Ahead of the launch of season 2 of Neverwinter's Avernus module, Game ZXC had the chance to sit down with Doug Miller, Senior Systems Designer for Neverwinter. Miller is also known as Asterdahl to the Neverwinter community on Reddit and other forums, and recently also conducted an AMA covering some of the finer details of the new mechanics introduced in Avernus. Our conversation with Miller covered new content, things to come, and some of the unique challenges and benefits of working on a popular Dungeons and Dragons MMO such as Neverwinter.
Neverwinter Avernus season 2 brings new buildings to the Redeemed Citadel, opportunities to discover a wealth of lore, new and powerful foes to face, and plenty of personal and community-wide goals to go after. Most of the rewards for reaching those goals will have to be seen on the day of release, but our conversation did reveal a sneak peak of two powerful artifacts that fans will be eager to learn more about. The following interview transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
GR: Can you break down what’s new in this episode?
Miller: Sure, absolutely. In episode one, when players completed that, they unlocked the ability to do some open world hunts. Hunts are a mechanic where you can go out into the world, put down a lure, and spawn a rare enemy. It’s like a little mini-boss in the world. Episode one unlocked that, and for episode two, similar to episode one, there won’t be a lot of new stuff right away but players will work together to fill this meter to help restore the Citadel. Once they reach that milestone and they complete it, that’s when they unlock the new feature. Without maintenance or anything, it’s just going to go live. So there’s gonna be some new hunts, there’s gonna be a new room that unlocks in the citadel, there’s gonna be new stuff to buy in the store.
GR: Server wide goals are interesting. Is there anything different about trying to develop content for that kind of big, community-wide interaction?
Miller: This was our first time doing a long-term server goal. We’ve done really short ones before, like within a single hour people will contribute to a thing and then at the end something will happen, but this is the first one we’ve done that will span multiple days or weeks. We had to look at the data and say: How many people are playing? How many hours a day are they playing? -And then really try to make that goal something that made sense. We wanted it to not take too long, but also not go too fast. We could never be 100% sure because when we introduce a server wide goal, it’s going to make people play differently. We all have our guesses and we have some internal betting pools. Some people guessed “they’re gonna figure out a way to exploit it and it’ll only take three days,” some people said it’ll take three weeks. I was aiming for around two weeks for the first goal, and that’s about what we hit.
GR: What’s it like to keep a game and a community alive for so long?
Miller: There’s a relief in working on a game that’s been out this long because we know who our audience is and they know who we are, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly. But at the same time, there’s six-plus years of weird stuff people have made on the team. We have to constantly say- oh god, there’s this really powerful artifact that somebody made years ago that’s really strong in this one spot, how do we deal with that? There’s a lot of difficulty in terms of balancing considering that big backlog of stuff we’ve made. On the other hand it’s really rewarding to have players stick around so long and continue loving the game.
GR: And if players have been around that long, they will find that stuff and they will use it.
Miller: Yeah, that’s nice when they tell us, but sometimes they don’t tell us!
GR: What about episodic content? How did you guys decide to start doing that?
Miller: So normally in the past, we had major modules come out every three to four months, which is a style that you saw in a lot of MMOs for years and years. But ultimately what happens is in that big lull, in that four month gap, a month and a half or two months in you start running out of things to do. We want to add things for people who want to log in and hang out with their friends, but ran out of stuff to do. We want to give them something to do while they’re there. We tried to make stuff, for instance, this server goal- there’s no new dungeon or trial as part of the redeemed citadel, but there is stuff to do in the zone with your friends. Ultimately I think a lot of people in an MMO are just looking for an excuse to log in and hang out with people, so we just wanted to get some stuff in there that didn’t take up too much development resources but it’s still something to see and do in the gap between modules.
GR: What would you say is the biggest change in this update, or the biggest changes?
Miller: Episode two is going to bring the Library, a new room in the Citadel which is a repository for lore. For people who are really into lore, this is going to be an episode to get excited about. The Library will have lore entries on its own, but also when you defeat any of the hunt marks their story is going to be added to the library, so after you defeat them you can go and see "who was this pit fiend that I just destroyed?"
GR: What’s it like to work in a system and lore setting, D&D and the Forgotten Realms, that has been so well established? And even in the time since Neverwinter came out has become so much more popular?
Miller: I think it’s really cool because people recognize a lot of stuff. People know who Zariel is, and they’re excited to see those characters return. Working with any intellectual property is challenging because you want to meet player expectations and do the characters justice. On the plus side we have so many stories to draw from that we’re never at a loss for what to do next. We don’t have to go back to the drawing board, we’re overflowing with ideas. “We wanna go to Icewind Dale! We wanna go to the Feywild! We wanna…” there’s so many places we want to go. That’s the most overwhelming part, that we only have so much development time but so many places we want to go.
GR: What can you tell us about the War Room?
Miller: The War Room is an area that unlocked at the end of episode one, and that’s where the Heaven’s Septem have taken up residence in the Citadel. They are sort of their own faction of elite angelic hunters who basically pursue the most dangerous fiends from the nine hells or the abyss. Zariel has basically invited them to set up shop in the Citadel and work with all the mortals and players to try and track down the most dangerous marks- the most wanted list of the demon and devil realm. That’s where players are going to go to learn about the hunt marks and obtain the items they need to track them down.
