Neverwinter Open Beta

[citizen1080]

1. Rift
2. Lotro
3. ???
4. Profit?


It's ok so far, looks like a cross between rift and lotro...nothing to get wet over. But its free and its forgotten realms...which holds a dear place in my heart.

[Clark]

irl friend was tellin me about this earlier tonight, may be fun to play on the side when nothings in window

definately way more potential than D3 had

[Noselacri]

It's nothing but a cash grab, like all Perfect World games.

[EchoedTruth]

It's nothing but a cash grab, like all Perfect World games.

I checked it out and it's pretty cool. I wouldn't just sweep it away in a generalization. Cryptic Studios said it wasn't Pay2Win. Being able to play an action MMORPG with a char who hails from Baldur's Gate = win

[Arclyte]

I checked it out and it's pretty cool. I wouldn't just sweep it away in a generalization. Cryptic Studios said it wasn't Pay2Win. Being able to play an action MMORPG with a char who hails from Baldur's Gate = win

I played for a few hours and I didn't see any D&D elements whatsoever

It felt like a generic hack and slash

[Hailto]

Game is awful, feels way too arcade-y for my taste.

[citizen1080]

The fact that I am sitting in the ec tunnel watching Archer prolly says a lot about the game. Still worth looking at tho.

[TWDL_Prexus]

Nothing really to add, but I was in the closed beta for a bit and I thought the game was pretty boring. Not going to play OB or at release.

[Vadd]

Baldur's Gate = win

[EchoedTruth]

1. Rift
2. Lotro
3. ???
4. Profit?


It's ok so far, looks like a cross between rift and lotro...nothing to get wet over. But its free and its forgotten realms...which holds a dear place in my heart.

It's Guild Wars 2 + LOTRO in the Forgotten Realms universe. I really like it.

[HeallunRumblebelly]

The fact that I am sitting in the ec tunnel watching Archer prolly says a lot about the game. Still worth looking at tho.

it gets better 30+ and is actually pretty alright at 60. lacks content, though ~

[citizen1080]

it gets better 30+ and is actually pretty alright at 60. lacks content, though ~

I think I made it to lvl 9 in my first and only play session..some orcs kept raping my shit. Ill give it another go tonight tho most likely

[Noselacri]

This game is really terribly designed. Everyone can ninjaloot everything, you can't replace a group member who leaves in the middle of a dungeon, the PvP is fucked up in all kinds of ways, and so on. It's like the developers don't really know about MMORPGs and just winged it. People are abusing the shit out of the Foundry system, creating "dungeons" which are just like a huge box with a hundred mobs that are stuck so you can AoE them down and powerlevel/farm that way. Between the Foundry cheating, the BoE endgame gear and the all-encompassing RMT element, there's just no legitimacy to the game and no economic/competitive integrity. It's a shame because a few things are genuienely cool, namely the controls and the many quest instances in the leveling content, but the game as a whole just lacks the solidity and quality that an MMORPG needs in order to succeed.

[smokemon]

well i started to download and then i read this hahha

[Clark]

This game is really terribly designed. Everyone can ninjaloot everything, you can't replace a group member who leaves in the middle of a dungeon, the PvP is fucked up in all kinds of ways, and so on. It's like the developers don't really know about MMORPGs and just winged it. People are abusing the shit out of the Foundry system, creating "dungeons" which are just like a huge box with a hundred mobs that are stuck so you can AoE them down and powerlevel/farm that way. Between the Foundry cheating, the BoE endgame gear and the all-encompassing RMT element, there's just no legitimacy to the game and no economic/competitive integrity. It's a shame because a few things are genuienely cool, namely the controls and the many quest instances in the leveling content, but the game as a whole just lacks the solidity and quality that an MMORPG needs in order to succeed.

I was worried about the Foundrys. That is very unsettling news. Irl friend wants me to play a little bit with him, but cash shop is whack.

