Interview With Scott Shicoff Of Cryptic Studios, Developers Of Neverwinter

I recently had the chance to sit down with Scott Shicoff, Lead Designer of Neverwinter at Cryptic Studios to talk about the latest Neverwinter expansion, Underdark. We talked about Dungeons and Dragons tie-ins, R.A. Salvatore's involvement, and the difference between "repeatable" and "replayable."

What made you choose to make Underdark the eighth expansion?

Shicoff: Wizards has a really cool story going on with their module that they’re doing, Out of the Abyss. You have demons from the abyss that have been unleashed on the Underdark and they’re kind of running amok and causing all kinds of chaos and damage. It’s such a brutal threat that we kind of figured it only made sense to send the heroes of Neverwinter down to the Underdark to help where they could. We wanted to tie it in really strongly with Wizards’ expansion.

Are you planning to tie in more expansions with the Wizards expansions in the future?

Yeah, absolutely. We did it in the past with Tyranny of Dragons and Rise of Tiamat. That’s tied together with Horde of the Dragon Queen and, later, Rise of Tiamat. And we’re doing it now with Out of the Abyss and there’s an expectation that we’re going to keep doing that moving forward.

You also tied it in with Archmage. How exactly does that tie in?

It’s only sort of tied in. It’s pretty loose. One of the big things, that was really cool for us, was working with R.A. Salvatore. He wrote a whole quest line that we have in game. You have a section of the fans that are going to be really familiar with the books and they’re going to want to see it play out, and then you have the fans that have maybe never read it. We want it to be a good experience regardless of whether you knew the books or not. It’s actually not a connecting piece within the stories, but in some ways, a retelling of certain aspects of stories that he’s done with these characters and a way for players to be part of the story in Neverwinter.

How long is this story expected to take?

That’s kind of a hard question to answer, really. You never really know how long someone’s going to take. You can try and burn through it. There are nine quests that are in this quest line and they’re instanced out and they have hidden easter eggs.

Some players might try to burn through it as quickly as they can, and again, it’s like nine instanced things with a good amount of story, and then they can go back and find the easter eggs. It’s sort of a tough question to answer.

What can we expect from the 10-player boss battle that’s at the end?

It’s a 10-person fight that you queue up for in Mantle Dareth which, for those who don’t know, is a secret marketplace down in the Underdark where all the different races, whether they’re Drow, Duergar, you might even see a Beholder down there, they can go trade in secret. So we have the players showing up in Mantle Dareth and down there, they’ll also find characters like Drizzt, Bruenor, and Regis—famous, iconic characters from Salvatore—because they’re looking for Demogorgon.

They’re going to run off and deal with that and you’re going to join them for this 10-person fight, which is available at the top of every hour. You’re going to go up against Demogorgon—with the help of those famous characters I mentioned. The battle is broken up into three phases and each phase is checking to see how well you do. So, we’ll reward players based on how well they do in each phase. The better you do, the higher your reward at the end of the fight. And then each phase has variations so the players will need to pay attention and really be engaged if they want the best possible score.

How much of a role are these famous characters going to play in the battle?

They mostly drive the story of it, though they will help deal with Demogorgon in the final stage. Of course, the players are the heroes of their story, so they need to be the primary drivers. As part of the lore tie-in, the characters will be down there helping you out. But the actual players need to really pay attention to what’s going on and adjust strategies based on what happens during the fight to really maximize their chance for the best rewards.

I also read about “variability” being added to battles. Can you elaborate on that?

So, the levels of variation—and we’re doing this for both skirmishes and the Demogorgon fight—will differ between the different pieces of content. Sometimes, it’s something small, like changing placements or spawns. And sometimes, it’s a fully different mechanic that will be in play in a given phase.

I’ll give one example of a phase during the Demogorgon fight where the players will do battle against a Goristro—which, for those that don’t know, is a demon that is effectively a siege weapon. There are two different types of Goristro that could show up for the phase and, depending on which one shows up, you’ll have different attacks to deal with and try and mitigate.

