New Neverwinter Nights Game Probably On Its Way

[JohnRTroy]

I like the acronym: OMG! Oh my god!

If you ever played the Action RPG Borderlands, I suspect that's where they're going with this--satisfiable as a single player game, a little more fun if you have a full team.

Although I suspect the co-op comes at the price of a very tight story-driven RPG akin to what Bioware produces.

 

[Steel_Wind]

It is not an MMO. It is a game where you play a party with your friends. Kinda like... D&D. They call it "Online Multiplayer Game".

Seeing that I actually like what they are doing with Startrek Online and how they interact with their community, I am cautiously optimistic.

You guys are missing the point. It's not an "online multiplayer game" so you can't play it solo. It's an "online multiplayer game" so that the game has near perfect copy protection.

THAT is what this is about.

 

[Dausuul]

It is not an MMO. It is a game where you play a party with your friends. Kinda like... D&D. They call it "Online Multiplayer Game".

Part of me wants to say, "If it quacks like a duck..." But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And it does sound as if they plan to move away from the MMO model of grinding all day long.

Of course, that still leaves the question of whether they can manage a halfway decent storyline within the game. (Yeah, I know it's based on a Salvatore novel series, but you can't just transcribe a novel into a computer game, and in any case I doubt they have Salvatore himself on staff.)

 

[Keefe the Thief]

I can play Borderlands online with my friends and it is not an MMO. If i can play 4e online with my friends and have fun, this is for me.

 

[Derren]

I can play Borderlands online with my friends and it is not an MMO. If i can play 4e online with my friends and have fun, this is for me.

Looks like Cryptics strategy is still working.
1. Grab a high value IP
2. Make a half finished, bad game out of it in a very short time
3. Sell lifetime subscriptions beforehand
4. Profit (from box sales)
5. Drop the game and grab the next IP.

 

[Almacov]

Part of me wants to say, "If it quacks like a duck..."

I'm assuming the OMG acronym is a joke, but it's funny how many people seem to forget that online multiplayer existed before MMOs.
In reading these interviews, I was struck by how identical the multiplayer model they're discussing in Neverwinter is to the multiplayer offering in Bioware's Neverwinter Nights.

They've obviously identified the content generation flexibility that was offered by the old Aurora toolset as an integral part of the game's legacy, too, which is something I wholeheartedly approve of.

 

[erf_beto]

So, I'm the only who likes fewer classes?

This might mean more time dedicated to developing the game itself, and less about balancing builds against each other.

Anyway, I don't think that "limitation" will last long. They'll probably add new classes later, through some sort of downloadable content - which you'll have to pay, obviously...

It seems to be the bee's knees these days... Pay full price for a half game.

And 4e is very modular, with every new book adding new powers and features. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case with the MMO OMG...

 

[Dausuul]

I'm assuming the OMG acronym is a joke, but it's funny how many people seem to forget that online multiplayer existed before MMOs.

*shrug* It's a company that has, to date, produced nothing but MMOs (and one spin-off project that consisted of commercializing their MMO graphics engine). They're now taking a franchise focused on single-player offline play, and converting it to mainly-multiplayer and 100% online. Naturally one suspects the end product may end up looking a lot like an MMORPG.

The interviews suggest their goal is something like a standard Neverwinter Nights storyline, and you can play through it solo or with other online players, with the latter being the expected mode. Sounds like a traditional CRPG except for the online requirement, but the devil's in the details. Let's say you've got a party consisting of Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Dave. They play every weekend. They go through the first 4 quests, leveling up, advancing the plot, all that good stuff.

But now Dave is going out of town and can't make it for a weekend. Alice, Bob, and Charlie are experienced tabletop gamers and know that nothing kills a campaign faster than requiring every player to be present for every session, so they go ahead and play through the 5th quest.

What happens next week when Dave returns? Does he get credit and/or XP for that 5th quest even though he didn't participate? What about loot--do Alice, Bob, and Charlie get 4 players' worth of loot, and do they have to face 4 players' worth of opposition to earn it? Or does Dave fall behind on gear? Does Dave have to do the quest on his own? What if he makes different choices than Alice, Bob, and Charlie made? What if he can't do it without Alice, Bob, and Charlie to help him--can they go back and do it again with him? What if Dave decides he'd rather play with Egbert, Francine, and Gerald, does he get to take his character when he goes?

