It's time for more  previes for The Elder Scrolls Online., but first Machinima has a video interview with ZeniMax Online's Paul Sage.

APL steps into the MMO world with the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online during the Machinima E3 live stream.

VG247

It was, more or less, exactly the same as my typical Elder Scrolls solo experience. Character creation was pretty familiar, if simpler, but the typical races were represented. I went around doing a bunch of quests that didn’t have much to do with one another, and I wandered around looking at stuff while random assassins tried to murder me. I talked to some people, and my dialogue options were usually pretty meaningless. It’s all what I would have expected from any other internally developed Bethesda RPG.

One might read what I just wrote and interpret that as me asserting that TESO is some sort of grand evolution of the MMO, but that is not at all what I am trying to say. Rather, what playing TESO made me realize is that all those other Elder Scrolls titles were actually MMO-style games that you had to play alone. That’s not an insult, because those games have avoided some of the key annoyances about MMOs, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

To be fair, TESO is not exactly identical to Skyrim. There is an action bar, for one, though there is no cursor as mouse look is locked on. Yeah, you’ll hit the left mouse button a lot to attack, but then you’ll throw some abilities, which you buy with skill points that you gain from leveling up, in from time to time with the 1-5 keys. And, like, uh, I’m sure there were other things that were different. No, this feels like Elder Scrolls.

The Escapist

As soon as I strode into the town of Daggerfall, a dog bounded up to me. I entered a dialogue with the puppy - like you do - and I was led to the body of a young Breton. His supposed killer attacked me immediately, and I got my first taste at combat. The right and left mouse buttons feel a bit odd to constantly press when fighting, at least for me, but I soon figured out a nifty combo of trapping the Bloodthorn Assassin in his place and peppering him with lighting and basic staff attacks.

It turns out the dead guy left a shopping list, and I had to go around to the shopkeepers in town to see what I could find out. Talking to the shopkeepers not only introduced more of the excellent voice-acting for every NPC - on par or better than Skyrim I'd say - but it also let me loot all of the barrels and crates in the market. I was disappointed the guards didn't attack me, my loot OCD will get the better of me in this game, but I gathered a bunch of raw materials like grain and fruit.

Hey, that's a cookfire. What happens if I ... Yep, hello crafting system. From what I had in my inventory, I brewed an ale and a wine - potions which would restore my health or mana over a brief time. You can also "deconstruct" anything you craft to get some raw resources back and possibly discover new recipes, but I didn't learn anything new when I deconstructed my beer. Pity.

Gameskinny

For Skyrim fans, marriage systems are no big news. For newer fans of Zenimax's  Elder Scrolls Online, this may come as a pleasant surprise. In an interview with Gamespot, Paul Sage, Creative Director of ESO, explained what these marriages actually are, and also detailed several other features of this upcoming game.

Player Marriages

A player can marry another player in a simple ceremony, but it’s really a marriage of convenience. The benefit here lies in the bonus experience points you’ll get travelling and adventuring together with your character’s spouse.

Just like in Skyrim, players will have to pay up to get hitched, and both parties will wear rings signifying their new bond. And if you happen to play with more than one person, you can marry another too. Polygamy knows no bounds in Tamriel.

Guild Benefits

An even cooler feature is the guild integration. You can find your guild from Day 1 of gameplay. The moment you sign in, your guild will be listed and you can jump right into familiar territory.

As a guild, you’ll get some perks that lone wolves won’t.

1. Claim Keeps: guilds get to claim a keep or tower and this steps in as the “player housing” system in Elder Scrolls games. Close enough.
2. Guild Leader Options: guild leaders can set permissions within the guild to allow guild members access to certain features, or to keep them out.
3. Guild Bank: guild members have their own shared inventory to store loot in, accessible by every member accepted into its fold.
4. Guild XP: get bonus experience points when you travel and adventure with your guild.

And finally DevilsMMO has news the the game is being delayed.

