Neverwinter Previews and Video Interview
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GameSpot:
The toolset in Neverwinter will let users start building their own custom adventure using one of four different building blocks: story, map, dialogue, or costumes. Story is the conceptual backbone of the game's user-generated content and can be built by stringing together dialogue sequences (which you write) arranged any way you like. These include multiple options in a dialogue tree and "fail states" that may end the conversation prematurely. You can write branching dialogue tree options or string them together by dragging them back into the same sequence. For instance, you can create a dialogue situation where no matter what you say to a hostile enemy, it attacks you.
If story is the conceptual backbone of the game's UGC, maps are the structural backbone. The updated Foundry map editor seems quite powerful and easy enough to use. While you can craft your own rooms, the editor will also come with dozens of preset rooms that you can drag and drop into your maps, connecting them by lining up their doorways. Better still, the editor will let you test out the dialogues and maps you've built by hopping into and out of a live mode to see what they look like in action. We watched Velasquez put together a simple dungeon full of undead in about 15 minutes, and what we ended up with was what looked like an actual adventure or, at least, a small portion of one. More interestingly, Neverwinter will let you integrate your custom content with the persistent, out-of-the-box content that Cryptic is building with the game, such as by keying up one of your custom quests from a dialogue with a guard from the city of Nevewinter proper.
The Escapist:
In my demo, we started with the maps. Since D&D has become so tile-based lately, this should be a very familiar process for most players. Simply pick the basic layouts you want and lay the pieces down to create multi-room castles, taverns, dungeons, or wilderness settings for your adventure. If the drag and drop elements aren't to your liking, you can create custom spaces using all the little bits and pieces you want, from doors to torch sconces to sarcophagi. Lay down a few chests, some monsters and a spawn point for the player and you've got the basics down. Property tabs allow you to manipulate the specifics of each item and you'll even be creating certain agents that factor into your story.
On the story tab, you can set missions and associate them with particular NPCs you've placed on the map. Our demo had a guard at the start of the level who asked the players to kill some undead deeper in the crypt. You add dialogue with a simple text editor and can give the player multiple responses that branch off into new conversations. There are also options to limit a player's choices based on different criteria. You might have a particular conversation option that's only available to certain classes, or certain Charisma levels. Through the creation process, a handy wizard will tell you if you have any loose ends or uncompleted elements in your story. Once the conversation is in place, you can assign a task outside of it for the player to accomplish. In this case, it's killing the undead in the rest of the crypt. The mobs of enemies are placed with their own unique states and aggro ranges. What's more interesting is that, like with the Aurora engine, you can simply label a monster spawn along a scale of "easy" to "hard" and the game will automatically scale the encounter to the ability and size of the player's party.
Ten Ton Hammer:
The available assets may appear somewhat daunting at first, but everything is neatly categorized into various kits based on a general theme. For example, in the span of 15 minutes we were able to open The Foundry, dig into the crypt-themed kit and piece together a fully playable mini-adventure complete with progressively difficult encounters, key NPC contacts, and get a feel for how easy it is to build out naturally flowing conversations. All great stuff so far.
The second major standout element for me is the fact that, if you're a more experienced mod maker or have worked with content creation tools in the past, there's enough depth to the system for you to genuinely make something highly unique. I was also happy to learn that dual monitor setups will be fully supported, so that's another giant green checkmark in The Foundry's win column in my books.
Neowin:
The editing tools will allow anyone, from novices to experienced mod makers, to create pretty much anything they want in Neverwinter, In the demo we got to see at E3 2011, we saw a simple dungeon with spider webs created inside a few minutes with the editor. The editor can place in NPCs for players to talk to and/or battle and it's all done with a top down viewpoint, much like making a new classic D&D pen-and-paper dungeon. Much of the dungeon building is of the drag-and-drop variety so it should be pretty easy to use.
Cryptic will let a player-based group review each new user-creator mission for Neverwinter before allowing it to be released to the general player population where it will also be rated. Cryptic also plans to continue to support the editor with extra content packs. There's no word yet if the editor will be released before the game but Cryptic says there will be some kind of beta test at some point.
And ZAM:
The Foundry is currently in development, so Cryptic gave us some general details regarding the system. Here are their main points:
'¢ There will be a complete set of standalone content that Cryptic will create for the game.
'¢ When the game launches, there will be a robust set of tools on The Foundry for players.
'¢ They're trying to design it to be an easier version of the Aurora toolset while maintaining a high level of customization.
'¢ They're still trying to work out exactly how much they want to allow users to be able to do with it.
