Neverwinter’s art team builds Castle Ravenloft block by block (and using a few tricks)

Now that you’ve seen (or maybe you haven’t) Dungeons and Dragons Online’s version of Castle Ravenloft, you can check out Neverwinter’s vision of this iconic vampire fortress that is coming in the next module.

The game’s artists penned a blog post to talk about how the visuals for the castle were drawn from the original D&D campaign and then modified to suit the game. It’s an interesting peek into the process of creating art for MMOs, especially if you’re doing so under a time restriction and with limited resources.

The team said that it had to pull out a few sly tricks to get all of the areas done: “Sometimes in the industry we don’t have the indulgence of existing concept or there may not be time for our concept artist to deliver an idea to us and that was the case for the interior of the castle. So with our limited time I re-purposed an older kit by updating the geo and materials, most noticeably the pillars.”