If you were excited for all the next-gen console news to come out of E3, there's one small rain cloud attached to the whole thing. The Elder Scrolls Online for PC, originally due in Summer 2013, has been delayed to Spring 2014, to coincide with the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game. No news as to whether this is an actual delay, a delay due to the developers needing to make changes based on the console version or if Bethesda are showing shades of Rayman Legends and delaying a finished game just because, but delayed it is.

CapsuleComputers has an interview on Neverwinter with Systems Designer Lindsay Haven.

So far the races have been identified as elves, half-elves, dwarves, half-orcs, halflings, tieflings, and humans. With the coming release of the drow elves as a playable race, will Neverwinter acquire more races? Perhaps through a payment option?

There will absolutely be more playable races coming to Neverwinter. We aren’t quite sure if they will be monetized or not. Though I think we will be making that decision soon, so keep an eye out for new races on our website.

Can you explain the licensing process in making this game a reality considering an already licensed Wizards of the Coast product – Dungeons & Dragons Online? Was it hard to establish a need for a fresh MMO?

In terms of adding a new MMO to the market, we felt that there was a lot of space in the free-to-play (and free-to-download) game space. As for a new Dungeons & Dragons game, well, most of us were pretty excited about being able to work on that, and it was something that Wizards of the Coast was pushing for as well. I think all parties involved never doubted this game had potential in the market as it is now.

Classes are a bit few in number at the initial release of the open beta. Can we expect more free classes to generate new characters or will they need to be purchased? Any hints to what new classes may be in the making?

We are currently working on new classes. I can’t say what classes we are working on, but I can say that we are looking at the most popular class in D&D history and listening to the Neverwinter community. We have room to expand in that direction because there are a lot of classes available to us through the Dungeons & Dragons lore. At this time we don’t plan on charging players for playable classes.

How far is Neverwinter willing to go? The name seems to localize the title in the immediate area in Faerun. Beyond the Underdark, can we expect expansions to led us into the deserts of Calimport or into the heavy winters of the Ten Towns?

The Sword Coast is a fairly big place and there is a lot we have yet to explore, so we’re going to focus on that for now. We have no current plans to go beyond the Sword Coast, but that may change in the future.

Here are a few more previews for The Elder Scrolls Online.

GameInformer - "Exploring Daggerfall"

During my hour of playtime, I make my way through a number of small sidequests, as well as an extensive mission chain that sees my character thwarting an assassination attempt on the local king. Questing feels more directed and story-driven than many MMOs, and less focused on "kill this many foes" or "collect this many objects." Even so, in the balance between traditional MMOs and the familiar Elder Scrolls games, the game undeniably feels closer to an MMO than its single-player RPG forebears.

FleshEatingZipper -  "5 Reasons Why ‘The Elder Scrolls Online’ Isn’t The ‘Skyrim’ You’re Searching For"

This morning I got my hands on Bethesda’s new epic new MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online. It was a brief session, only about half an hour, but it was enough to get a good first impression of what the new online team’s been putting together for so many years. If you’re looking for a traditional Elder Scrolls game though, you’re going to be plenty surprised.

Polygon - "Separate Servers for PC and Console Players"

Sage, who works as creative director on the studio's MMO offering, stated that despite recently announcing the title would hit both next-gen platforms as well as Windows PC and Mac, the game will feature three separate server environments to ensure fairness in PvP across all systems as those on PC and Mac will use a mouse and keyboard while console users will have only a controller.

Bethesda sent out a press release on The Elder Scrolls Online being available not only on Pc and Mac, but also on Xbox One and PS4.

THE ELDER SCROLLS® ONLINE

COMING TO NEXT-GENERATION CONSOLES

Latest Game in Award-Winning Franchise Arriving on

PlayStation®4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac in Spring 2014

June 10, 2013 (Rockville, MD) - Bethesda Softworks® today announced that The Elder Scrolls® Online is in development for both the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system and Xbox One, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft. The game will launch on these consoles, in addition to the previously announced PC and Mac versions, in Spring 2014. The Elder Scrolls Online is the latest chapter of the award-winning franchise - and will bring the legendary experience online for the first time. Players can choose their own style of play as they embark upon an epic adventure across all of Tamriel, playing alone on a heroic quest as in previous Elder Scrolls games, exploring the huge, rich world with a few select friends, or playing with hundreds of others in massive PvP battles to save the Empire.