And, on top of that, the Goristro is going to want to charge the players, being this sort of siege instrument of destruction. They’ll need to identify shifting locations on the map so they can try and lead the Goristro towards those changing areas, so that, when it charges towards the player, the player moves out of the way, it crashes into the wall in a very specific spot to take extra damage.

Tied into all that variation, like I said, if you are paying attention to the situation, reading what’s going on, and able to adjust your strategy to compensate, then you’ll have the chance of earning the best rewards.

So mostly the variation is going to be added in what spawns and new monsters having variations?

Yeah, it can be locations of spawns, types of spawns, mechanics tied into it. All of those things together will make it so that you’re not just able to close your eyes and play it. I guess that’s the big thing. There’s a lot of repeatable content in a lot of games and we’re going for more “replayable.”

The basic difference between “repeatable” and “replayable” to me is that, if you can get it on muscle memory and effectively play with your eyes closed, you’re not going to be that engaged. It’s going to be boring. So we’re trying to put in enough variation so that you’re going to want to pay attention. You’re going to have fun doing it.

So you’re looking to take existing “repeatable” content and make it all “replayable?”

No, we’re starting this out with the new content that we’re coming out with in module 8.

So going forward, you’re going to work towards more “replayable” but you’re not going to change existing content?

Not immediately, but we may go back and revisit it. It’s a living game. We’re always updating it.

Since Strongholds is the new major feature, is Underdark going to affect Strongholds at all?

There are going to be Demonic Heroic Encounters that are going to be showing up in the Stronghold map. One thing that’s cool about the Demonic Heroic Encounters is that they scale based on the number of players that are showing up to deal with it. The more players you have, the difficulty increases, but the rewards also increase.

So if you don’t have a lot of players available to do it, that’s okay, you can still participate. But if you get a bunch of people going out and taking care of those, then it’s more rewarding.

Also on Strongholds, we are opening up a new plot location for a resource generating plot. So for people who are like “we would like some extra stone” or “we want another warehouse,” there’s a location for a structure like that to be built. I believe it’s for Strongholds of level 9 or greater.

And then we are also introducing a new PvP tower that’s Underdark themed that players will be able to construct.

With the Demonic Heroic Encounters, do the monsters vary by region, or at all?

We have a handful of different Demonic Heroic Encounters, and they scale and that kind of shifts, but that’s based on the amount of players and not by location. So, if you’re on your Stronghold and you want to do them, you can. If you want to go to, say, Dread Ring, where they will also be showing up, you can go out there and take care of it there. So the location doesn’t change them, but there are different Demonic Heroic Encounters and again, the number of people participating will sort of adjust what you are up against, as well.

So will there be stronger monsters or more monsters or both?

Both.

What kind of new gear will be made available in Underdark? Is there anything in specific that you can share?

There are two new sets of armor, Dusk Armor and Drow Craft Armor, and those are available through different locations, including the campaign. And there are other places you can get it, as well. And some of that gear will help you against demons and Demogorgon.

There are also some new artifact weapons and we’re putting out a bunch of unique rings that have interesting abilities. There’s all these different types of rings and they range in power from +1 to +5 and, based on the difficulty of the content and your success in playing it, you’ll increase your chances for getting better versions of these special, interesting rings.

Then with the campaign, there’s also new boons, of course.

So you will have a strong incentive to replay the content to get a higher score?

Absolutely. You not only want to improve your abilities but also your ability to read the situation in order to get a better score.

Can you share any of the effects that the new rings might have?

We have some that are going to be something like “if you are running for a certain amount of time, then a special thing happens after a certain amount of seconds of movement” or “if you’ve done enough damage to something.”

Here’s one specific example. “You’ve been running for x number of seconds, you will be stealthed to foes further than 20 feet away.” And all of these numbers, seconds, distance, will be changed based on the power of the ring. Or like “when you strike a foe, you gain a certain amount of power for four seconds” and the effect can stack.