[Noselacri]

You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed. Neverwinter leaves a decent very first impression, but scratch the surface anywhere and it's plywood underneath. It's clear that it's designed after Perfect World's formula (and a formula that is tragically common in today's MMORPG market): they serve you a three-course meal, the first dish tastes great but the second one is crap; then they tell you that the third course will taste as good as the first one if you pay, but you have to take their word for it. Oh, and in this case, the third course costs like $200 for a dish that you can get elsewhere for $60.

It's really quite bad. The dungeons look neat at first glance but it's a cardboard facade. The combat mechanics are absolutely primitive, and the "difficulty" lies not so much in challenging fights as in just not giving classes the tools to do their jobs. Clerics can't heal anywhere near as well as traditional MMORPG healers can, but the other classes don't have the survivability that you'd expect them to have as compensation for the cleric being more like a GW2 support mage. The guardian can't hold aggro for shit, but the other classes can't really tank the mobs they invariably get on them as a consequence of some of the worst aggro mechanics since EQ. The great-weapon fighter is just a weird and largely useless failure of a tank/dps hybrid.

Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay). And that's per bag, which will bind to your character, so you'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to get bags for two characters. Want more than two character slots for your account? Pay up. Want more than fifteen bank slots, which you absolutely must have because you'll find DOZENS UPON DOZENS of items you have to save up and combine later? Get out the Mastercard. Want a fast mount so you can actually win the battlegrounds? $40 please. Do you demand the conceited right to respec your character? $5 per! The list goes on and on with shit that all other MMORPGs offer as basic features but Neverwinter expects you to pay extra for. When creating your character, you have to pick from a number of preset stat sets and the creation process deliberately refrains from telling you what the stats actually do, so when you find out later on that you have to reroll, I hope you haven't already spent $40 on BoP bags. That can't possibly be intentional, though, right? The game boasts of being free to play, but you'd have to spend a few hundred dollars to get the standard features that you take for granted in other games. It's like being offered a free soda but the bottle costs fifty bucks. Hey, you can always drink it out of your cupped hand! Aren't they generous?

It's theoretically possible to get most of that shit via gameplay and the accumulation of a currency called Astral Diamonds, but we're talking months of farming to get the aforementioned fundamental gameplay necessities, let alone any actual luxuries. Keep in mind that ADs are also the currency used on the auction house, so if you want to save up for bags or bank slots, you have to literally opt out of trading. Even identify scrolls and enchanting your items costs AD, so saving up for bags or whatever is a huge sacrifice in character power. They've done their very best to present the appearance of everything being obtainable without paying while making it so unrealistic that one might as well not even acknowledge the possibility.

People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a stack of 100 mobs that are stuck in a tiny cell for AoE grinding and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of. Meanwhile, the game itself has practically no meaningful content after the leveling phase; it's just a collection of dungeons, about twelve or so, and then they have three difficulty tiers (including normal which is depleted while leveling). The endgame consists exclusively of extra heroic 5-mans, the world is your oyster!

Everything else is equally shit. Everybody can roll need on everything, and everything including endgame purples is BoE so everybody just rolls need so they can sell it if they win something that isn't for their class. If someone leaves your group, you just have to leave and start over after replacing him. Mobs just spam-CC in PvE so that the poor fucker who's trying desperately to tank will enjoy being stunned about 75% of the time. Wanna know what the main taunt mechanics in this game is? It's an ability that you cast on your target which then amplifies the threat you generate, but if the mob hits you the debuff disappears, so the tank must not get hit by the mob he's tanking. Brilliant design.

The list of criminally poor game design could go on like that for five pages, but the worst part is that you get to suffer through it while being constantly bombarded with reminders that everything would be better if you paid. When you die, you're given the option of rezzing instantly at full health if you pay a little. Crafts tend to take hours, but you can click a button to make it instant for a price. Your companion needs to go home to the farm for an hour in order to level up, but you can do it instantly with a small injection of sweet problem-solving cash. You can swing your credit card at literally everything in this game and fix the gamebreaking issues that the developers have intentionally implemented in order to tempt you into doing just that.