"We are thrilled to bring this game to consoles, in addition to the PC and Mac," said Matt Firor, game director of The Elder Scrolls Online. "It's something our fans have been requesting since we first announced the title, and something our team is excited to offer. Everyone will be able to play The Elder Scrolls Online the way they want to play."

After having experienced extended hands-on gameplay and testing the game's innovations, quests, and unique features, The Elder Scrolls Online was described by MMORPG.com as "a perfect sauce of awesome." The game has emerged as one of the industry's most anticipated titles - and praised by such diverse press outlets as IGN, GameSpot, Game Informer, MMORPG.com and TenTonHammer.com. Millions of Elder Scrolls fans have already signed up for the beta on PC and Mac to gain early access to the game, and console fans can now sign up to be eligible for the console beta test  which will begin later this year. For more information or to sign up for beta on your preferred platform, visit www.elderscrollsonline.com.

The Elder Scrolls Online will be the first Elder Scrolls title to be played online after nearly 20 years of offering these best-selling, award-winning fantasy role-playing games for single player only. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim® is the most recent chapter of the Elder Scrolls story. Skyrim, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, was released in November 2011 and enjoyed worldwide critical and commercial success. As the follow-up to the 2002 Role-Playing Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind®, and the 2006 Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion®, Skyrim earned hundreds of 'Game of the Year' awards and has sold over 20 million copies.

The Elder Scrolls Online is being developed for the PlayStation4 system, Xbox One, PC, and Mac by ZeniMax Online Studios. The studio is headed by industry veteran Matt Firor who has more than 20 years of online game development experience. Working with Matt is a team of highly regarded developers who have created some of the best known online games ever released.

The Elder Scrolls Online has not yet been rated by the ESRB.

Gamerhub.tv has a short interview with Matt Firor about The Elder Scrolls Online.

Producer Matt Firor discusses the open beta and what's new in Elder Scrolls Online in this exclusive interview.

There was a few hints from BioWare about more server shutdowns and merges. Well, it seems that there is a confirmation email that is being sent out by BioWare to all of their APAC/Oceanic server players.

Here you have it straight from my email box.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM STAR WARS™: THE OLD REPUBLIC™

Asia Pacific Server Consolidation / Free Character Transfer

Greetings ,

We wanted to inform you that we are preparing to consolidate our Asia Pacific servers into our current West Coast North American servers. This will occur sometime in the next few months.

Each of your characters on an Asia Pacific server is now allowed a free one-time transfer to any non-Asia Pacific server. Any characters remaining on an Asia Pacific server when the consolidation takes place will be moved to a West Coast North American server in order to provide a better overall gameplay experience.

Please follow the instructions below to begin your free character transfer:

- Go to your “My Account” page by clicking on your username in the top right corner of SWTOR.com
- On the left hand side, scroll down to Character Transfer
- Once there, select your current APAC server and then the character you wish to transfer
- Now select your destination server (where you want to move your character)
- Press the transfer button

All remaining characters will be consolidated into the following servers in a few months:

- Dalborra -> The Harbinger
- Master Dar’Nala -> The Bastion
- Gav Daragon -> Bergeren Colony

May the Force™ be with you,

The Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Team

According to IGN Cryptic has announced Neverwinter will launch on June 20. It will also have an expansion already available for free called Fury of the Feywild.

Cryptic has announced it's free-to-play MMORPG Neverwinter will launch on June 20 and beta progress will be carried over.

The game, set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms, has been in open beta since April 30 but will shift into full release in a fortnight. When it does so, it'll coincide with the live release of Gauntlgrym, Neverwinter's free level 60 PvE and PvP content.

Additionally, the company has also announced the first free expansion pack for the game will be called Fury of the Feywild, and will be available sometime this summer. More details about the expansion will be released closer to launch, but for now we've been told It'll chronicle an attempt by Fomorian Giants to seize the Elven city of Sharandar.

