Despite Neverwinter already boasting an impressive 26 modules that take players through countless iconic Dungeons & Dragons settings, the team at Cryptic Studios still manages to pull off some surprising feats of level and character design as evidenced by the game's latest module, Spelljammer. In Module 27, players will embark on a spacefaring spelljammer vessel and travel to surprisingly distinct planetary and asteroid landing zones as they fight against the interstellar Xaryxian Empire.

In an exclusive interview with Game ZXC, Neverwinter Executive Producer Brett Norton weighed in on how Cryptic brought the iconic Spelljammer D&D campaign setting into Neverwinter. He spoke about the various challenges involved in adapting this unique setting, as well as how the landing sites throughout Wildspace opened up a brand-new approach to Neverwinter content and level design.

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Q: Neverwinter will be diving into sci-fi with Spelljammer, a previously untouched setting in the game. What was the most challenging thing about stepping into this new setting?

Norton: You'll hear us talk about this a lot, but the most challenging aspect of Spelljammer as a whole was capturing the sense of exploring Wildspace and traveling to a lot of different locations. Wildspace is a vast, incredible space, but video games have to be much more specific about which locations we can visit compared to the tabletop game. We first contemplated having the module take place on the Rock of Bral, a massive floating asteroid in Wildspace that serves as a natural hub for a lot of tabletop adventures. But the Rock of Bral, while an iconic landmark when viewed from outside, has an actual surface that is similar to the cities and landscapes we've done in Neverwinter in the past. There's nothing bad about the Rock of Bral, but if we spent all our time on just that, it wasn't going to capture the feeling of getting out and exploring space. We wanted to see more, different environments than just the Rock of Bral, so our maps team came up with the idea of 'Landing Sites' instead.

Each of the Landing Sites is smaller than some of the sprawling adventure zones we've done in the past, but it allowed us to create a larger number of unique locations for Spelljammer. This is a pretty big departure from our past modules, which generally only feature one or two very thematically similar, large maps.

On top of the challenges we faced with maps and location, we obviously needed starships to move through Wildspace. The art team had to figure out how to budget and create some massive, unique spelljamming ships, especially the iconic Star Moth of the Astral Elves. We have been secretly working on these ships for quite a while, knowing that we needed to be working far in advance to make Spelljammer special.

Overall, the team did a great job planning, managing, and executing on the landing sites and spelljammer ships. There's certainly a lot we couldn't fit into Spelljammer, given the breadth of the IP, but we managed to include a lot more diversity in this module than we had expected, thanks to some good long-term planning and teamwork.

Q: Spelljammer is a distinct setting for D&D. What did you feel was most important in terms of expressing the overall feel and tone of Spelljammer? Were there any features or qualities you particularly wanted to include?

Norton: A sense of exploration and wonder. That was the most important feeling to capture, and what we think is at the heart of Spelljammer's fun. We really wanted to include spelljamming ships of course, which might seem a given, but when you're talking about building huge ship models for a video game, it's not. We hope that the Wildspace map and the different landing sites we've created help captures that sense of wonder, but it's always a challenge to translate something as open-ended as the tabletop's space exploration into a video game.

Q: Spelljammer has had almost no exposure in video games aside from the 1992 MS-DOS game. Was it difficult working on and finding references for a relatively underutilized theme?

Norton: To some degree, yes. We did have the advantage of leveraging the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space set released by Wizards of the Coast last year. This gave us a solid baseline from which to start, but obviously, a tabletop experience and a gaming experience don't face the same limitations. But there's a fantastic amount of concept art, characters, locations, etc. in those source books, so it helped us a lot.

We ran into a similar challenge with our Menzoberranzan module, which despite being a popular location in the Forgotten Realms IP, hasn't had much representation in video games (or recent D&D tabletop books). In both the case of Spelljammer and Menzoberranzan, we pitched some early ideas and concepts to Wizards of the Coast on how we would translate these settings into a video game, ensuring we met their aesthetic and narrative needs.

The good news is that the lack of 'canonical' recent video games in those spaces meant we got the opportunity to define some elements for ourselves. We don't know if future games will utilize how Neverwinter chose to represent these settings, but we hope we did a solid job and future developers find our work useful if they're in the same situation as we were.

Q: The module includes a new trial, Defense of the Moondancer. How does this trial stick out from others? Are there any standout mechanics or unusual features that come to mind?

Norton: Without spoiling too much, we wanted to challenge players in a way that's a bit different than our last few 'big bad' trials. Rather than facing a single, incredibly powerful creature (like Gzemnid), players face off against the combined might of the Xaryxian Empire. The team raiding the Moondancer is comprised of numerous soldiers, lieutenants, and led by the dangerous Captain Zoor'lar. The Xaryxian Empire fights like an army, and Captain Zoor'lar leverages his lieutenants to assist him, and his soldiers, during the trial.

We hope this provides players with some unique new tactical challenges, as they will need to leverage crowd control powers and other effects to handle the soldiers while carving a path to Zoor'lar himself.

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Q: This module marks the beginning of additional Spelljammer content in Neverwinter. Can you talk a bit about what the long term vision looks like as far as Spelljammer content? For example, will future modules also leverage the Landing Zone system?

