It needs to be of the ”highest possible quality” and Cryptic admit they ”had to improve” everything. In their MMOs ”nothing was polished.”
”From our point of view, we just had to take a look at ourselves and kind of change the way we were doing things, and with the tools and the resources with our previous MMOs, we knew that Neverwinter had to be the highest possible quality, and we had to improve, dramatically, everything that we did,” Cryptic boss Jack Emmert said.
”The best way to do that was to sort of change the style of gameplay so that the focus wasn’t on hundreds of hours of mediocre – some would say even worse than mediocre – content, but instead create a rich story-driven multiplayer game.”
Cryptic is developing the D&D co-op Neverwinter title for publisher Atari and announced the project just recently. It’s a time for the studio to prove themselves.
”Super-fast doesn’t mean super-good,” he said. “That’s what the reviews said, that’s what the players said. City of Heroes was great for its day, but we can’t just keep repeating the same methodology over and over – we’ve got to make stuff that’s great.”
They won’t use the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ for Neverwinter. ”Coming into the launch of STO and Champions, I made sure we had something for everyone,” he said.
“Here was the problem. By following that philosophy, nothing was polished. We ended up having lots of half-done features in some quarters. What I forgot was, in as much as a consumer or a player, if it isn’t there at launch it might as well not be there.”
“If it’s in half-done or half-done well, that’s what you get remembered for.” So exactly how is this co-op D&D RPG game going to work? There ”is no offline play” to start as “yes, you will have to connect to our servers; just like an MMO, that is a similarity.”
”Players will have lots of controls over whether something’s public or private and so forth, and we’re working on those various options now,” continued Emmert. So it’s like an MMO only it’s not although there may be a business model. “We’ve got some kooky plans that I think people will like.” Don’t go expecting a traditional Neverwinter RPG.
Neverwinter releases exclusively on PC in Q4 2011.