Connected Digital World has a new video interview for The Elder Scrolls Online.

Later this year, Bethesda Softworks and Zenimax Online will be releasing The Elder Scrolls Online. I recently got to play some of the beta and be part of a group interview (apologies for the camera position and audio but it was a very small room with 6 people from different countries asking questions). There is also some brand new gameplay footage in the video, including never before seen first person views! Enjoy.

Fluent writes in with his personal opinion on why an MMO is better in certain areas than a single player RPG.

First, let's talk about the amount of content that an MMORPG has. MMORPGs in general have a ton of content. Quest content, things to do, places to see. Let's look at one MMORPG that I'm playing right now, Lord of the Rings Online. This game has a grand total of 21 huge zones which you can explore, with well over 2000 (!) quests to be found in these zones. Not only is that a ridiculous amount of content, more content is added all the time through expansions (of which there are 4 of at the moment) and updates. That's enough content to keep any RPG fan busy for a long time.

Exposition of lore. One thing I find great about RPGs is how they build a coherent game world using fantasy lore. In a game like Lord of the Rings Online, the lore is expounded upon to a very high degree. Every quest you find is weaving some small story in the world of Middle Earth, and you are learning more and more about the world you're in with every task that you complete. This also goes hand in hand with the amount of content. Since there are more quests around, there is more chance to expand upon the lore in every situation. Being a lore junkie myself, this aspect of MMORPGs is most satisfying. Single-player games have this as well, but usually the worlds are not quite as filled out as the MMORPG counterparts, mainly due to the sheer scope and size of an MMORPG being greater than that of a single-player RPG.

Do you agree or do you see things from a different perspective?

GameTrailers has a new video interview for The Elder Scrolls Online with Creative Director Paul Sage.

Elder Scrolls goes MMO and we've got the details on gameplay and environments in this E3 Countdown Interview with Creative Director Paul Sage!

Rock Paper Shotgun had a hands-on session with The Elder Scrolls Online and provide us with the results of the session.

That sense of exploration is something Zenimax want to emphasise. The likely reason being that they know Elder Scrolls fanatics to be curious trailblazers at heart. There certainly is a lot of landmass to cover – comprising the land from all the previous games combined, plus more – but it’s how this landmass is to be populated that will determine how successfully sated the hungers of these trailblazers will be (or how satisfied the explorer ‘subgroup’ of the MMO community will be, for that matter). It’s been a common criticism of the single player Elder Scrolls games that – although the worlds are huge, the geography stunning, and the architecture fantastic – there is a serious lack of character among the majority of the quest-giving caste and other NPCs. Obviously, this being Elder Scrolls *Online*, it can rely on the human element to pick up the slack, but that doesn’t make the first staid fetch-quest we encountered during our playthrough any more enjoyable, even if it was dressed up in a murder mystery plot and one of the characters was a dog.

Venturebeat has a inteview with Elder Scrolls Online’s Game Director on lore, combat, giant demon anchors, and dragons,

GamesBeat: What’s the vital element you had to get in to really make it an Elder Scrolls game?

Firor: For every Elder Scrolls fan, there’s a different answer to that, which is great. The guys who have been around since the beginning will tell you it’s the lore. There are no specific quest vectors. If something looks cool, you don’t have to find an NPC to tell you to go explore it, like in other MMOs. You just go and explore and get credit for it. That’s what people have come to expect from Elder Scrolls.

GamesBeat: What’s going to get someone to walk away from, say, World of Warcraft and come over to Elder Scrolls?

Firor: Elder Scrolls is an IP that brings a lot of other things with it. You can tell that it’s not using a conventional MMO combat system in any way. It’s very much an Elder Scrolls combat system. This is very much an online-RPG.

GamesBeat: Was that the goal? To take the Elder Scrolls experience we know and put it online?

Firor: It was really to come up with an online role-playing game that uses the best features of MMOs. What MMOs do well, they do really well. Things like social systems or player trading, all of that is awesome. It also comes with a lot of baggage. We wanted to make sure that we got the right elements from both genres — single-player RPGs and MMOs – and bring them together.

