Neverwinter Interview
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Part of what makes playing D&D around a table with your friends fun is the crazy things that you imagine you can do. I was worried that that magic would get lost in a game like Neverwinter, where the streamlined MMO story can feel really impersonal. Emmert addressed that concern for Neverwinter: "There's a lot of choices that you make depending upon the things that you learn along the way, that affects how you progress through the main storyline. Interacting with people, finding out about them. Really, it's a matter of exploring the world of Neverwinter. There are tons of things which you'll find out that are applicable to the main narrative storyline."
That idea of exploring the world and slowly learning the story is key to many a D&D campaign, but I was still worried that the focus might be more on combat in this type of game. "With Neverwinter, we're going to put puzzles in. We're going to put in things that you need to figure out. We're going to put in clues. Most certainly, Neverwinter is going to involve more than just combat," Emmert said. When I asked about how diplomacy and interaction with NPCs might work, he said that branching dialogue trees is the direction they are currently headed but that it may change. "You'll have to wait and see."
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It's undecided whether players will be able to create new NPCs (it could quickly become a dangerously over-populated world after all) but Neverwinter will allow you to hook into the game world using the exact same tools that Cryptic does. Using this system, it's possible that creators will use to create stories that do not take place in a typical fantasy setting.
"We'll probably come up with some interesting stuff for people that want to be creating content that uses D&D rules but is perhaps in a setting that is far different than ours," Emmert said. "Eventually, we want to open it up for people to expand [the game] outside of just seeing Neverwinter." I can't say for sure whether there will be spaceships or WWII veterans, but knowing the crowdsource out there, I'm fairly certain that weird anachronisms will show up if the ability is there.