But the controls are kinda neat and also leveling is fairly cool for the first few hours because there's a lot of solo quest instances and it almost feels like playing NWN during that delicious first course of the dinner. The developers seem to have been under the impression that they were developing an action RPG, because the few places where it emulates that genre is the few places where it's decent whereas the game fails spectacularly whenever it tries to be an MMORPG. After making a mockery of Star Trek Online, Perfect World must not have felt like they'd ruined quite enough beloved franchises, so I guess they set their sights on Dungeons & Dragons this time around and they certainly did their part to ensure that nobody else will try to put D&D and MMORPG into contact with eachother again for a long, long time.

[myriverse]

I played for a few hours and I didn't see any D&D elements whatsoever

It felt like a generic hack and slash
That sounds contradictory.

Edit:
The Foundry-type stuff was always a staple of the Neverwinter franchise and was always hit or miss based on the skill of the designers. It sounds like more of that.

The lack of survivability sounds like a plus to me. See "D&D element" above.

The cash shop sounds like a problem only if you make it so.

[Jerin]

Its Cryptic...if you played STO for a few weeks you have 3 max lvl characters and you can defeat all content without paying $1 for anything of the cash shop stuff.

Having said that, i played NWN these past few days since open beta... and its basically the same f2p model as STO..

there is little difficulty in that game.

if you think Neverwinter is pay2win...you kinda suck at online gaming.

Paying for a chance at some stupid mount does not make your character better in any way. And as far as time sink goes...we are classic EQ folks..you could get max lvl on every race/class combo before 1 max lvl character here on p99 lol


and as far as the foundry goes..Cryptic is great at letting fools create content for them...whatever issues Neverwinter has regarding the foundry will be ironed out.

[Swish]

Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay).

That's put me off another MMORPG. Fucking hell... where playing "for free" costs you weeks more of effort to get the same thing someone paid for in under a minute.

The only modern online game that I like on the PC is League of Legends... where EVERY character is grindable, but you just wallet dip if you want the extra fluff (like skins, extra rune pages etc)...couple that with some of the low grind time characters being very good (Ryze, Kayle, Annie, Ashe to name a few) and its really an open access game and as close as free to play as I've seen.

The real idiots are some of the WoW kids (now in their 20s, some at least) who will cough up for this stuff.

[MrSparkle001]

That sounds contradictory.

Edit:
The Foundry-type stuff was always a staple of the Neverwinter franchise and was always hit or miss based on the skill of the designers. It sounds like more of that.

The lack of survivability sounds like a plus to me. See "D&D element" above.

The cash shop sounds like a problem only if you make it so.

No it's a copy/paste of Star Trek Online's foundry system. I really enjoyed NWN's custom made servers but the foundry is nowhere near that.


People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a stack of 100 mobs that are stuck in a tiny cell for AoE grinding and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of.

That's basically what they did with STO. The foundry there is really a (not so veiled) excuse to not develop content. When people ask "what is there to do besides the few endgame missions we grind over and over" the answer is always "have you tried the foundry?" The same will most likely happen in this game. The developers will not come up with a lot of new content, and instead we will hear a lot about the foundry, and minus a few rare exceptions most of the foundry content will be crap. And even the rare exceptions are not replacements for proper developer content.

[HeallunRumblebelly]

I think I made it to lvl 9 in my first and only play session..some orcs kept raping my shit. Ill give it another go tonight tho most likely

...really? I've found it painfully easy most of the time :| Devout cleric OP as fuck though. Top damage in half my runs, just healing with astral when i must and sometimes i'll burn my divinity on the channeled heal while swapping back to maintain astral. works well enough and i get to use 3x aoe damage abilities with an aoe damage daily, lol.

[Clark]

You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed. Neverwinter leaves a decent very first impression, but scratch the surface anywhere and it's plywood underneath. It's clear that it's designed after Perfect World's formula (and a formula that is tragically common in today's MMORPG market): they serve you a three-course meal, the first dish tastes great but the second one is crap; then they tell you that the third course will taste as good as the first one if you pay, but you have to take their word for it. Oh, and in this case, the third course costs like $200 for a dish that you can get elsewhere for $60.