GamesBeat: When did you know you were getting that right?

Firor: We built our own engine — any game developers reading this will immediately start laughing, because it’s painful to play on an engine in an early state of development. It doesn’t have any of the cool shaders or effects. You have to put yourself past all that and get to the gameplay. But yeah, there was a version probably about a year and a half ago where I could say, “Okay, I see it. I see the world. There’s weather. There are cool effects and cool animations.” That’s when it really started rolling.

GameInformer has a breif hands-on preview for The Elder Scrolls Online.

As you can tell by my impressions here, Elder Scrolls Online’s storytelling has left an impact on me. I was more impressed with the tale told in this brief quest chain than I ever was in my hundreds of hours exploring World of Warcraft's barebones stories. Star Wars: The Old Republic’s waning community proves that players need more that good storylines to keep them engaged with an MMO, but I’m hopeful for Elder Scrolls Online. I walked away from my hands-on time eager to jump back in hunt down more fascinating stories when the game hits PC and Mac later this year.

PCGAMER has a two page preview of the beta for The Elder Scrolls Online.

Those who feared that The Elder Scrolls Online would amount to another cash-in MMO with a big name behind it have it wrong, but the counter-position – the promise of a casualty-free marriage of emergent RPG and online game – doesn’t quite hit the mark either.

From my first moment in game it is clear that TESO is the product of a measured and ongoing negotiation between opposing forces: the traditional MMO and the singleplayer game, ambition and technology, the demands of the community and the views of its designers. Its successes and failures alike are produced by that process.

“We’re not trying to top Skyrim,” game director Matt Firor says. “If you want to play Skyrim go play Skyrim! We’re doing something a little bit different. It should feel comfortable to people who play Elder Scrolls games, but it’s its own game in its own right.”

Bruce Maclean the Senior Producer of BioWare Austin announced all the changes, and events for STAR WARS: The Old Republic  this summer.

My name is Bruce Maclean and I am a Senior Producer here at BioWare Austin. I know there have been a lot of questions around the forums about what kind of content you can expect from us this year and so I’m here today to give you all a bit of information about what we’re working on bringing to you this summer!

We’ve seen a lot of requests for a rerun of our Double XP weekends. Well, okay! We’d like to help you stay cool in the heat of the summer with three weekends starting June 22nd and continuing through July 7th. The third and last weekend will actually start early on Thursday the 4th of July, in case you are enjoying a long Independence Day weekend.

By July 9th Ops groups will have had four weeks to cut their teeth on Nightmare Mode Terror From Beyond. That’s when we will launch Nightmare Mode Scum and Villainy as a part of Game Update 2.2.2! New mechanics and unique loot for you.

July 23rd look for a return of the Relics of the Gree Event for a nice two week long run. Per community request the Event will scaled up to level 55 on this next run!

August 6th is our target date for Game Update 2.3, which we are working on right now and will be our biggest update since 2.0. Some of the bigger parts of this update are:

New Flashpoints
New Daily Area
New Recurring Event
Significant graphical upgrades

MMORPG.com has wrote a short article discussing some of the design choices for The Elder Scrolls Online. The article also covers the upsides and downsides of the game's PvP combat.

On one hand, I’m very excited about the prospect of key members of the Dark Age of Camelot team designing Elder Scrolls Online Cyrodiil “Alliance vs. Alliance” warfare.  On the other, I’m a little confused as to why the team has made an active decision to keep PVP out of the rest of the world, and more than that... opposing factions won’t even be able to see each other when they’re in each other’s PVE content areas (see the ZAM interview linked at the bottom of this article, from Matt Firor himself).  So in this week’s column, I’m going to briefly touch on the good and bad parts of this decision, and what it could mean for the elder game of an online Tamriel.

As I said above, I’m pretty excited that a lot of the folks who once worked on Dark Age of Camelot’s RvR are heading up the team working on Elder Scrolls Online AvA. Brian Wheeler was one of the ingredients that made the magic happen in DAOC.  He was also part of the WAR team, but we can’t put that game’s failings on one man’s shoulders, so we’ll just sidestep it and chalk it up as a learning process.  At least we know ESO will have three factions as opposed to the inherently broken two.