GR: Zariel is an interesting character because she was evil, but is now redeemed. Is it fun to play with a character like that, that is now a powerful ally but was once evil? What’s it like to play with the redemption theme?
Miller: In high fantasy there tends to be a lot of one-dimensional, evil characters. You know: “I’m just a lich! I devour souls and I murder people because that’s my jam!” With Zariel there’s a lot of depth. She started good, then she fell, then you’re trying to redeem her. I think it’s a story we wanted to tell because it’s something we haven’t done in Neverwinter, but also there’s so many options if you’re running the Avernus campaign yourself, and we think that redeeming her was an exciting option that not a lot of people probably went for in their own campaigns.
Also, it allowed us to offer some things- helping her to rebuild and do what she came to do the first time. When she first came to hell she came with a bunch of mortals to try and defeat all of the devils, so she’s getting a chance to try that again with he help of other celestials. I also think the trial, which is a ten-man fight where you face off against Zariel after she’s been redeemed, was pretty cool. In the past the trials have been more of a fight to the death, and this time around it is more of a friendly challenge with an angel. There’s a lot of opportunities for storytelling there.
GR: It’s neat to be able to fight a good guy just for funsies.
Miller: It’s really cool because you usually don’t get to fight a celestial, they’re always good and you don’t have a reason to fight them as a player. It allowed us to do lots of things with visual effects, like holy magic that we usually wouldn’t get to spend all that much time on.
GR: What do you think is the best part of the new episode?
Miller: I think the server-wide progress we touched on before is the most exciting for us just because we haven’t done it before. Players are giving us all sorts of feedback, so we’re looking at how it’ll change, whether we add more prizes... but I think we’re really excited about the dynamic of learning about new things together, seeing that big progress bar increase, and then as soon as it completes new things happen right then and there.
GR: How do you make each individual player feel like they’re making progress on these huge server-wide goals?
Miller: We have a sort of personal progress track in the campaign window that are your own personal goals, and at each of those milestones you’re going to receive rewards yourself. That’s big, if we had just done a server goal for new content, some people would work towards but plenty of players would say “what’s in it for me?” and want personal rewards. We want to make sure that people feel their own personal progress is contributed.
GR: Do you have personal favorite detail in this update?
Miller: There’s so many but I think with this particular milestone... the leaderboard reward for this milestone is going to be an artifact that people have been wanting. It’s the Golden Memories artifact from the zen market, and the Scathing Light version from the leaderboards. Those are both artifacts that are going to have visual effects from Zariel’s own spellbook. When you fight her in the trial she access to a lot of spells, and with these artifacts you’ll have effects from her spells, so you’ll basically be able to use her spells. I think that’s my favorite thing because even though I’m a designer I got to work on some of the visual effects from her fight, so getting to give some of those to the players is really cool for me.
GR: This is all pretty late game content. How often do new players jump in? An how can newer people access this stuff?
Miller: Yeah, it’s endgame content. We do actually have new players coming in all the time, so it’s always a constant discussion we have on the team when building a new feature. People want to be able to jump in to the new content right away so we’ve made it a lot easier to level up over the years. Even coming in as a free player it’s only going to take maybe a few weeks at most to get to the point where you can do this new content. If you’re really excited to jump into the Zariel stuff there are also level 70 characters for sale in the store and they’re not so expensive. If you had to jump in right away I would recommend that.
GR: Right. As MMOs age, the balancing of character progression has to change.
Miller: Yeah, if we just had six years of content you had to play through as a new player to get to the end- from one perspective that would be exciting as a bunch of content to play, but on the other hand if your friends are telling you to come play and they’re on the sixth year, you don’t want to take nine months to catch up.
We try to keep that old content as relevant as possible for people who want to go back and enjoy it, so we have random queues that might toss you into an old dungeon or something like that, but it’s definitely a thing to balance. We want to keep some of it so that there will be variety, but if we kept all of it it would be too overwhelming.
GR: What are you most excited for moving forward?
Miller: I’m definitely looking forward to seeing if players work even faster through the milestones because they know certain rewards are in store, or whether they’ll be happy where they’re at. I want to see how that will change milestone to milestone.
GR: Any future plans you can reveal? Anything in the works where you’re waiting to see how this pans out?
Miller: There’s nothing beyond the Redeemed Citadel that we can talk about, but Chris showed off the roadmap for the future and there’s a lot of stuff on there that people are excited about. We are working on a new class. I can’t tell you what it is, but I’m working on that class and I’m excited about it. People are already guessing because they know the D&D classes and they know what we don’t have. But yeah, I’m really looking forward to sharing that new class when we’re ready.
GR: Anything else you want to touch on?
Miller: This is a new feature for us with the server goals, the personal progress, so there’s a lot of things that players might be confused by. We didn’t want to jam too much information into the UI all at once and have 100 footnotes on the UI, but I did do an AMA last week. If players are confused about any of the minutia or small details they should check out that AMA because it’ll have a lot of those answers. My handle on the forums and on Reddit is Asterdahl.
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Neverwinter is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
