MMOs are big beasts, right? We looked at what we're doing with Neverwinter and decided six months in to change scope, make sure that we could get a game out, make sure that we could be true to what we wanted to do with that D&D game, and ended up scoping that down to a co-op online RPG game. ![]() "As we started developing the game and working with Atari, we weren't able to fund the project at the level we needed to to make it a fully fledged MMO. We love MMOs, we love to develop MMOs and that's what we're best at. ![]() "In the very beginning our goal was to make Neverwinter into an MMO," Craig Zinkievich, Cryptic's chief operating officer, told me. Cryptic made a profit and Neverwinter got the funding its original vision needed. When Perfect World Entertainment - the same company that owns Torchlight maker Runic Games - bought Cryptic, it did the studio a favour. Repurposed to make a quick buck, I thought. Months later - sure enough - Neverwinter became a free-to-play MMO. It was a new direction for the studio that created City of Heroes.īut then Cryptic's owner Atari went bust and Cryptic was bought by Perfect World Entertainment, the US arm of a Chinese free-to-play MMO powerhouse. ![]() I ruled it out because Cryptic had been on a downer with Champions Online and then Star Trek Online, and was fighting fires when Neverwinter was announced - as an online cooperative RPG and strictly not an MMO. I'd ruled Neverwinter out and I shouldn't have.
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