Greetings Adventurers,
Our Executive Producer answered your questions during the last stream on Twitch.
Here is a summary of the topics covered!
Note: it will also be localised into German and French soon.
For those of you who are new, I am Brett Norton, Executive Producer on Neverwinter for Cryptic Studios. It generally means that I’m sort of the caretaker and manager of Neverwinter as a whole. I work with the designers, the artists, other producers, business people, all of our various partners at Wizard of the Coast, Gearbox Publishing etc. to make sure that Neverwinter happens. We release modules, we put out good stuff and we continue to grow the game. I also work sometimes with some of our partners on the creative etc., and every now and then I get in to monkey around the engine and make some changes myself, so sometimes I get to do some hands-on work. Most of the time I am more a manager, but I get a chance to see and review everything that’s being proposed, designed or developed for Neverwinter, and I’m a pretty big fan of Neverwinter itself. I have been playing it for many years now and I have got a couple of characters that I take through various forms of end game content. I have done some of the harder trials and I generally stay on top of what’s happening on the live server, so I am pretty familiar with the game. You can usually ask me questions about what’s going on there and I can try to respond as accurately as possible.
What is going to happen with Chaotic Writings since Juma has escaped from Vallenhas?
You will still be able to spend your Chaotic Writings in the campaign store, but you will no longer be able to purchase Juma’s bag with this currency. The Chaotic Writings will obviously lose a decent portion of their value, so we encourage players to spend those prior to the M25 release. We are also making some adjustments to how to complete insurgencies and other things in Vallenhas. We will basically decrease the difficulty for accomplishing things like the Awakened Forger’s Box as well as completing the Rage of Bel campaign pass. It will require fewer people and insurgencies, and bosses from them are getting easier. We know that after moving Juma there will probably be fewer people running around Vallenhas as they move towards the new zones but as a result, we are trying to make sure that you can still progress and still get the Awakened Forger’s Box if you haven’t already done that, without having to require huge groups of people to do insurgencies and other content that is still on that path.
Julia: By the way, shout out to those of you who did hashtag #FreeJuma for so long. You successfully freed Juma. It was really cool to see players noticing that Juma was out of the cage. It’s really great when we get some of that community involvement in the game.
Your cries of #FreeJuma were heard and sometimes wishes do come true. As the Vallenhas Guards investigate the escape, perhaps Juma will find you elsewhere? ? pic.twitter.com/JEfaDBt8as
— Neverwinter (@NeverwinterGame) February 26, 2023
Do you have any plans to update the Wonders of Gond event, and how do you approach updates to the events in the game?
We do updates to events periodically and we try to hit a couple of events every time we work on a new module release. Usually those are for the events that are sort of themed around the module or happen shortly after the module is released, and we hit a different subset of events each year. I don’t recall the Wonders of Gond event being on the upcoming list of events that we are doing, so I wouldn’t expect an overhaul of it just yet, but we are, for example, doing some updates to a number of other events. Our big focus for the near future has been the 10th anniversary. We are doing some unique and cool things for our 10th Jubilee, so expect some more significant changes to that compared to what we have done in previous years. That’s where we are putting a lot of the effort because 10 years for Neverwinter is a big deal, and we didn’t want it to be sort of the same anniversary that we have done for the past several years. We wanted to throw in some original stuff as well as revise a whole bunch of their rewards and change some things around like making it a bit easier to get those rewards. Expect that most of our changes will be leveraged at that event. Wonders of Gond is on the slate to be updated but we are also trying to update a few other events along the path, like Coins of Waukeen and more in the future.
Julia: As I have been doing the production work for events, I confirm that Wonders of Gond is not on the current list because, as Brett mentioned, we do have a 10th anniversary. We don’t want to spoil it because there has been a lot of work going into it. We can just say that you can expect great giveaways, some original new content etc. It’s going to be awesome. Some events like Masquerade of Liars also get an update every year because of the teams. April Fowls is coming soon too, and we look forward to your reactions!
Do you have any plans to make the progress easier for campaigns as soon as their initial timeline is over?
