Acquisitions Incorporated has just arrived to the game, but for someone else the journey alongside the Sword Coast is over. On Friday Producer Ben “Scarabman” Bascom announced that launching the Heart of Fire Module was his last adventure for the game, and that he will pursue a different opportunity elsewhere.

Four years ago, I joined Cryptic to provide expertise on console development as the studio was looking to bring Neverwinter to Xbox in North America and Europe. After a successful release, I was excited to integrate my efforts more fully with the Neverwinter team and help converge our PC and console development processes, which, at the time, were very far out of sync. During my time, we’ve vanquished vampires, destroyed dinos, journeyed with giants and dropped demons with Drizzt. It’s been a long road but I’m proud of how far we’ve come over the years.

As he pointed out, he was mainly responsible to coordinate the development and release process between different platforms. In case we recall that correctly he also was one of the few devs that actively commented on console issues on the message board (except the community team of course). During the Module 15 preview phase he additionally was one of the few devs that came in and at least occasionally answered the community in the feedback threads.

Devs do handle their departures differently. Some simply leave and do not actively say goodbye to the players like Ben did. So his friendly and encouraging forum post is indeed appreciated as one commenter pointed out. We of course wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavors and hope that Cryptic will be able to find a replacement soon. After class balancer Tony “Balanced” Marasco” he is the second departure from the development team in Module 15 that we know of.

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