don't bled together since D&D demands more tactical approach. why would they want to make an mmo out of the worst d&d game out there?

Mr. Velasquez talking more about Action Combat and Dungeon Delves:

I've never quite understood complaints that the game (or any game in this property) doesn't adhere faithfully to D&D rules. Tabletop RPG rules have always been concessions to the fact that unaided humans can't crunch big numbers in realtime. A system in which you can only work with 5% increments, as in any d20 system, or even only in 1% increments, as in percentile systems, is saddling itself with clunkiness from the outset. There's no reason to use such klutzy and inelegant fractions when you're working with computers, except that nerds LIKE their GOOD NUMBERS. If it's important to be faithful to D&D at all in creating products like this (and I'm not sure it is), it's more in leveraging the IPs involved than it is in having THESE numbers THIS way because THESE numbers are the good numbers. D&D games need displacer beasts and bags of holding and wands of magic missiles and Bigby's Giant Hands, not four-sided dice and two-point-investment-incremented 3-to-18 stats (which was itself new in 3E! what ever became of 18/00 strength?). Those mathematical trimmings are certainly evocative, but a new system quickly brands its own number memes. D&D is beholders and mind flayers, not savings throws and BABs.

It might be more accurate to call it a Forgotten Realms game than a D&D game, but hey. That's how branding works. What matters is how the game plays in the end and whether the systems balance well and create interesting power curves with handy increments, none of which tabletop D&D has ever managed very well in the first place. What's going on numerically under the hood is irrelevant as long as it's comprehensible and it -works.- If you really can't stand thinking that your computer's rolling an imaginary d1000 instead of an imaginary d20, you need vicodin.

If anything concerns me, it's just that the combat reminds me of GW2's, which I did nnnot find inspiring. "Basic attack plus a couple situational cooldowns and active dodge lol!" Fuck that. Give me a rotation any day. At least that's hypnotic. But hey, free to play. Not like they're charging me anything to find out. And I can't wait to see what starts coming out of the Foundry system, although I'm sure that's where we'll start hitting a lot of paywalls.

I was just about to bro-fist your post when I realized, that not everybody might have been aware that Neverwinter was not worth following in the least. I'd say that's newsworthy...

Precisely.

crawlkill

The problem is that they aren't throwing away the "+1s" and "d20s" because a computer can do more complex formulas behind the scenes. The problem is that they are throwing those dnd trappings away in favour of MOAR AWESOME, because apparently even basic arithmetic is too much for their target audience.

or maybe because basic arithmetic is, you know, BASIC and not really appropriate to an environment where infinitely more complex arithmetic can be done instead. I'm just throwing that shit out there. nerds seem really proud of the capacity to add and subtract single- and double-digit numbers at embarrassingly slow speeds. who can say why. the idea that people make rational numerical decisions even in simple mathematical environments like tabletop gaming is laughable. even the experts create feats and powers and weapons that shred the never-entirely-stable balance of their own games, or that sound nice but do practically nothing.

human beings aren't very good at thinking about things like "is a 1% increased chance of doing 227% critical damage and a proc on every fifth crit increasing my casting speed by 5% for ten seconds worth each hit landing for 17 points less and my miss rate going up .25% outside of my trinket cooldown as long as I take no opportunity attacks for the duration?" you dramatically overestimate yourself if you think you are, and, again, need tranquilizers if you think that the underlying math of a game is what makes it fun (especially when that math is primitive and -designed around people being stupid- in the first place, as is the case in tabletop rules). what matters is that the math works, not which numbers are used. how can this require explanation? are you sentient? is this a Turing test? I've spotted you.

The main problem here is that D&D, for a lot of people, is more than just killing things. Another problem is that ever annoying 100 to 1 hero to nonhero ratio which fucks up everyone's immersion. It's a shame too, since Neverwinter will have user created content. I can't imagine playing tabletop DnD, where the only choices were some generic classes and shit ton of filler combat. Then again, this game is kinda modeled off of 4th edition, so I guess the shoe sort of fits in this case.

Fuck you, Cryptic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This looks like the most generic and boring action game yet.