That’s kind of what we do with some of our Legacy Campaigns, we do things like the Genie’s Gifts which we have added functionality to some of our more recent modules and we have expended a number of campaign buyouts. Those are some of the methods by which we have to update some of the older campaigns. We are looking in the future as we move past Sharandar and move past some of those other modules that have been on for a while about expanding and doing some more functionality and adding methods to expedite how fast players move to that. In particular, we know that Dragonslayer is more of a unique campaign and it requires a bit more grinding than some of the other campaigns that happened in the past, so we are looking at potential solutions for Dragonslayer that are unique to Dragonslayer. Otherwise, for the other campaigns, we will likely use the Genie’s Gifts and the campaign buyouts like we have done in the past. We will not change the Sharandar progression path because we already have these tools to speed up progressing through old campaigns and we would like to continue to use those since we also want those things to be valuable for the foreseeable future.
Do you have an update regarding Xbox and PlayStation beta shards?
I don’t have big updates for it. We wanted to get the Xbox beta shard out and get a chance to prove that it could work. We have never done anything like that and it’s been a new sort of technical endeavor for us. We haven’t been able to keep it as up to date as the PC preview. It’s easier for us to push builds on a pretty frequent and informal basis to the PC Preview shard because it’s owned within our system, so we have a lot of easy leeway for updating that whereas the preview shards for Xbox and PlayStation are trickier to deal with. We are working on ways to expand that on Xbox and PlayStation, to make it easier and try to get more frequent updates in, so we can better use it similar to how we use the PC Preview. I apologize because it’s not perfect yet but we are trying to make some significant strides into giving console players a better access to early content. Certain components may not survive however, like we can’t necessarily do the character copies that we have for the PC shard. There are unfortunately some limitations, sometimes beyond our control, with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
Julia’s cat: Hey! Pet me please!
Julia: I am preparing a list for a second wave of adding people to the Xbox beta shard. I am also waiting to hear when we can get M25 on the Xbox Beta because we had to do some other updates first. As soon as I get more information about that, I will grant access to these people. It has to be done manually, so it’s not an easy process, it’s kind of tedious and manual, and it will require some time to do so. Regarding the PlayStation test shard, we are hopefully getting close to having that one too. It’s a process and I am very thankful that people are patient. I am glad that we are at least moving in the right direction in terms of getting the community something they have been asking for a long time.
Do you have any news regarding the Legacy toons?
We have tried a number of technical fixes on our end and there have been some flaws with what we have addressed. There have been a couple of different causes that have caused the problem, but we are looking at that issue and hope to have a fix for that deployed that will sort of forcibly reset those characters. We cannot promise that this fix will be ready at the M25 launch because we want to make sure that we don’t break any existing live characters in the process of doing that. It’s a tricky situation to be in, but we are working on a technical software solution that basically reset those characters and force them to purge the broken feats and boons that they have managed to get. So don’t expect that situation to last, we will fix that as soon as possible.
Do you plan to release a new class with the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie?
We are not currently working on another class. Classes are a significant amount of effort, and the community has rightfully pointed out a number of issues that we would like to fix with current classes before we jump into adding a new class to the game. We have been wanting to work on Paladin updates for a while and we have some changes that we have begun working on, but they are currently not in a state that we are ready to roll them out. The Paladin changes are not likely to be expected with the M25 expansion. I can’t give a time frame for when they would likely roll down, but we are looking at trying to do some small updates, probably between the next two expansions.
Do you have any news regarding the Stronghold system?
We have done a few updates to Stronghold recently. We revised the Greed of the Dragonflight event a while back, and then we did some updates to the Stronghold food. We have a couple of other smaller ones that we might be able to get over the next few months, but we are not planning a substantial update to Strongholds. We will see if we can continue to make some quality-of-life improvements to them, do some loosening of some of the repeatable quest limitations, and make it a bit easier and faster for people that are still leveling up new strongholds.
Do you plan to spend some time focusing more on bugs and quality of life updates instead of developing new content or updates?
We certainly do but it varies a bit sometimes by the people associated with it. For example, we can squash bugs, but a lot of them, like class or systems bugs, fall on the same people and there is only an amount of bandwidth that we can do at any given time. We try to carve out a certain amount of time at the end – sort of the beginning of each of our major releases – to do bug squashing, and you will probably see some changes with M25 that were probably not super related to just the new features and content that come out with that expansion. Class reworks and updates take a considerable amount of effort. The Wizard updates took a substantial amount of work, that was probably a month plus long endeavor by one of our most experienced designers. That’s not something that we can knock out in a couple of days, it takes a lot more time.
It seems that the new trial is no longer available on the Preview server.