Tabletop games have come up with a variety of answers to these questions, and often rely on the DM to custom-tailor the solution to the group. Given the company's background, I suspect there will be a strong tendency at Cryptic to fall back on the traditional MMO answers without really thinking about it. If they do, we'll end up with a game in which each quest is a disconnected entity, with very limited impact on other quests; in which characters can go back to help others do quests that they themselves have already done; in which characters are readily portable between groups.

At that point what you have is an MMO in all but name. Maybe it lacks some of the grindiness, maybe it has a more intimate feel and is more amenable to roleplaying... but the strength of the traditional offline CRPG, which is the tightly integrated plotline and ability to "remember" player decisions, is lost.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Given the company's background, I suspect there will be a strong tendency at Cryptic to fall back on the traditional MMO answers without really thinking about it.

Well, knowing at least one actual game Cryptic made from experience, they use the concept of "sidekicking" (I think that started in Champions). If you team up with other players, you can set a member of the team as the guy you level up or down to. Your hit points and DPS is scaled to match the expected value at that level. It's not perfectly the same as really leveling there (in STO, you don't get more powers for example), but it's a way to deal with level differences.

Also, I can kinda see how the "single player" option will look like - STO allows you to field 5 bridge officers with you on your away team. The bridge officers are simpler than your character and also weaker, but they have almost the same item slot (one cruicial part of your own equipment is instead part of their skill set). Essentially, they are pets.

 

[WizarDru]

Well, knowing at least one actual game Cryptic made from experience, they use the concept of "sidekicking" (I think that started in Champions). If you team up with other players, you can set a member of the team as the guy you level up or down to. Your hit points and DPS is scaled to match the expected value at that level. It's not perfectly the same as really leveling there (in STO, you don't get more powers for example), but it's a way to deal with level differences.

The problem with both Sidekicking and Exemplaring is that they didn't always work that well. When a friend with a level 50 character exemplared with our level 10, he wasn't suddenly a Level 10....he was a level 50 with 40 levels worth of attack bonuses removed. So he still had access to enhancements that made his then-limited powers far more powerful than our characters. The reverse was also true...a level 20 character raised to 47 is not the same as a level 47 character in CoX (or at least didn't used to be, it's been a couple of years since I played regularly).

I just read that interview with Emmert, and his admission of mistakes on ST:O and CO read like excuses that don't really grasp the problems that they encountered. He seems to be trying to say that their problem wasn't that they have a bad design process that emphasizes speed...but that those darned fickle consumers expect that the game will work and have all the promised features at launch. When I played the ST:O beta right up until launch, I was continually amazed how many major bugs existed in the game, unaddressed. I mean, errors that were in the newbie mission, like you spawning as your starship on ship-based and away missions. Aspects of the design like having to do stupid fetch quests and patrols to get access to a Phaser-II or a new ship. Pointless fleet actions, sluggish controls and away missions that were so buggy that people couldn't finish them and so on.

Emmert's takeaway from all that is that if a feature isn't in a game at launch, it's irrelevant to customer adoption numbers; if you have the feature in at launch but its buggy and terrible the negative stigma of your failure will never be dissuaded. But they seem to miss the "we shouldn't have rushed" idea entirely: "We are going to make sure that we carve out, in the time we have, to make the best possible content. Not the most, which is oftentimes what we did in the past, and one of the ways to make sure we're doing well, is we're having a new, basically every few months we have a vertical slice. " There is no tacit admission that, "Hey, maybe we should actually develop the Klingons content beyond just being PvP" or "Perhaps we should have done more combat testing before nerfing defense into unplayability for many in CO", for example.

Emmert's description of the games shows that maybe they're competing with a Borderlands model, maybe with a Guild Wars model...or maybe a Pay-as-you-go model. DDO's pay2play model works because by the time they implemented it, they already had a fairly extensive amount of content and had already fixed many issues that drove people away earlier. Borderlands works because you can enjoy it solo or co-op..and there are rewards for playing co-op beyond just having more people present. And both of them have offered up periodic new content on a regular basis. Even Guild Wars offers annual events every few months for free.

I see lots of vague promises for new races, new classes and so forth that echo the same kind of 'by-the-pants' development cycles that got them their current reputation. MMO or just online co-op game, my faith in Cryptic as a developer makes me very wary of this.