It's really quite bad. The dungeons look neat at first glance but it's a cardboard facade. The combat mechanics are absolutely primitive, and the "difficulty" lies not so much in challenging fights as in just not giving classes the tools to do their jobs. Clerics can't heal anywhere near as well as traditional MMORPG healers can, but the other classes don't have the survivability that you'd expect them to have as compensation for the cleric being more like a GW2 support mage. The guardian can't hold aggro for shit, but the other classes can't really tank the mobs they invariably get on them as a consequence of some of the worst aggro mechanics since EQ. The great-weapon fighter is just a weird and largely useless failure of a tank/dps hybrid.

Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay). And that's per bag, which will bind to your character, so you'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to get bags for two characters. Want more than two character slots for your account? Pay up. Want more than fifteen bank slots, which you absolutely must have because you'll find DOZENS UPON DOZENS of items you have to save up and combine later? Get out the Mastercard. Want a fast mount so you can actually win the battlegrounds? $40 please. Do you demand the conceited right to respec your character? $5 per! The list goes on and on with shit that all other MMORPGs offer as basic features but Neverwinter expects you to pay extra for. When creating your character, you have to pick from a number of preset stat sets and the creation process deliberately refrains from telling you what the stats actually do, so when you find out later on that you have to reroll, I hope you haven't already spent $40 on BoP bags. That can't possibly be intentional, though, right? The game boasts of being free to play, but you'd have to spend a few hundred dollars to get the standard features that you take for granted in other games. It's like being offered a free soda but the bottle costs fifty bucks. Hey, you can always drink it out of your cupped hand! Aren't they generous?

It's theoretically possible to get most of that shit via gameplay and the accumulation of a currency called Astral Diamonds, but we're talking months of farming to get the aforementioned fundamental gameplay necessities, let alone any actual luxuries. Keep in mind that ADs are also the currency used on the auction house, so if you want to save up for bags or bank slots, you have to literally opt out of trading. Even identify scrolls and enchanting your items costs AD, so saving up for bags or whatever is a huge sacrifice in character power. They've done their very best to present the appearance of everything being obtainable without paying while making it so unrealistic that one might as well not even acknowledge the possibility.

People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a stack of 100 mobs that are stuck in a tiny cell for AoE grinding and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of. Meanwhile, the game itself has practically no meaningful content after the leveling phase; it's just a collection of dungeons, about twelve or so, and then they have three difficulty tiers (including normal which is depleted while leveling). The endgame consists exclusively of extra heroic 5-mans, the world is your oyster!

Everything else is equally shit. Everybody can roll need on everything, and everything including endgame purples is BoE so everybody just rolls need so they can sell it if they win something that isn't for their class. If someone leaves your group, you just have to leave and start over after replacing him. Mobs just spam-CC in PvE so that the poor fucker who's trying desperately to tank will enjoy being stunned about 75% of the time. Wanna know what the main taunt mechanics in this game is? It's an ability that you cast on your target which then amplifies the threat you generate, but if the mob hits you the debuff disappears, so the tank must not get hit by the mob he's tanking. Brilliant design.

The list of criminally poor game design could go on like that for five pages, but the worst part is that you get to suffer through it while being constantly bombarded with reminders that everything would be better if you paid. When you die, you're given the option of rezzing instantly at full health if you pay a little. Crafts tend to take hours, but you can click a button to make it instant for a price. Your companion needs to go home to the farm for an hour in order to level up, but you can do it instantly with a small injection of sweet problem-solving cash. You can swing your credit card at literally everything in this game and fix the gamebreaking issues that the developers have intentionally implemented in order to tempt you into doing just that.

But the controls are kinda neat and also leveling is fairly cool for the first few hours because there's a lot of solo quest instances and it almost feels like playing NWN during that delicious first course of the dinner. The developers seem to have been under the impression that they were developing an action RPG, because the few places where it emulates that genre is the few places where it's decent whereas the game fails spectacularly whenever it tries to be an MMORPG. After making a mockery of Star Trek Online, Perfect World must not have felt like they'd ruined quite enough beloved franchises, so I guess they set their sights on Dungeons & Dragons this time around and they certainly did their part to ensure that nobody else will try to put D&D and MMORPG into contact with eachother again for a long, long time.