Julia: That’s intended because we didn’t have the trial open all the time. We have been opening it up on a weekend because we still want the trial to be challenging when it goes live. If players can access it 24/7 on Preview, then they can just bet everything on Preview and when it goes live, they will get it done on the first day. There will be a normal and master version, so everyone will have a chance to explore it.
Some dragons from the Siege of Neverwinter are one-shotting characters.
I have seen some issues with these dragons. These dragons are actually not the ones from our updated Dragonslayer expansion, so our goal is to try to update them. There are a couple of powers on the dragons, specifically the blue dragon that has a lightning storm power that does a massive amount of damage and oftentimes wipes out all DPS players in melee range. You can dodge it if you watch the animation, but it’s a tricky thing and that was one of the more problematic abilities from the old dragons. The green dragon also has a poison cloud that is pretty damaging for players. Our hope is that we will be able to revise these dragons for the next run.
Do you have any plans to add the Tabaxi race?
Julia: We tried but we cannot. It’s just the way our models in game are set up, it does not work well with Wizards of the Coast’s vision of the Tabaxi race. It was kind of heartbreaking.
Do you have any news regarding PvP content?
I know that there are still definitely some PvP fans out there, but PvP is mostly on the back burner for things that we are looking at updating. It has a much lower engagement. It would take a lot of effort for us to make it more accessible to a large number of players. To tackle that it would require a fairly major feature update. It’s unfortunately not currently on our radar for the current expansion or the next one. We are looking at some quality-of-life changes, improving access by reducing some of the restrictions of the legacy PvP items that players cannot really get because they are locked behind various walls of campaign progression and it’s very difficult to get those. We are however not going to be able to go back, reinvent Neverwinter’s PvP and get tons of players playing it without a substantial feature behind it and that’s not happening in the near future.
Are you aware that some players are unable to get the Spider Key and Dark Maiden’s Gear?
Yes, that should be fixed shortly.
What do you think about Animation Canceling?
Animation Canceling as a broad concept is fine. We actually have several powers and class abilities that we built expecting people to be able to do forms of Animation Canceling. However, certain powers and certain exploits allow you to cancel animations in ways that were not intended. One example is certain powers, like if you use a sprint, a dash or something to cancel out the animation and get a small boost in DPS. That’s cool and usually that’s limited by your class stamina meter and whatnot, so you cannot do it all the time. We have also seen players use things like macros and other exploit tools to do things like animation canceling and extremely small and fast intervals to either use at-will powers or other powers far more frequently than the game should allow. Do not expect these situations to last forever. Those types of exploits will eventually be patched out, either on the technical end or on the balance end. If there are specific powers that are very awful but for some reason there is this weird way we can cancel animation, we try to fix those. We already fixed a couple of loopholes in the past, but if anyone knows some powers that are causing massive unbalance problems, let us know and we will take a look at addressing those.
Would it be possible to allow us to exchange Mythic insignias for account-wide versions (like we already can with our enchantments)?
We currently don’t have a system planned for that, but it’s a good suggestion though and we will look at the viability for it. That being said, it takes a good bit of time to set up those types of exchanges.
Do you have any plans to refresh or rework the VIP system?
We have taken a look at that, and we have moved a few things around within it. We have talked about eliminating all the ranks and just collapsing it down to a single rank and giving some benefits to it. Overall, we have bounced around a lot, but the reality is that we currently have about 50{d0f68332078ae50ae5cd49ede95b9d76bcf00fa473a5a7068cdab9d644705628} or so of Neverwinter players that actually use the VIP system, so we have got pretty good participation in it if you think of it like a subscription. And we don’t want to monkey with it too much because players seem to like the basics of some of the stuff that they get like the travel signpost, the vendors that can be summoned as well as the daily enchanted key. We want to make that more accessible to players so they can get more of the benefits at lower ranks. But at the same time people have been using VIP for a while so unless we are pretty solid that this would increase how much players use it, we don’t want to change it. We already moved a few things, like the travel signpost, to rank one because we knew that those were awesome aspects. We have been toying around with giving out more free VIP and we do a lot of promotions now as it’s very enticing for people who do not have it and we would love it for more people to be subscribed to reach like 60 or 70{d0f68332078ae50ae5cd49ede95b9d76bcf00fa473a5a7068cdab9d644705628} of Neverwinter’s players.