So why isn't it appropriate? Obscuring the game mechanics behind some hidden formula so that the player has no idea what their strength score exactly does (besides bigger score = bigger damage numbers!) has zero benefit for the players. I like knowing what my character is and isn't capable of doing, that's kind of what makes a rpg a rpg you could say.

Yeah, who thinks trying to solve problems is fun? Those stupid professor layton and sudoku NERDS should quit and enjoy REAL games that contain no problems, challenges, goals... wait...

I am going to sell you a car called the pogo stick. Now we are still going to use the same name-space as 'car', and I promise that when you ride in it you'll get the same emotional context of an actual car. You'll move forward when you use the pogo stick, just like you would under the rules governing a car, and you'll feel the same up and down motion in your pogo stick spring, just as you would in your car's shock absorbers. But we've streamlined the process so you don't have to worry about things such as an ignition switch or seat belt. Overall, it will be a much better experience.

And yet the Dungeon and Dragons games that are well-regarded on this website are the ones that stuck closely to the PnP style of play. The Gold Box games, Baldur's Gate 1+2, Temple of Elemental Evil and Knights of the Chalice come to mind.

If you like the Baldur's Gates because you regard their systems as well-balanced and involving--systems that involve the binary of "being a godly spellcaster and doing the same thing in 90% of encounters" or "clicking on the enemy and hoping your THAC0 is sufficient"--instead of because they had good scripts and good characters set in an involving open world, then there's no hope for you. the other titles I've got nothing but contempt for, so I can't really speak to that. in any case, none of those games are MMOs and don't really apply here. a single-player system can be as bad as it likes; balance in single-player games is a limited concern, just as balance in tabletop is a limited concern. in a tabletop game, all that matters is that none of the PCs hugely outshine other PCs/the GM's plans. in an MMO, the challenges are static (ie the raid boss won't fake a third critical in a row that obliterates your barbarian into a normal hit just because well that doesn't make for much fun to play), and having a coherent system the players can manipulate readily, which means "without spending dozens/hundreds of hours prodding numbingly arcane builds just to find the tools that aren't broken." if so much of D&D weren't broken to start with, there wouldn't be so much room for players to sit around "optimizing." thinking about D&D characters is -in no way- parallel with solving a logic puzzle or filling out a sudoku (seriously?). it's not looking at an elegant matrix with an obscure but definite solution: it's looking at a tangle of ruinous rules with little regard for one another and trawling for those places where their brokenness can be used to advantage.

can't be bothered to quote the rest of the posts here. suffice it to say that if D&D had used a percentile system in 1989 and contemplated moving to a d20 system today there would be identical riots.

and if you can't handle the "everyone's a goddamn hero and the game is mostly combat," well, then you don't like MMOs in general and aren't making much of a comment on this one. I'd hold off on that particular cynicism for a while, though, as the Foundry sounds like it's perfectly capable of creating experiences of Infinity Engine-level complexity (which, after all, mostly just requires a dialogue engine). in any case, we'll see.

christ I'm trying to get Codexians not to shit on a product because it wasn't composed by Gary Gygax in a salvia fever dream what's wrong with me

...MMO?

Wow... that's not biased, it's complelty blind. TERA combat is amazing, closest an actual action game any MMO ever got, while this game of theirs seem like a simple GW clone...

THAT'S NOT WHAT CLEAVE DO, YOU RETARD! Is a passive skill that grant's you an extra attack if you kill a creature, not a AoE attack!

Get with the times, grandpa.

We already have free DDO, and it's not bad. It even sucked me into giving them ten bucks for something or other. Amazing, after two hundred hours they got ten bucks then I got bored because it's boring. I explored, I grew, then I moved on. Does anyone want to buy an eighth level wizard? No? I don't care either. Maybe I can sell him for EVE bucks. It's boring after awhile. They all are. Not sure why they keep striving for the same thing.

Some of us would be happy with just a fun game for twenty hours. Put some time into it and make it exciting. Then if it's good, a few months later sell us more of it with a few goodies tacked on with the same engine.

Sure, there's a certain amount of WoW types to milk but it's finite, yet there's quite a few normal people out there too.

I feel like I'm mumbling to my cat again.

This game sure causes a lot of butthurt, but it looks p. good for a F2P MMO.

4th Edition nigga.

You have to be kiddng me-

Oh, fuck.