ArenaNet announces on the Guild Wars website that all support, and development for the original Guild Wars is halted.

It's hard to believe that there's been more than eight years of Guild Wars. So much has happened since our release in April of 2005: two additional campaigns, an expansion, two major live story arcs, new festivals, new content, countless new features, and quality-of-life improvements have been added to the game. The change has happened so naturally over time, it's hard to believe how stark the difference is between when the game first launched and how it stands on the live servers now.

Over time, our focus has shifted to updates that not only help maintain Guild Wars but help the game maintain itself. With this focus in mind, we'll no longer be releasing any new content for the live game except in support of automation. Our goal is to get the game to a place where it can continue to run and be available to all of our fans. We have a lot of love for Guild Wars—it's the game that made us what we are today—and we want to continue sharing it with everyone!

I want to make sure that players correctly understand our intentions behind these changes and the overall push for automation. As I've said, we want the game to be in a place where it's able to take care of itself. While we will not be producing new content, the Live Team will still be around to perform critical fixes for crashes or other serious issues. We want to support the players who made us successful by ensuring the game provides the best service possible without constant supervision and attention. Reducing the need for manual intervention makes it easier for us to keep Guild Wars running in the years to come.

ZeniMax Online is continuing its promotional campaign for The Elder Scrolls Online by revealing a new enemy called the wamasu.

The wamasu prowls the swamps of Black Marsh in The Elder Scrolls Online. Read our Creating ESO article to find out more about this dangerous enemy

Neverwinter’s beta was taken offline due to hackers exploiting, and cheating with the economy.  Perfect World promised to release a care package to try to make up for the losses and hardship. It looks like they delivered.

When we opened the doors of the Neverwinter Open Beta on April 30, we expected there to be all kinds of responses, from positive feedback and fun player stories to bug reports and constructive feedback…We’ve counted on these responses to make the game even better as we get closer and closer to our live launch.

What we did not expect, and should have, is how amazingly supportive and helpful our community would be during the brief snags that we might hit along the way.  We are sincerely overwhelmed by all of the positive comments and feedback that we’ve received from you over the past few weeks, and would like to express our deepest thanks for your ongoing support and willingness to help us make Neverwinter one of the best free-to-play MMORPGs around.

Case in point: this past weekend, the Neverwinter community helped us to identify a major exploit involving the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange, which we promptly addressed through a number of corrective actions, including permanent bans on exploitative accounts and a necessary rollback to the time before the exploit was initiated.  We realize the frustration that the rollback and related downtime may have caused and are deeply sorry for this inconvenience.  We’re also overwhelmed by your positive support and patience during the downtime, as well as your assistance in identifying the issue and helping us to develop and implement a solution as quickly as possible.

A new Elder Scrolls Online video has been released featuring creative director Paul Sage describing how players will find useful. The Elder Scrolls Online is expected to launch this year and will be playable at Gamescom in August.

Creative Director Paul Sage describes what you'll find as you explore every corner of Tamriel. For more information about The Elder Scrolls Online, visit our website: http://elderscrollsonline.com

BioWare has released Game Update 2.1: Customization for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The update brings new dye mods, appearance kiosks, and collections. Check out the launch trailer.

Howdy from Austin, Texas! We are thrilled to release Game Update 2.1: Customization today. This update introduces many highly requested and anticipated features to Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. As the name indicates, Game Update 2.1 is all about giving players the freedom to customize their characters to fully immerse themselves in their personal Star Wars™ saga.

What types of customization and convenience options are now available for purchase, you ask? Well, players will be able to change their Character, Legacy, and Guild names with new Cartel Market consumables. And if your character’s look doesn’t quite match their new name, then swing by one of the Appearance Designer Kiosks located on both Fleets and Capital Worlds and adjust almost anything about your character’s image. This includes body type, face, scars, tattoos, hair style, eye, hair, and skin color. You can even change your character’s species! For a completely fresh look, I would suggest trying out our brand new species, the Cathar! Subscribers can expect a permanent discount on these items.