Great post. Need to make my irl friend who keeps praising the game read this. Also to those considering playing I will say that I played Perfect World International for 2 yrs 2007-2009. If it wasn't for pvp I would have quit it much sooner. The cash shop in PWI grew beyond repair and they just kept adding, and adding, and adding. To the point where playing without using irl money was just not comprehendable. After I spent like 150-200 bucks I said screw this and stopped playing all together. Havn't logged back on sense, thank God for p99.

[Millburn]

You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed...

I've got a lvl 35 GW Fighter on Dragon right now and you pretty much hit every nail on the head. My big concern is how to manage my dwindling bag space without investing $10 for a 24 slot bag, yeah...$10 for a SINGLE 24 slot bag....what the literal fuck.

[Knuckle]

You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed. Neverwinter leaves a decent very first impression, but scratch the surface anywhere and it's plywood underneath. It's clear that it's designed after Perfect World's formula (and a formula that is tragically common in today's MMORPG market): they serve you a three-course meal, the first dish tastes great but the second one is crap; then they tell you that the third course will taste as good as the first one if you pay, but you have to take their word for it. Oh, and in this case, the third course costs like $200 for a dish that you can get elsewhere for $60.

It's really quite bad. The dungeons look neat at first glance but it's a cardboard facade. The combat mechanics are absolutely primitive, and the "difficulty" lies not so much in challenging fights as in just not giving classes the tools to do their jobs. Clerics can't heal anywhere near as well as traditional MMORPG healers can, but the other classes don't have the survivability that you'd expect them to have as compensation for the cleric being more like a GW2 support mage. The guardian can't hold aggro for shit, but the other classes can't really tank the mobs they invariably get on them as a consequence of some of the worst aggro mechanics since EQ. The great-weapon fighter is just a weird and largely useless failure of a tank/dps hybrid.

Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay). And that's per bag, which will bind to your character, so you'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to get bags for two characters. Want more than two character slots for your account? Pay up. Want more than fifteen bank slots, which you absolutely must have because you'll find DOZENS UPON DOZENS of items you have to save up and combine later? Get out the Mastercard. Want a fast mount so you can actually win the battlegrounds? $40 please. Do you demand the conceited right to respec your character? $5 per! The list goes on and on with shit that all other MMORPGs offer as basic features but Neverwinter expects you to pay extra for. When creating your character, you have to pick from a number of preset stat sets and the creation process deliberately refrains from telling you what the stats actually do, so when you find out later on that you have to reroll, I hope you haven't already spent $40 on BoP bags. That can't possibly be intentional, though, right? The game boasts of being free to play, but you'd have to spend a few hundred dollars to get the standard features that you take for granted in other games. It's like being offered a free soda but the bottle costs fifty bucks. Hey, you can always drink it out of your cupped hand! Aren't they generous?

It's theoretically possible to get most of that shit via gameplay and the accumulation of a currency called Astral Diamonds, but we're talking months of farming to get the aforementioned fundamental gameplay necessities, let alone any actual luxuries. Keep in mind that ADs are also the currency used on the auction house, so if you want to save up for bags or bank slots, you have to literally opt out of trading. Even identify scrolls and enchanting your items costs AD, so saving up for bags or whatever is a huge sacrifice in character power. They've done their very best to present the appearance of everything being obtainable without paying while making it so unrealistic that one might as well not even acknowledge the possibility.

People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a stack of 100 mobs that are stuck in a tiny cell for AoE grinding and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of. Meanwhile, the game itself has practically no meaningful content after the leveling phase; it's just a collection of dungeons, about twelve or so, and then they have three difficulty tiers (including normal which is depleted while leveling). The endgame consists exclusively of extra heroic 5-mans, the world is your oyster!

Everything else is equally shit. Everybody can roll need on everything, and everything including endgame purples is BoE so everybody just rolls need so they can sell it if they win something that isn't for their class. If someone leaves your group, you just have to leave and start over after replacing him. Mobs just spam-CC in PvE so that the poor fucker who's trying desperately to tank will enjoy being stunned about 75% of the time. Wanna know what the main taunt mechanics in this game is? It's an ability that you cast on your target which then amplifies the threat you generate, but if the mob hits you the debuff disappears, so the tank must not get hit by the mob he's tanking. Brilliant design.

