Neverwinter Nights Online

Cryptic Studios has annouced they are releasing a Neverwinter Nights online game in 2011. It sounds to be semi single player RPG, with online elements, but not fully MMO.

Q&A Interview: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverwinter/news.html?sid=6274162&mode=previews&tag=topslot;thumb;1

Website: http://www.playneverwinter.com/

 

As much as I want to be happy, because it sounds good, Cryptic has a horrible track record lately in the MMO market. They made Star Trek Online which I hear nothing good about, and I also hear that Champions Online is a failure too. I dont know how they get the rights to great IP's anymore.

 

At least they're not Obsidian, heh...

 

Yeah, but the folks that made NWN1 & 2 aren't involved at all.

Their busy with Dragon Age 1 & 2.

I read the hype and I get the feeling it's going to be just another MMO, I hope not but alas ...

 

NWN 2 was made by Obsidian. They're also the studio responsible for butchering Star Wars: Kotor2. BioWare made NWN1 and they're the ones working on DA 2.

Regards,
Storm

 

I heard that KOTOR2 would've been an OK game if it hadn't been rushed by Lucas Arts. They had only a year, or so to make it. NWN2 on the other hand was a much better RPG than NWN1 but gameplaywise the engine sucked. :/ What's more important they're working now on Fallout. Too bad they're being held back by Bethesda and can't do it on any other engine than Gamebryo.

Now, as for Neverwinter Online? I can't see anything good coming out of this. Just look at Dungeons and Dragons online. It's almost the same concept. It may have been fun at first but if you joined the game later and got to play with seasoned players you would not get any satisfaction from navigating and discovering new areas or quests because they'd rush and spoil your fun. RPG never works good with MMO. It works best with PnP or singleplayer.

 

They reused the NWN1 engine (which already had its problems). But supposedly they rewrote most of it. But still. In the end it inherited a lot of NWN1's problems and then added some new ones.

I didn't have that many problems with the Fallout 3 engine. Maybe it's *good* they're being forced to use the original engine. But anyway, we'll see how it went soon.

Regards,
Storm

 

One of the major problems in the gaming industry is that once a publisher goes public, it needs to have better yearly profits than the last year. That means that if they have a blockbuster like DragonAge in 2009, investors will expect the same amount of revenue/profit in 2010. That means they need to church out Dragon Age 2 within a year, or have a substitute title ready to go.

This yearly production cycle works decently with sports games where you just need to change the roster and add a couple of features each year, like the Madden football series. However, it is much more difficult with other types of titles.

 

Yeah. We say the same thing about FIFA since our football is much more popular in Europe than your football.

I heard Dragon Age which as an OK semi-oldschool RPG (would've been much better if it had more open world locations, the main city was as a joke) is now getting a new shiny sequel, and as you said, it's probably going to be horribly rushed. It's scheduled to be out at the beginning of next year. However, what worries me more is the fact that they're doing away with most of the oldschool elements which will make it more like Mass Effect.

Don't get me wrong, Mass Effect was great (I finished both games and I'm waiting for the grand finale) but I don't think I want to get double amounts of the same thing in a completely different game.

 

But seriously. With a good development process, doing a good game in one year is not impossible (look at Torchlight, small but good).

We now have reached a level of graphics quality where a sequel doesn't need to improve on actual graphical quality much (at least that's my opinion). So you have a finished toolset, a finished engine, a finished campaign setting (Thedas in case of Dragon Age) and can build on that.

If your engine is built with modern Software Engineering principles in mind, extending it for new content is also not much of a problem. You can see the effects of this in the DLC they provided for DA. New abilities, locations, quests and classes are no problem. And you can also see the effects in the Awakening expansion. They pretty much churned that one out in less than 6 months. Throne of Bhaal was somewhat similar (it took them 9 months for that one), but the amount of artwork and assets required to make a modern game are not comparable to a 2D game like ToB.

Regards,
Storm

 

I semi agree. I have taught masters degree classes on innovation and one of the major problems major companies face is only investing in large scale projects that could possibly increase sales/profits by 10%. If you are Activision, or EA, or Ubisoft; Torchlight at the $10-$20 price range will not do that for you. It is too small of a bet to have a big impact. Churching out high quality, but small games, at a low price tag doesnt do much for a public companies bottom line, so they tend to ignore them. Or they will rush a big game, like Dragon Age 2.

This is one of many reasons why small companies (noteably private companies), without the pressure from shareholders to keep a high share price, are able to innovate more than big companies. They are less worried about a yearly profit statement and can make good games (ala Torchlight).

Blizzard was private when they made World of Warcraft. They were able to take their time. Blizzard has a track record of stopping production on a game if it is not fun (See Starcraft: Ghost). Most public companies would not stop production and send out a crap game b/c of their bottom line. It is going to be really interesting how Blizzard deals with the pressures from Activision which they merged with a couple years ago. Starcraft 2 worked out well enough it seems, Diablo 3 and their new MMO are going to be more interesting tests.

I will agree that Torchlight is a great game and successful, but most small games are not. If you don't believe, check out the $10 and under games on Steam.

 

True but you should also take into account that the amount of money invested by the Torchlight studio pales in comparison to the DA/DA2 budget.

Usually you cannot throw manpower at a project to make it go faster magically due to the added overhead, but what I was getting at: DA2 already has the plan layed out, so there is very little risk in the project (not economic risk, I mean project management risk). As such, doing it in a year seems feasible.

Oh really? SC2 is a trilogy of (nearly) full-price games using the same engine (risk and cost reduction). In addition, they didn't really innovate when it came to gameplay (also risk reduction). Diablo III is also a pretty risk-free project since they're not going to change gameplay dramatically and have a devoted fanbase.

Torchlight had polish. Most if not all of the smaller games lack that. But Torchlight was a prime example of special circumstances. You had a well established team with a plan layed out and experienced developers. In addition, they chose to go the correct route and re-use as much code as possible by using a open-source engine (a good one, there are a lot of bad ones out there as well) to save time.
All in all they had good project management I suppose

Regards,
Storm

 

I agree. My point is that when the President of Game Development needs to find a way to make an additional 100 million next year, they dont tend to place 30 small bets. I teach in my class that they should have a mix of small and large bets, but it is difficult to implement due to priorities.

Yes I agree. It will be a shorter production time. Dragon Age 2 may not be a great example, but it can be more difficult with other series such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Bio Shock, Fallout, ect where replacing that revenue in the following year is more difficult.

My argument regarding SC2 is not that they are 'risk-free' or not. It is that public companies, which Blizzard Activision is now, are under a lot of presure from shareholders. This leads to meeting profit requirements, which means time pressures, which can lower the quality of a game.

ToEE was made in 18 months. Look what happened.

 

@Ranth,

ToEE also had other problems (quality control being one), but obviously tackling big risks early wasn't part of their project management approach. That one guy who re-wrote the rendering path 2 months before release? Updating the rulesets a few months before release (They were WotC licensees, why didn't they see it coming earlier)? Really not such a great idea.

Regards,
Storm