Neverwinter closes in on 18 million players, and we’ve killed 6.5 million dragons in 5 years

Five years ago, Neverwinter launched with the promise of mixing action-based combat with tools to make your own adventures within a bigger world set in Dungeons & Dragons‘ Forgotten Realms in the aftermath of the Spellplague, an event that changed the entire setting. The crush of players on launch day crashed the servers, but those times are long-gone, as Cryptic Studios and publisher Perfect World announced today that Neverwinter now has almost 18 million players on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Neverwinter lead designer Thomas Foss remembers what went down when it went live in June 2013 for the PC: “Oh my god, look at all these people playing our game. That is awesome,” he said. Principle concept artist Chris Dien chimed in: “Remember, our servers crashed. We were not expecting those numbers. It was insane,” he said.