Neverwinter Interview
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Massively: We weren't expecting Neverwinter to be a cooperative RPG; we were expecting another MMO from you guys -- so why the sudden departure?
Jack Emmert: First of all, there's the IP itself. Neverwinter originally was more of a cooperative RPG, although it has an MMO accent, where players could set up their own servers and so forth. Nevertheless, predominantly, it was smaller groups of people. 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. 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. We want to make a great game -- the original Neverwinter is a true classic, and it's really important to hold to that standard.
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And now the final question that I love asking developers: what is the favorite part of your game? That part that sticks out to you, resonates in your mind, and makes you really want to play this game?
Definitely the combat. It's more tactical and interesting than we've done in awhile. Champions is very arcane. I like STO combat a lot; it's similar to that, a little bit thoughtful -- position is important but it's deeper than that. I'm looking at the condition of my players. If you play D&D Fourth Edition, you'll see lots of powers and abilities that are queued off of circumstances, when I'm stunned or bloodied, when I'm this or that. I have to pay attention to what I'm doing and what my teammates are doing. It's refreshing; it's an old-school RPG. It's not turn-based but it reminds me of that a lot.
