Interview With Lindsay Haven Of Cryptic Studios, Developers Of Neverwinter

I recently had the chance to sit down with Neverwinter Producer Lindsay Haven to discuss the upcoming module, The Maze Engine. We discussed the module's story, changes to existing dungeons, the new mount system, and more.

How does The Maze Engine’s story tie into Underdark’s?

The Maze Engine’s story is the continuation of Underdark’s story. The demons are still invading and, although we’ve defeated Demogorgon, we haven’t defeated the other demon lords. This time, we will be facing Baphomet and Orcus.

What is the Maze Engine?

The Maze Engine is a device of unknown power, but we know it is incredibly powerful. Baphomet would like to use it to rewrite reality so that it’s much easier for demons to take over, to create that kind of chaos.

When you face Baphomet in the final fight of the module, he has figured out how to harness some of the power of the Maze Engine and he uses it to teleport players into a different reality, which, surprise, it’s a maze. Players have to make their way through the maze in order to rejoin their party and eventually defeat Baphomet.

Does the name come from the fact that it tosses people into a maze?

The Maze Engine just changes realities. Really, Baphomet sending you to a reality where there is a maze is more of a story that Cryptic spun. The Maze Engine itself is really just used to change realities. The name is kind of meant to indicate that it changes things around and you never know where you are in the next turn. The literal maze representation is just something that Cryptic came up with.

So it was just a coincidence?

I wouldn’t say it was a coincidence, but it was something that was derived from Cryptic rather than something that was really written into Dungeons and Dragons lore.

I read that the iconic characters are going to be showing up again in repeatables. Is it going to be quest-specific, random, or something else?

It’s going to be specific. Drizzt is going to be with you most of the time. We felt like Drizzt’s character is more tied into what the Underdark is and what the demons represent at this point in time. So he plays a bigger role, but the other characters will join you during specific parts of the quest line and help you and Drizzt basically drive back the demons.

How is Castle Never changing now that Orcus has taken over?

It’s changing a lot. Valindra is the original resident—within our storyline anyway—and she’s obviously been killed off in our previous storyline. Now that the demons are coming to the surface, Orcus, who is the Demon Prince of the undead, is pretty attracted by Valindra’s old dracolich that we previously defeated. So he is moving into Castle Never to raise the dracolich.

He’s, for lack of a better word, remodeled quite a bit. A lot of where you see the undead and the demons gathering within Castle Never, where the major fights are, there’s a lot of decoration that leans more towards that undead and demonic feel. Orcus is really coming in and taking over.

So, from a mechanical standpoint, all of the bosses are different. The storyline in Castle Never is completely different. But a lot of parts are very similar. We used many of the same rooms, so a lot of the iconic pieces of Castle Never are still there.

How are the other revamped dungeons changing?

We really just brought those back. We updated the loot. We changed some of the collision and lighting. Otherwise, it’s the same story. It’s the same characters. But we did cut out a few of the fights to make them more appropriately timed. We took out some of the—what we call—trash mobs and made it so you got to the bosses quicker.

Since we started building Neverwinter, it’s been about five years. I know we haven’t been out that long, but some of those older pieces, our technology has changed and advanced, so we wanted to update that before we got them back out there.

I read that some of the leveling dungeons are going to scale difficulty now. How is that going to work?

One thing that we wanted to do with Neverwinter was make it so that you could play with your friends and help them level through the content. Dungeons, typically in MMOs, are that weird spot where somebody comes in and they’re totally overpowered.

The way we set it up in Neverwinter is that, if you’re level 70, you’re scaled down to, say it’s a level 46 dungeon, you’ll be scaled down to 46. You’re still definitely more powerful than a level 46 because you have many things like feats that a 46 wouldn’t have and you have items with enchantments in them that you wouldn’t have otherwise. So you’re still a little bit more powerful, but it’s putting people more in line so that the content is a little bit more of an even playing field for everybody.

It’ll scale you down to the level of the dungeon, but will it scale you up?

You can’t access the dungeon if you’re too low for it. So if the dungeon is a level 46 and you’re 46, it will scale anybody else down but you play a 46.

So you still can’t join friends that are farther along, but they can join you.

That’s true. In terms of technical difficulties, it’s hard to even balance one direction, much less balance two. Previously, we’d done up to level 70, but we actually looked at our technology and found that it was going to be easier to go down. So that’s the direction we went. Hopefully, we’ll include the leveling up at some point, but for now, we had to get something good in the game that felt good and we think that was the way to do it.

How does the new mount system work? Do interchangeable mount speeds and abilities have any restrictions?

No, not restrictions from mount to mount. If you have a white mount and you have a legendary speed at 140%, you can just put the 140% on the white mount. It’s the same with the passives and the click powers and any of the insignias. It’s super interchangeable.

The reason we did that is that we felt the reason people choose costumes versus the reason they choose everything else had different motivations and we didn’t want that costume tied to other things. So the mount costume really just holds the slots for everything else and there are no restrictions there.

Will any new mounts be making it into the game with the launch of the new mount system?

Absolutely. It’s not going to be as massive as when we launched the game. It’s probably going to be more like a normal module. For us, it’s pretty great because one of the reasons we didn’t want to separate this is because now we can release costumes as much as we want without having to saturate the market or affect power in the game. We have a lot more freedom to make more costumes. We’ve made, I think, maybe twice as much as we usually do for our module this module.

With the launch of the new mount system, will you be retaining tiers like legendary for mounts?

Quality for us now is going to be more about what we call the “mount template.” It’s going to be about what insignia slots there are, how many insignia slots there are, and what powers, like the speed and click-activatable. What of those come with the mount and a little bit about costumes.

We’ll still use it, but we’ve actually completely gotten rid of having to pay Astral Diamonds for those. We’ve been, over the last seven months or so, really taking a critical look at the Astral Diamond economy and moving it in the right direction with, of course, feedback from players, but this was one of the last things that was a huge holdout for that. It was just too expensive to upgrade those. So we just took it out.

The last two expansions have had a three-month gap between PC and Xbox. Do you think you’re going to start closing the gap with this one?

Yeah, we’re going to close it a little bit. Ideally, I think it’s pie in the sky to say that we would release them at the same time, but it’s not going to happen in the near future because we have much less freedom to update the game server when it’s on Xbox and we have to go through that whole process. Every time we do that, by that sheer fact, it’s going to take two weeks when we’re done with our build to actually get it to them.

We could make PC players wait. We just don’t see a major reason to do that. It’s going to be less than three months, but it’s probably not going to get to any less than a month or a month and a half until we figure out how to fix that.

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Neverwinter: The Maze Engine is currently scheduled to launch on PC on March 15th with an Xbox One release happening "less than three months" later.