With season two of Neverwinter‘s Avernus expansion almost upon us, Game Rant sat down with Senior Systems Designer Doug Miller (Asterdahl on Neverwinter forums and Reddit) to discuss all of the new content being added as well as the new mechanics in the game- seasonal content and server-wide goals included. Avernus season 2 is bringing new hunts in which players can fight powerful demons in the first layer of hell, new rooms of the Redeemed Citadel from which Zariel makes her assault on the abyss, and plenty of rewards to go along with helping the once-fallen angel redeem herself through war against the demons she used to ally with.
All of this is, of course, very late-game content meant to test the powers and skills of players who have been enjoying Neverwinter for years. However, since the game is free to play, such large updates and overhauls are bound to attract new players curious about what Neverwinter has to offer. After explaining all of the new content, rewards, seasonal updates, and community-wide goals, Miller also gave some insights on how those new players could jump into Neverwinter and start their path towards exploring Avernus right alongside the old guard.
GR: This is all pretty late-game content. How often do new players jump in? And how can newer people access this new material?
Yeah, it’s endgame content. We do actually have new players coming in all the time, so it’s always a constant discussion we have on the team when building a new feature. People want to be able to jump in to the new content right away, so we’ve made it a lot easier to level up over the years. Even coming in as a free player it’s only going to take maybe a few weeks at most to get to the point where you can do this new content. If you’re really excited to jump into the Zariel stuff there are also level 70 characters for sale in the store and they’re not so expensive. If you had to jump in right away I would recommend that.
With MMOs like Neverwinter that often keep their communities alive for years (Neverwinter itself released in 2013), balancing has to change as the game ages. This can also be seen in such examples as Destiny 2, which will be removing huge swaths of rarely-played content to make room for new expansions. There’s a fine balancing act though. All of that older content has its place, and can even be a draw to new players who want to experience the benefits of years of development.
If we just had six years of content you had to play through as a new player to get to the end… from one perspective that would be exciting as a bunch of content to play, but on the other hand if your friends are telling you to come play and they’re on the sixth year, you don’t want to take nine months to catch up.
We try to keep that old content as relevant as possible for people who want to go back and enjoy it, so we have random queues that might toss you into an old dungeon or something like that, but it’s definitely a thing to balance. We want to keep some of it so that there will be variety, but if we kept all of it it would be too overwhelming.
Now may be just as good a time as any to jump into Neverwinter after a long hiatus or for the first time, as ever more seasons of the Avernus module will continue to roll out, and even more updates are sure to come. While he was not able to share any specific details with us, Miller did reveal that the team is currently working on adding a new class to the game, along with plenty of other content to come.
Neverwinter is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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