Why do six classes have two roles, but three classes do not?
The classes are divided the way they were as part of the M16 class rework and that was prior to my era working on Neverwinter so I didn’t have a lot of impact within that, but the reality is that changing, adding or expanding that is pretty substantial. Adding a new paragon path is not as much work as adding a new class at Neverwinter but it’s close, it’s a lot of work. We always have to pick where we spend time. Should we focus on a new class, improve existing paragon paths, add new paragon paths? In most cases right now, my preference is to try to work on fixing some of the underperforming paragons as well as just some of the classes that struggle. We want to do some improvements to Paladin Oathkeeper and Rogue Whisperknife.
Do you plan to rework the Reaper’s Challenge store and the Trade Bar store?
We are looking at that. No promises in the short term but we have looked at what we can do to try to make these shops better. As you may have noticed, we recently changed the prices in the Appointment store on a number of items that were a bit overpriced relative to their value. In the future, we also expect some new additions to that. We are going to try to keep those stores such as the Appointment store, Wondrous Bazaar and the Trade Bar store a little bit more fresh. We do recognize that some of those have gotten a little out of date. There are still some usable things like companion and mount upgrade tokens, and you can get insignia powder from the trade bar store, but we want to try to add some more useful things to those shops in the upcoming year.
Do you have any plans to add more appearance items in-game or at the ZEN Market?
We add new appearance items with new visuals with each of our expansions, but we haven’t gotten great returns by adding exclusively appearance items for the sake of new appearances in the past. Most of the time, if we add an entirely new model like a weapon or various things like new armor pieces, etc. we almost always get more value by building that into new rewards for events, campaigns, dungeons, trials whatever the case. When we just make a purely cosmetic item and put it in any of the stores, it gets very little attraction. Many players really focus more on stats and we’re happy that they can also convert items to appearance items. We are not likely to spend a lot of time, money or effort to get purely cosmetic items. There are a few exceptions like when we do them for giveaways and promotions, people love them when they look cool.
Do you plan to expand the use of Unbind Tokens?
We will be selective and careful about doing that because the unbind system is kind of a jailbreak system and it allows those items to be forever unbound and it allows them to sort of filter through the economy in a huge number of ways. We need to be a bit picky about that. If there are certain things that the community would like to see unbound, we can propose that to the internal team, but in general, we have been slow with it because we want rewards to be sort of earned in particular and we don’t want to create a plethora of some of our more recent items being unbound and jailbroken forever. We do want to slowly expand that over time to the historic items that players have used for a bit, and which they want to get back, either for appearance items or some items that are still useful for some builds. It’s a careful process that we have to manage because of how Unbind Tokens really jailbreak items.
Do you plan to bring back the Feral Velociraptor?
Julia: This is something that we also talked about recently. For those wondering, the Feral Velociraptor was part of the 2019 summer charge promo, so it’s been a while.
I know there are a few companions and mounts that have not been released in a while and they are not able to be obtained. We added them to the collections just so we were kind of aware that these things existed as some people have managed to get them, and we are looking at ways to bring back some of those. Nothing is exclusively gone forever and we always try to come back after a couple years and pick up some that players want.
Do you have any updates regarding drop rates for Mastercrafting and success rates?
Nothing in the short term. We have looked at Mastercraft and we made some initial adjustments. It was obviously a little bit too hard for some of the things that we had to craft and we have discussed some of the imbalances. Some of the items are extremely challenging because they require a lot of whiskers and other rare resources that you can sometimes only get from the Vault of Stars dungeon. In some cases, we like the fact that there is a demand for them and we like the fact that players are actually spending time to go out and acquire items, but at the same time we recognize that there is a bit of an imbalance of the costs. Certain classes have to pay many millions of AD to get the Mastercraft weapons or other goods while others get away a lot cheaper. Imbalances are not great but we have looked at a couple of different avenues for adding more ways to get some of the Mastercraft items, so that it’s just a bit more accessible. We know that there are still a few recipes but hopefully it’s not crazy awful. I managed to get my Mastercraft weapons on my Barbarian and certainly the off-hand weapon was incredibly expensive.
Why don’t Mastercraft items double-drop on double profession events?