Game Update 2.1 also introduces Dye Modules, which can be purchased as consumables on the Cartel Market, with in-game credits at the Security and Collector’s Edition vendors, as well as through crafting. With our new Dye Mods you’ll be able to recolor almost any piece of gear in The Old Republic. You can mix and match colors on each individual piece of gear, or you can choose to Unify Color for a more classic look.

Cryptic Studios' Rob Overmeyer has written a new developer journal for MMORPG.com on Neverwinter.

There are very few limitations when it comes to the content an author can make in the Foundry. Whether it is a quick rescue of a drunken dwarf in the Chasm, or a deep delve into the history and lore of the Forgotten Realms, authors can create an array of different quests. We support this creativity with tools that allow you to customize the look and feel of everything, from friendly contacts to the critters players will fight. Our costume editor allows for nearly endless customization of every person or thing you’ll come across in a quest. Within the quests you can really tune the experience for players by having elements of your quest be special for players with specific skills. And this is just the start; there is so much more that can be done with the Foundry.

With the map editor, you can build both exterior and interior maps. Exterior maps come in a few varieties with lots of options to choose from. There are several sizes of detailed and prepopulated maps that are ready to be filled with content and some final details that support your story. There are also “canvas” maps that allow authors to customize every rock, tree, magic portal to Neverdeath, and blade of grass. The interior map editor allows for room-by-room customization of an instanced or interior map. You can build that unique tavern that has a secret door to the sewer that leads to a cave network that attaches to an ancient crypt that is under a castle and leads to the…well, you get the idea! There’s a lot you can build with the interior map editor, and you can add any detail pieces that you prefer, to make your quest feel areas exactly how you like them. In the map editor, you can also set the look of various background elements, like changing the sky or adding fog. You can even select the perfect ambient sounds for your maps to further customize your quest. There is so much you can do to make your world come alive and tell your story.

Every story needs a beginning, middle, and end. In video games, those points are often marked by encountering a contact, someone you might meet on your journey that changes your path. Our dialog editor allows for some truly amazing customization in this storytelling process. If you like, you can build a pretty straightforward dialog, but if you prefer something more complex, you can build an entire game within the contact dialog editor. Even better, this dialog can be ascribed to many more objects than simply a person or monster. You can place your dialog on any object available in the editor and turn your complex dialog into, say, a puzzle or riddle, that could potentially open a secret door. There is a lot of power in the contact dialog editor and we are eager to see what you do with it.

You read the title right if you ever thought your character needed more colors your in luck. Bioware released a preview video of the dye modules that will be available in the customization update.

Here are a few previews for the F2P MMO Neverwinter.

Ten Ton Hammer

A game needs to be about far more than combat, especially one sporting “Dungeons and Dragons” in the title. Some of the most important staples of D&D are cool environments, extraordinary monsters, and epic quests. Neverwinter has all of these in spades. As you gain power, you’re given more important quests and missions to investigate. As you progress through the game, you begin to realize that the last dungeon you claimed was the coolest dungeon you’ve ever seen soloing (I’m looking at you Clocktower) is no longer the coolest...because the dungeon you’re in at that moment is now the coolest.

The further you go, the more monsters you encounter, each with their own special ways of dealing as much damage to your poor character as they can. I find myself regularly trying out different power combinations and methods of dispatching just as much pain and agony back at them. As you delve into Neverwinter dungeons, not only will you discover more methods of death, destruction, and dismemberment, you’ll be greeted by some old D&D classics. The Mimic and the enormous Gelatinous Cube that tried to eat me the other day were both brutal and welcome sights. They’re not overused and provide just enough flair and distraction to be a joy rather than an annoyance.

MMORPG.com

Questing in Neverwinter falls on the “kill 10 rats” / FedEx side of the MMO fence. There’s little reason to veer off the shining path except to find hidden caches of potions, enchantments, and money. I suppose that the game would feel much less linear if I turned off pathing but, then again maybe not. The quests and the lack of exploration will remain the same even if the sparkles are gone.

