Neverwinter Previews

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Written by BuckGB on September 2nd, 2012

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The Forge is Neverwinter's ace in the hole when it comes to taking on its contemporaries. It's a massive suite of tools that allow gamers to create and share their own levels, crafting robust narratives from the ground up (literally). We watched as one of these worlds came to life, starting with opening up the Forge menus and jumping into the easy-to-understand user interface. Dragging and dropping boxes and options created a full MMO dialog tree, with multiple choices and all of the stuff you typically click through and ignore. We picked objectives, too, randomly deciding that the player would have to kill X of Y, and collect an object. Those Ys won't know what hit them.

Creating a dungeon looked like snapping Lego pieces together. Almost any room can be linked to almost any other room at any point, so it was easy to drag and drop different pre-made structures from the list of hundreds to create a dungeon. With a few additional clicks, the rooms were full of the objects and enemies of our choice, all of which could be customized to our liking. We were amazed to see that besides choosing from any of the dozens of NPCs in the game, it was also possible to edit them completely, essentially creating new creatures and characters with Cryptic's character creation tools (which have always been among the best in the industry). And no, that's not limited to swapping skin color or eyes--you're able to bend, warp, and distort any part of the body, even if it means intentionally breaking the character model.

Conversation trees can do simple yes/no branching, but you can also sub-branch and add detail for specific answers while others kill a conversation outright. You can set dialogue to loop or double back if need be. Likewise, dungeons can be as simple or involved as you like. The monsters who populate them can come from a premade set of critters and evil NPCs, but you can tweak the appearance and behavior of these foes as well. Your favorite creations can be saved to a library of content for reuse in other quests.

Cryptic claims that players could work all the way to their character's level cap playing nothing but user-generated content; the aim is for player-created experience and item rewards to be commensurate with integral story quest content. While the game will impose restrictions on bounty yields to prevent people from abusing the system by creating a one-room quest to kill a level 1 kobold that makes you hit your level cap, quests and their rewards will scale with players and entice them with... well, with whatever quest designers can come up with.

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