Cryptic Studios COO Jack Emmert has spoken about the new/old direction that the developer is taking with the new Neverwinter game, and revealed that the studio won't be focusing so much on the MMO anymore.
Calling Neverwinter an 'OMG' (Online Multiplayer Game), Emmert reveals to Massively that the idea is to take the series back to its original, team-based roots. "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."
"We just had to take a look at ourselves and kind of change the way we were doing things... best way to do that was to 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," he added.
Cryptic previously worked on City of Heroes, Star Trek Online and Champions - all MMO titles that have seen varying levels of success. It is the lessons learnt from the latter two games specifically, that Emmert cites as the reason for Neverwinter being so 'focused'.
"We're no longer just doing MMOs but online multiplayer games. In the future we might do traditional MMOs, but it depends on the circumstances," Emmert concluded. "We're going to do online games -- they'll probably be RPGs; they're going to be true to their genres. That's very important to me. All the game mechanics, everything revolves around it, and they are going to be focused. We are going to make sure that we carve out, in the time we have, to make the best possible content."
Calling Neverwinter an 'OMG' (Online Multiplayer Game), Emmert reveals to Massively that the idea is to take the series back to its original, team-based roots. "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."
"We just had to take a look at ourselves and kind of change the way we were doing things... best way to do that was to 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," he added.
Cryptic previously worked on City of Heroes, Star Trek Online and Champions - all MMO titles that have seen varying levels of success. It is the lessons learnt from the latter two games specifically, that Emmert cites as the reason for Neverwinter being so 'focused'.
"We're no longer just doing MMOs but online multiplayer games. In the future we might do traditional MMOs, but it depends on the circumstances," Emmert concluded. "We're going to do online games -- they'll probably be RPGs; they're going to be true to their genres. That's very important to me. All the game mechanics, everything revolves around it, and they are going to be focused. We are going to make sure that we carve out, in the time we have, to make the best possible content."
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