Oddly enough, quests in a party with like-leveled characters are not 'shareable' at times. For instance, Shelassa found a quest in a zone in which we were playing. She tried to share it and was unable to do so. This happened several times. I realize that there are quests that are class-specific but partied players should at least be able to obtain the quest, or simply see it, in order to tag along, if not to benefit.

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In this phase for the Neverwinter Open Beta, marked the first time in the game where I participated in an event where I participated in back-to-back Cloak Tower dungeon runs. While the loot from the run was insignificant since other players forgot about the dungeon keys, the fact that I was grinding for Astral Diamonds felt like I had been playing this game for a very long time. It felt like second nature as I immediately picked up daily quests, which also yield some unique rewards. While I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and look at the Foundry, just the initial glance into the way that the built-in feature works is sure to excite die-hard Dungeon & Dragons fans as well as any kind of player wanting to step into the DM role.

Combat in the Neverwinter Open Beta, for the most part felt unchanged as I progressed through the same quests found in previous beta sessions. While quests seemed to have been altered and tweaked for various reasons, it felt easier transitioning through quests as the Guardian Fighter by slowly whittling down enemies by soaking damage. Much of the interface seems to be unchanged, as well as the tree for one’s abilities. While the buddy system still uses the Star Trek Online means of adding friends, it feels like a hurdle that becomes easier after the first time.

GamesReviews has an interviw with Systems Designer Lindsay Haven of the F2P MMO Neverwinter.

Some of the biggest MMOs are dropping subscription fees but are taking on a single upfront cost. Can the free-to-play market continue to deliver AAA MMORPGs with no guarantee of money per person? Is there a better way of getting cash coming in?

We at Cryptic feel that free to play games are the future of MMOs, we wouldn’t have released Neverwinter as free to play and free to download if we didn’t feel that way. We also feel that free to play games can be AAA titles, we are looking to prove that with Neverwinter. It’s still too early to tell to if we succeeded or not, but we have a lot of faith in the model.

The battle system in Neverwinter seems so comfortable and intuitive. It seems crazy that it took so long for a developer to get rid of the more traditional 1-0 control system. Was it a big decision to go for something less traditional?

Yes, it was a big decision. We tried a lot of different control schemes, even developing multiple systems at the same time, knowing that some of the work wouldn’t ship with the game. But we don’t consider it a waste. It was important to explore all the options we had because there were many strong and valid pulls in different directions. It would have been easy for us to do the typical MMO style system, but with D&D a top down click systems seems so right, but we’ve been seeing the market move towards this action style combat for a while so it seemed right to explore that as well. In the end we went with what with action combat because we felt that made for a more visceral experience, which is something that players don’t get when playing table top D&D. To us it seemed the more innovative and wish fulfilment option we could take, and those things are a big part of the desire to play an MMO.

Were there things you wanted to do but couldn’t? How limited were you by the Dungeons and Dragons IP?

During development we didn’t feel very limited by Dungeons & Dragons. Like I said before, most of us are big fans of Dungeons & Dragons and so we were happy to work with the IP. If anything, there were things from Dungeons & Dragons we wanted to put in the game, but couldn’t because it didn’t transfer over to an MMO, real time combat, game well. For instance we couldn’t include a lot of the player power triggers and conditions, or use just the ability scores at a D&D scale. Those kinds are the kinds of things we struggled to get in the game, but eventually we felt like it just wasn’t going to work. Overall though, we are very happy with how the game came together.

I felt that the biggest fault of the beta was that the gameplay could become a little repetitive over time. Are you looking to try to eventually capture more general players, or is this one specifically for the folks that love dungeon running and loot?

 While I do think that combat specifically shines in group content (both dungeons and PvP), many people find combat fun for PvE content as well. At lower levels can it feel a little slow because we wanted to give players enough time to get the hang of combat before putting out too many tough challenges, but as you gain levels monsters begin to challenge your reaction skills more and more.