There’s something like 70 different rings. The types of rings, and their power levels, they will vary based on where you’re playing the content and how well you do.

I read in a blog post on Arc Games that a “hard look at Neverwinter: Elemental Evil” was taken and improvements were going to be assessed. What kinds of improvements made it into Neverwinter: Underdark?

So, when we were doing the development of Module 7: Strongholds, and it kind of includes the time when Module 6 was live, we made a series of improvements to the game. We adjusted difficulty, we changed XP—both the curves and the amounts you earned—and we updated rewards that weren’t really up to par. Since then, we’ve been continuing to evaluate the state of the game and we’re making improvements wherever it makes sense. I guess the point is that we don’t necessarily try and wait for a full module release if we feel there’s something we should address immediately.

One thing we did notice when we were planning Module 8 was that the Tarmalune Trade Bar Store hadn’t been updated in a very long time. This was really unfortunate since Trade Bars are something that players get as part of the value of lock boxes. It’s not really fun to get a currency that you don’t care much about. So we saw this as an obvious spot to improve the game.

So in this update, the whole store is getting a revamp. New items are going to be available, prices are going to make more sense—which generally means they’ll be lower than what you’ve seen before—and moving forward, we have a plan in place to continue updating on a regular basis.

But, like I said, if there’s an issue with the game, we don’t wait for a module release. We try and take care of it as soon as it makes sense.

With the new gear preview feature, are you planning any revamps of major menus like that?

Not for this module release. And actually, gear preview is a brand new feature. We haven’t had it before. So you’ll be able to look at weapons, armor, fashion, and see what it’ll look like on your character. If you go to a store, go to another player, you’re at the Zen market, in the right-click menu, I think it literally says “see gear preview” or something like that, and it pops up a new window that shows you what that weapon, armor, or fashion looks like on your character. It will even remember a limited amount of other things.

So if you’re trying on a bunch of helms and you quickly want to swap back—oh what was that last one? That was pretty cool—you can use a menu to quickly show that thing again because the system will remember for a while.

 

I’ve seen in some games where you can click in chat, where the item is listed, and you can pull up the gear preview. Is that going to be a feature?

Yep, that’ll be in there. Anywhere where you can get that right-click menu on an item, as long as it’s an item that can be previewed on a character, then it’ll show up regardless of where you’re getting that menu from.

So how did the collaboration with R.A. Salvatore come about?

Shortly after launch, we contacted Salvatore about writing an original quest line for Neverwinter incorporating the companions. At the time, Salvatore was working on his novel involving Bruenor and Pwent in Gauntlgrym, which we thought would be a really cool tie-in to the storyline, integrating that novel and the game together.

Well, obviously it’s been awhile since then. The storyline has evolved a bit. But you’re still going to get to see really cool storylines that Salvatore wrote and a number of iconic characters that you’ll be fighting alongside, both in the quest line and in the Demogorgon fight.

Yeah, but it’s really simple. We thought it would be cool to work with Salvatore, so we contacted him, he thought it would be cool to get his characters in the game, and the rest is history.

How long do you think it’s going to take to get this expansion on Xbox One?

Well, I can’t give release dates yet, but our goal is to try and get PC and Xbox to be the same content as soon as possible. We had a really big release not too long ago which was basically up to what would have been PC’s version of Module 6 and we are working towards releasing Module 8 right now. So we’re still a little bit behind. But we’re making rapid progress.

My hope is that sometime next year we’ll be at parity, but I can’t say for sure. It’s really important to us that we get all versions of Neverwinter up to the same content.

On the subject of the PS4 version of Neverwinter that was previously confirmed by Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons Associate Brand Manager Trevor Kidd in a livestream, Shicoff had “no comment.”

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The Underdark module is set to launch this fall. For more information, head over to the official website.