I know why, but it’s not an interesting answer, it’s a technical one because they were not set up in the same way as other professions things to double-drop, which sucks but that’s unfortunately the reality of the situation. It’s something we would like to do but because of the nature of how Mastercraft items are generated through various loot tables and things, it’s not like an easy fix that we could do at a technical level. It would require a lot of checks and balances to ensure that it does what we want. I agree that it would be great if they did, it would drive more people towards professions and doing certain pieces of content during the profession events. Sadly, that system was not set up that way from the get-go and since it wasn’t set up that way from the get-go, reverse-doing it now would take a decent bit of effort. I can talk with the team to see if this is something that we can manage or at least do it for the most recent Mastercraft resources and some of the most popular ones that might help the situation a bit. It’s challenging because from what I have seen, it has to be manually updated in a lot of places.
Suggestion: Please let us sort 10-player queues without having to kick players.
I completely agree. We have talked multiple patterns about trying to get a better queue group/trial/raid sorting mechanic. It’s something that has been on our list like “Can we do this”? Can we get the UI time and all the software time to improve that? It’s a bit of a heavyweight feature since the window that was originally constructed was not built to do flexible things. We want to, but it’s something very much on the software UI side.
Do you plan to fix Goristro from Demogorgon’s trial because he gets stuck in the wall?
Yes, that’s a known issue that we are currently investigating.
Can we get more interesting and harder Xbox achievements than just completing campaigns and dungeon/trials?
Generally speaking, we try to offer a larger subset of fairly interesting in-game achievements. For the ones that are actually platform-driven by things like trophies or by the Xbox Live specific achievements, we generally try to make those more on the accessible lens so that players can unlock their sort of platform points in the way that we want. We want to try to put in some more unique in-game achievements because we have a bit more flexibility with what we do with in-game ones and we are less restricted than some of the point categories.
Julia: There are very strict rules about editing achievements that are console-specific ones. Each of the platforms is very strict about rules. If you create an achievement, going back and trying to edit it is not possible.
Suggestion: Could we favorite some mount combat powers because the amount of these powers is getting quite large?
We will take a look and see if there is something that we can do to make it a bit easier to sort those kinds of long lists. Companion player bonus powers are getting into the same boat.
Is it possible to keep the 3-insignias bonuses while having 4 insignias equipped?
Yes, you can still get the 3-insignia bonuses while having 4 mount insignias equipped. If you meet the requirements for a 4-slot insignia bonus, it will use that. If you only meet the requirements for a 3-slot insignia bonus, it will use that instead.
Do you have any news regarding the Paranoid Delusion?
The Paranoid Delusion will get some radical changes for the next expansion. Don’t expect it to be in the place that it is right now on live. It’s going to change a lot because the way this companion was set up was not great, it was buggy and problematic. We have spent some effort as part of our companion update for the M25 addressing those and we are trying very hard to ensure that Paranoid Delusions are in a much more fair and compatible state with other companions, which means that they are not going to be overpowered.
Do you have any data or information that could provide some insight on ways the community could do their part to bridge the gap between endgame players and the rest of the player base?
I can’t offer any spoilers, but we are currently working to provide a clearer path for players, for example who have just reached level 20 and how to get them to move towards the endgame content and endgame systems a lot better. We have some current work plan to facilitate that, so that’s one of our upcoming endeavors (not in the short term). That being said, we hope that some of the systems that we currently have in game like the battle pass and a few other things are great ways for players to get a lot of great rewards, catch up and hopefully encourage you to do things that are also good for you, such as running the various queues to get Astral Diamonds and acquire other things that will improve your character.
Since new artifacts are going to 1,500 item level, are the other artifacts going to be bumped up to 1,200?
No, since the new artifacts are going up to 1,500 item level, we are not necessarily going to bump up the old ones. We will take a look and think about that down the road but there are no current plans to retrofit old artifacts.
Do you have any news regarding the Boons?
It’s still on our to-do list but it’s not short-term. For now, we might just do some small fixes because we would like to make some improvements and quality of life updates to the existing boons, but the solution that we want to do would take a bit more time than what we have.
Do you plan to bring back the Knox Box?
The Knox Box is not currently slated to come back. It was a bit of a test as we were trying out some new stuff. Maybe in the future but we are not committing to the Knox Box coming back.
Do you have any plans to update professions and/or workshops to include new items?
It’s on our list, but again it’s unfortunately something that winds up taking a lot of effort.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions, feel free to post them on our official forum.
Stay tuned for our upcoming expansion and see you in game!