Norton: We have not announced anything with respect to future Neverwinter modules, yet, so we can't spoil our plans. But there is a good chance that future modules will expand on Spelljammer and, in particular, Wildspace. There's certainly room for more landing sites, and we have more than a few ideas that didn't make it into Spelljammer that we'd love to represent in a future Neverwinter module.

Q: Players can travel to several planets in Spelljammer. How did you decide which planets to include? Were there certain aesthetic or lore considerations guiding the process?

Norton: Yes! From an aesthetic standpoint, there were just some locations we wanted to include in Spelljammer because we thought they'd be awesome things to do in Wildspace. We actually made a big list of all the landmarks / locations we thought were interesting, and then had to whittle that huge list down to the set that you'll see in the module. Some of those locations were chosen because we thought they were just aesthetically cool sci-fi landmarks, and others chosen because we felt they had strong local narratives that we wanted to tell. A few maps though, we included because they tied into our overarching Spelljammer story (Light of Xaryxis), and we needed some tentpole locations to drive the main narrative forward.

Q: What was the team's approach to Spelljammer's narrative? Did it look to Spelljammer adventures like Light of Xaryxis, or was there a certain plot or mood the team was interested in?

Norton: The overarching plot of Spelljammer is inspired by the Light of Xaryxis narrative. That being said, whenever we translate a tabletop narrative into Neverwinter, we have to make some changes to account for the limitations of building a lot of assets and locations. Tabletop narratives often take players to numerous wildly different locations, and that's much harder to do in a video game. In Spelljammer, there's a lot of original sub-plots, specifically on the various landing sites, that are entirely original. We hope that the overarching plot, inspired by Light of Xaryxis, is captivating, but also that our smaller, unique narratives on each location are really enjoyable.

Q: Is there anything the team learned or discovered while working on Spelljammer that might influence how future non-Spelljammer content is approached?

Norton: We're constantly iterating on our process and the technical structure of Neverwinter. There's some new dev technology that we're rolling out with Spelljammer that we hope to use in future modules, but hopefully it's relatively invisible to players. It does help speed-up our content creation, so the good news is that if things pan out, we'll be able to generate more unique gameplay, faster, for future modules. We also did learn a good bit while building Wildspace itself, as the structure is pretty unique compared to prior Neverwinter adventure zones, but we're not certain yet how much that will carry forward into our future, not-Wildspace, adventure zones.

Q: In addition to visiting various planets, players can also visit asteroid landing sites with their own unique content. What kinds of things can players do at these special asteroid and invasion landing sites?

Norton: Each of the landing sites, whether they are planets, asteroids, or the invasion site, have their own unique narratives and gameplay. The planets, being a bit bigger, have more involved and unique plots, but each of the asteroids has their own small story and interesting quests. On some of our landing sites, you might be trying to help settle a dispute between Orcs and Elves, while on another, you're trying to curry favor with an intergalactic cartel. You might even get involved in a roundup of the local space hamster population! The most unique landing site is the invasion site, and that's a limited-access site where the players assault a Xaryxian shipyard / docks area. It's intended to be a sort of 'time attack' style raid, something that naturally funnels players into it when it's available, and it was a bit inspired by parts of our Rage of Bel content a few years back.

Q: Some other general updates are also included, such as a Paladin class update. How did player feedback inform the development of this update? Are there certain things players brought up that you felt were especially important to address?

Norton: We utilized our community to gather a sort of 'initial list' of known bugs, issues, class weaknesses, etc. Using the Paladin class as an example, we knew of more than a few things we wanted to address going into the module's development. We set out to get our initial set of changes in, and got those changes up on our Preview servers.

Once the Preview servers were updated, we opened the feedback floodgates. We've had active threads on our official forums, and really active threads on some of the community Discord servers. MMORPG players are quite passionate about class balance, and this was certainly no exception. We continued to iterate on the classes overall several rounds of changes, making continual updates to the Paladin (and a few more to the Barbarian as well). Our Preview servers functioned as a sort of general 'Early Access' in this respect, and the community feedback was invaluable for not just finding bugs, but giving us important 'feel' and balance feedback. We made some additional changes based on their requests, and in a few cases, actually reverted some changes that they didn't like. Namely, we reverted some changes to one Paladin power, but used the ideas we liked to revamp a different, much less popular power instead.

As we were working on our tank paragons, the community felt strongly that we needed to work on improvements to the overall 'threat' system that tanks use. We did some fundamental changes to how tank threat is generated (across Neverwinter), and made some systemic changes to tanks to bring more consistency between all three of our tank paragons. So, while Paladins, and Barbarians a bit, were the most-affected classes in Neverwinter, there are quite a few fundamental changes that affect Fighter tanks as well.

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Neverwinter

From Cryptic Studios comes the D&D-inspired MMORPG Neverwinter, which takes place in the Faerun-continent famous from Forgotten Realms lore. Neverwinter is free-to-play and features all the classic adventure an RPG fan could hope for, from class-based combat and immersive stories to even PVP game modes.

Platform(s)

PC , PS4 , Xbox One

Released

June 20, 2013

Developer(s)

Cryptic Studios

Publisher(s)

Perfect World Entertainment , Gearbox Publishing