The list of criminally poor game design could go on like that for five pages, but the worst part is that you get to suffer through it while being constantly bombarded with reminders that everything would be better if you paid. When you die, you're given the option of rezzing instantly at full health if you pay a little. Crafts tend to take hours, but you can click a button to make it instant for a price. Your companion needs to go home to the farm for an hour in order to level up, but you can do it instantly with a small injection of sweet problem-solving cash. You can swing your credit card at literally everything in this game and fix the gamebreaking issues that the developers have intentionally implemented in order to tempt you into doing just that.

But the controls are kinda neat and also leveling is fairly cool for the first few hours because there's a lot of solo quest instances and it almost feels like playing NWN during that delicious first course of the dinner. The developers seem to have been under the impression that they were developing an action RPG, because the few places where it emulates that genre is the few places where it's decent whereas the game fails spectacularly whenever it tries to be an MMORPG. After making a mockery of Star Trek Online, Perfect World must not have felt like they'd ruined quite enough beloved franchises, so I guess they set their sights on Dungeons & Dragons this time around and they certainly did their part to ensure that nobody else will try to put D&D and MMORPG into contact with eachother again for a long, long time.

I agree with most of what you said, I would not be upset about 'foundry' abuse just yet, as it is in beta, after all.

One can hope that the overly abusive astral diamond system gets toned down before a real launch. I understand an official launch on a free to play game will be less grand of course.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that these folks are aware of the cash farm system they've built, and are simply pushing the envelope to see player reaction and will then trim the excess fat to make paying for things in game more of a luxury than a necessity.

[EchoedTruth]

I agree with most of what you said, I would not be upset about 'foundry' abuse just yet, as it is in beta, after all.

One can hope that the overly abusive astral diamond system gets toned down before a real launch. I understand an official launch on a free to play game will be less grand of course.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that these folks are aware of the cash farm system they've built, and are simply pushing the envelope to see player reaction and will then trim the excess fat to make paying for things in game more of a luxury than a necessity.

That is exactly what The Old Republic did when they went F2P. They restricted everything and people got pissed so they backed off. Neverwinter is really fun. The combat is excellent (I like it more than GW2). The world is a gritty, realistic one, similar to that envisioned by earlier Forgotten Realms games. The F2P aspects alone do NOT make this game worth passing on. It is really, really fun. I quit playing P99, WoW vanilla EMU, guild wars 2, path of exile, etc... to play this.

[MrSparkle001]

I agree with most of what you said, I would not be upset about 'foundry' abuse just yet, as it is in beta, after all.

One can hope that the overly abusive astral diamond system gets toned down before a real launch. I understand an official launch on a free to play game will be less grand of course.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that these folks are aware of the cash farm system they've built, and are simply pushing the envelope to see player reaction and will then trim the excess fat to make paying for things in game more of a luxury than a necessity.

If anything the astral diamond system will get worse. The dilithium system in STO used to not be so bad but they made it worse and worse to a point you were practically forced to spend money.

Don't expect them to treat Neverwinter any different.

[Jerin]

The dilithium system in STO used to not be so bad but they made it worse and worse to a point you were practically forced to spend money.

What are you spending real money for in STO? 2 maybe 3 weeks of casual
playing can get you enough dilithium to buy any ship. Even with a basic
Vice Admiral ship you can do all (space)content on elite difficulty.

Neverwinter doesn't seem to be an overly difficult game either. If your character
can defeat end game content without spending any real money, whats the problem?

[MrSparkle001]

It's not just for ships now. I haven't played the game in a while but apparently you need it for crew, space station stuff, and now I think even some equipment, from what I've read on the forums.

[SyanideGas]

I downloaded it today, the rogue is pretty cool. Game seems decent so far.

