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Rock, Paper, Shotgun has the latest Jack Emmert interview on Neverwinter. Contrary to the last article, this time he emphasises the old-school connection, though I get the feeling they haven't actually documented the entire design yet:
More information.RPS: So what’s the philosophy for this new game? You’ve mentioned in other interviews how differently the company is approaching Neverwinter, so how does that manifest in the design?
Emmert: We want to make an old-school tactical Western RPG. We want to get back to the roots of Neverwinter and we want to taste the strategies of those D&D games where you have to manoeuvre around, select your abilities carefully, and so forth. It’s not turn-based, and it’s not isometric, but that old school model was our focus to start with. Secondly we wanted the game to be immersive, so we want the experience to be inspired by games like Oblivion and Dragon Age, and to take a cue from fantasy products that created incredible worlds to delve into. Thirdly we wanted it to genuinely represent a D&D experience! We looked at the 4th Edition rules and tried to make sure that we could bring that alive as much as was possible with our tools.
RPS: So tell me about the player experience. How different is it to previous Crpytic MMOs? Still got the splendid character creators?
Emmert: Well you start with character creation of course, and there are customisation tools for that, and character creation is based on D&D 4th Edition’s process. After that you will probably face a tutorial level, which we have yet to build! And then you will enter into the world of Neverwinter. Once you are through that you will enter one of a number of persistent zones. Now these are much smaller in terms of population, it won’t be the same numbers of people we’ve seen in previous games from us, it’ll be just a few score. So it’s enough that you will run into others, but it won’t feel crowded. The focus here is on the co-op RPG experience, so we want you to be able to meet new people, or meet with friends, but then get on with adventuring. You will get to that from the persistent zones, although these contain storylines too. Some missions will take you into instances off of these persistent zones, and sometimes you will just stumble across them. It depends.