Neverwinter Interview
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You were candid in a recent interview, saying that you didn't think Cryptic games' quality has been up to par. What do you think you have to do to raise the quality to where you want it to be?
JE: Well it's not that I thought the quality wasn't up to par, it's the customers and critics and everybody else, right? [laughs] All you have to do is go to Metacritic.com. It's not like we went out and said, "We're gonna make a really shi... mediocre game, and put in a box," no. We all thought that Star Trek Online was going to be phenomenal. We all thought that Champions was going to be phenomenal.
Even in open beta, the reaction we got from [Champions] was better than anything we ever did with City of Heroes and City of Villains. We were sky high. So believe me when the reviews came out, we were shocked, just shocked. Because there was nothing that would lead us to believe leading into it, from the data we had in beta, like the number of people playing, the number of downloads, how often they played and all that kind of stuff. It had exceeded anything that we had done previously.
So the reviews meant we had to have a reality check. The old way of doing things is very simple. We made City of Heroes in about a year-and-a-half. We made City of Villains in nine months, and both of which were successful, both of which were highly-acclaimed and reviewed.
And we looked around at MMO companies, and they were struggling. They were spending tens of millions of dollars, and we spent, what, $8 million on City of Heroes and $6 million on City of Villains. Here, we had a game, it was successful, we pumped 'em out, we had the technology, we had the tools, we thought we could be doing it forever, because we were like, "Yeah, we'll just keep making them every 18 months! We can!"
But what's happened over time is, quite frankly, World of Warcraft. I think it's a very different marketplace now. Because of World of Warcraft, the expectations are raised. So now with Champions and with Star Trek, we need to improve those games. We need to make them better. We're doing everything we can with our live team to improve the quality of gameplay. Not just to shove more content in, but to polish it.
With City of Heroes and City of Villains, that just wasn't the case. So mistakenly, arrogantly on my part, I just thought we could take these games and make them over and over again. And we did with Champions and Star Trek. They are so much better than City of Heroes was at launch, it's not even close. But just look at the review scores.
I designed City of Heroes. I didn't design Champions and I didn't design Star Trek. I have no horse in this race. I'm honestly bashing myself by saying these are better games. But I can honestly say, especially with Star Trek and Champions, they were just better. So when you see the reaction to the games, it really astonishes.
(...)
So you said you haven't announced a business model for Neverwinter.
JE: Yes, we haven't announced a business model for Neverwinter.
So you're not going to necessarily slap a price on the box and forget about it.
JE: No.
Is it going to be a monthly subscription? Microtransactions?
JE: I can guarantee you that we envision this as an online product that will continue to grow over time, that we continue to add content to. So whether it's subscription fee, whether it's free-to-play, whether it's microtransactions, whether it's pay-by-the-minute [laughs], whether it's some sort of Ponzi scheme that I haven't figured out, I don't know. None of that has been announced.
