New Neverwinter Nights Title?

[Doubtful]

The more i read about this, the more i feel like NWN2 will be the last stop for community created persistent D&D worlds.
Still, there's always Mass Effect 3 to look forward to. Right?

On the plus side i've now found out about persistent unreal engined servers.. Snazzy..

[Machiavelli]

Looks MMOish to me.

[Sweet Spirit]

Where does Cryptic get all of this support? I've yet to see any of their games have extended success o_o

[Rasham]

It's not gonna be good at all.

It's gonna take a group of Neverwinter Nights fans to talk WotC into letting them make a new DnD game in the style of NWN. It can be done!

[Elusa]

Most of what I read is just an indication that they're moving away from being true to the PnP. The fact that it's simply Neverwinter instead of Neverwinter Nights 3 is telling.

[Anks]

I see this turning out to be a diablo 3 wannabe, to be honest I am not sure by the interview if they will allow full persistant realms, it wasnt really clearified.

[Cornuto]

Seems more like it's going to be borderlands with swords.

[Zoberraz]

Mmm.

Well, I think the big difference is that we won't have our choice of persistent world. They'll have communities gather in their core PW world, their co-op storyline, and the ability for players to create their own modules based off in that region and to effectively DM those.

I don't view the limitation of one player setting in itself as being 'bad'. Sundren, Frontier, Necrosis and other places are just different disparate communities growing up and following certain themes. It still makes it possible for any one person do go and develop/flesh out a select story hook (like the ones Adam Miller made: Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, Demons, Dark Waters) with a following of players being eager to explore/interact around those modules. It also doesn't stop likeminded people to gather together, play and stick around certain hubs within the established default gameworld (Neverwinter itself, Port Llast, Crossroad Keep, the Mere of Dead Men, Luskan even).

Like, for example, right now I have friends I'd like to roleplay with... but the barrier of us being on different persistent worlds and neither of us being willing to invest in making the crossover prevents that. In such a setting as what Cryptic Studios is setting up, that barrier might be gone. Perhaps the atmosphere could end up being a little more metagamish/co-op... but to be honest I value D&D much more for me feeling I can play an adventurer and do fantastic adventurous things than for me to do simulationism. If I'm interested in roleplaying I go and create my own roleplay with likeminded individuals even in settings such as Everquest 2's Norrath or Lineage 2's Aden - so I don't see much of a problem in it (except that I'm stuck in FR rather than Core 4E PoL or Greyhawk, again).

[Zoberraz]

New article at IGN:
Exploring the New Neverwinter

[Urithrand]

The barbarian looking thing shouldn't say:
"My steel, Unbendable. My will, Unbreakable."

It should say:
"My steel, Unbendable. My will, Fragile."

There's my 2 cents on the subject.

No, it should read:

"My steel: Smash heads good! My will: Squishy!"

Edit: I think that a game designed much like a MMO and with an integrated toolset sounds perfectly usable as a PW engine. As long as it's fully customisable, then the game's what you make it. Granted the story will suck, but Sundren could be reborn lol

[Merick]

Players will definitely be able to create quests, custom text, speech and probably monsters (though not items).

Another Forgotten Realms game that will completely bomb, Only this time I don't think I can blame Atari.

[Twisted-Indoctrine]

Another Forgotten Realms game that will completely bomb

No kidding. Couldn't they try like... ANYTHING to keep it fresh. Eberon? Nope. New D&D core world? Nope. Darksun?(!?!?!?!?) Nope. Let's rehash the forgotten realms... AGAIN. No one could possibly get tired of that, right?

I mean... It's a campaign setting with a long bloody tenure and a lot of respect but give it a break for a bit.

[Merick]

I enjoy the forgotten realms, I was referring more to the quote about how the Toolset will not allow players to create custom items.

I think that is a taste of things to come. Generic garbage nobody will be interested in. Another flop from a company that really has become legendary for releasing half finished games that require huge amounts of DLC.

EDIT
Forgotten Realms has a lot of potential if it is done correctly. Which it has not been since BG 2.

[Cornuto]

...We've learned what not to do," Emmert said when I asked him about Cryptic's recent history. "We did Star Trek Online and Champions Online and we produced and created those the same way that we did City of Heroes and City of Villains." When those games were made, there wasn't a lot of testing between different classes or game systems and Emmert admits that led to an unpolished feel when they were released.

"Say we created a character class, a fighter," Emmert said. "We tested it and it seemed pretty cool. Then we tested the wizard and that seemed pretty cool too and it worked. But we didn't test them together, and we didn't test them in particular adventures. So what would happen is that the features at the end of a project would all come together at once. In City of Heroes, it worked for the marketplace. People played the game, they enjoyed it. Now standards have changed and what happened with STO and Champions, internally we felt 100 percent confident, but when people played it and reviewers, The Escapist included, said, 'Wow, this is really unpolished.' We looked at that and said, 'What the hell are you talking about? Did you play City of Heroes?'"

...

To combat the negative player feedback and press that results from a game experience that isn't perfect, Emmert said that he is completely changing the way that Cryptic makes videogames. The biggest development is making the game playable as soon as possible so that they can refine just how fun it is. Neverwinter isn't due out until Q4 2011, yet Emmert can play the game right now.

"[Neverwinter] is almost 100 percent playable, every aspect of it. I can get in right now, and play for hours, content that we think internally is practically shippable," Emmert said.

In addition, because the game is completely playable, they can bring in consultants to determine whether the game is fun over a year before launch, instead of letting reviewers rip it apart after it is already released into the wild, so to speak.

"We can give it to an outside reviewer. So we have an impartial person helping to monitor how well our game is going to do," Emmert said. Using the informed opinions of individuals to assess the quality of Neverwinter is a response to the failure of "focus-groups" to point out anything wrong with Cryptic's other games. "We did [focus groups] with Champions, but that didn't really show any of the flaws, to be honest." Cryptic had allowed independent reviewers to inspect both STO and Champions, and anecdotal evidence suggests that those reviewers raised huge red flags, but it was may have been too late in the design cycle for Cryptic to drastically alter their games before the scheduled release date.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...ptic-Studios.2

[Zoberraz]

There was this too:

http://neverendingnights.com/archives/531

No new information up to this point. They have a wet towel and they're wringing it very, very dry.