Neverwinter Xbox Feature Covers the Game's Development History Through Menzoberranzan, the 25th Module

mmorpg.com:

There’s a special feature on Neverwinter over at the Xbox Wire, covering the game’s path as a console MMORPG, and its decade-long history. There's even a little tease for the end of 2023.

Neverwinter released on PC 10 years ago, and made it over to Xbox eight years ago. Executive Producer Brett Norton and Creative Director Randy Mosiondz give insight into the history of Neverwinter overall. The Neverwinter team, as with many MMOs, had to take their time to shape what their game would truly be after the initial concept.

Mosiondz, on the early days: “Early on there was an attempt at building a narrative-focused game where there was heavy storyline scripting, and every player in an adventuring party could ‘vote’ towards how a story would play out. While it was an interesting system, once we incorporated an action-focused combat style, we found the two game elements didn’t mesh well together”. One thing they noticed was their approach was “we were trying to serve two types of players and were doing a disservice to both” by focusing on a locked narrative and not finding their true core development idea yet. Enter action-based combat with narrative content and a PC release in 2013.

Console release was something they considered even early on, and that launch was a hit. This led Cryptic to port over Star Trek Online, to additional success. All this while learning about what it meant to tailor to console.

Being able to borrow from the rich history and ideas from Dungeons & Dragons has been at the core of the experience ever since. The release of  Menzoberranzan is Neverwinter’s 25th module, and the full profile traces the growth of the game and what that means. If you’ve been playing for a long time, then you’ll have seen