That was canned and the work already done was evolved into Champions Online. Cryptic also picked up the pieces of Star Trek Online to develop that into a full-fledged licensed game, and their next major title, with new parent company Perfect World Entertainment, takes the studio into the realm of fantasy: Neverwinter.
Neverwinter is a free-to-play fantasy MMO that - like its name indicates - is based on the rules and lore of Dungeons & Dragons. We played it at E3 2012 and were pleasantly surprised with Cryptic’s work, and over the last few months have participated in the closed beta weekends. Each of these weekends however, had a limited amount of playable classes and restricted content available. Only Founders, press and a select few had access but as Perfect World and Cryptic announced yesterday, this all changes later this month.
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Cryptic Studios Executive Producer and COO, Craig Zinkievich, reveals the open beta date for Neverwinter:
Jack Emmert, Cryptic Studios CEO, talks about rewarding founders with an additional fourth weekend of closed beta before the current version of the game goes public at the end of the month:
There are three tiers of founders packs, each adding exclusive content to purchasers, ranging from an extra racial class to a giant spider mount. Details on those can be found here. And here’s an epic gallery:
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Did we mention that players can actually build their own content? The Foundry feature lets players used a toolkit to literally contruct and share new adventures, and players can rate and play them throughout the game.
Neverwinter releases for PC in open beta April 30, 2013, and in full later this year.
Follow Rob on Twitter @rob_keyes.