[Jerin]

It's not just for ships now. I haven't played the game in a while but apparently you need it for crew, space station stuff, and now I think even some equipment, from what I've read on the forums.


there is nothing in STO that requires real money


**the only thing in STO worth paying money for is maybe a larger
inventory...maybe

[Jerin]

It's not just for ships now. I haven't played the game in a while but apparently you need it for crew, space station stuff, and now I think even some equipment, from what I've read on the forums.


Be honest...you dont have the faintest idea about STO...

"I have not played the game in awhile"

You never played STO in anyway shape or form..never has STO been pay2win;
matter of fact if you think STO is pay2win...you are a fucking retard.

STO is one of the easiest MMOs out there....on Elite difficulty.

[SamwiseRed]

I downloaded it today, the rogue is pretty cool. Game seems decent so far.

lol at your sig dude

[Jerin]

I've got a lvl 35 GW Fighter on Dragon right now and you pretty much hit every nail on the head. My big concern is how to manage my dwindling bag space without investing $10 for a 24 slot bag, yeah...$10 for a SINGLE 24 slot bag....what the literal fuck.

Why would you spend any real money on a gdamn fucking bag? Your not selling loot, there are 10k people out there, selling the same shit your selling.

Im done...i keep looking to talk about Neverwinter when im inebriated.
And everytime i come to these forums there is some weakling being a fucking pussy.

You don't need to spend any money to play any gdamn Cryptic game. They are all fucking cake. Stop being fucking
pussies.

its all so....unnecessary


name a game, any game(eh Crptic game) where RL money is the difference between winning or loosing..

[Dualform]

From what I've read on neverwinter reddit there's a gem that aoe stuns foes around you when you're struck once every two minutes and crafting the gem is on a 1% success rate unless you pay $.

that would only really be bothersome in pvp I spose.

If you want to respec its about 240k diamonds. (They were very clever when it came to being vague in the skill tree.) And since there's two skill trees you'd have to pay that twice. To put it into prospective I'm level 43 out of 60 and only have 50k diamonds. (I play like 6 hours a day!)

I won't ever use the auction house because i'll be using my months farming just to fix problems I had to learn the hard way.

I enjoy the game, but I'm looking forward to other things. (Like velious here.)

[MrSparkle001]

Be honest...you dont have the faintest idea about STO...

"I have not played the game in awhile"

You never played STO in anyway shape or form..never has STO been pay2win;
matter of fact if you think STO is pay2win...you are a fucking retard.

STO is one of the easiest MMOs out there....on Elite difficulty.

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Yes I did play it. Granted it was a year ago I last played, after the new Odyssey cruiser, but I still occasionally read the forums. I used a fleet escort and bought the collector's edition for $7 online (that should tell you something about the game). Even back then dilithium requirements were becoming excessive. It doesn't make the game pay to win like asian MMOs but you really limit yourself if you don't. It doesn't help that they "fixed" the easy console foundry missions that gave you a quick 1440 dilithium. Now you have to run the same few elite borg missions over and over.

Bottom line: STO is a medicore game and I don't trust the company's "free to play" model, and Neverwinter is pretty much destined to be the more of the same. It will rely on the foundry instead of developer content, which by nature means mediocre content.

[Millburn]

Im done...i keep looking to talk about Neverwinter when im inebriated.
And everytime i come to these forums there is some weakling being a fucking pussy.

You should probably read what I post while you're not drunk and then reply while you are. We get the best of both worlds this way.

[Knuckle]

Ok I've put about 2 hours in, here's my thoughts as a level 6 Elf Great Weapons Fighter.

1.) The introduction is embarrassing. It feels so fucking cheesy there's just something about CGI graphics and spell effects with the characters trying to look powerful at the start of a game that makes me want to punch my monitor. I miss the warcraft2 esque narrated introduction with scrolling text and a nice background to set the theme. Bethesda would be a great company to learn from here, ever since Daggerfall in 1995 they've made their games start with some flair.

2.) Extremely dissapointed that I was only picking my characters 'back story' when I picked a city. Game diversification has gone to absolute shit. Why does everyone have to be funneled into the same city and quest line. Even story driven games can give one a sense of freedom(dragonborn), instead of feeling like your standing in line for a fucking ride.

3.) I like the combat so far. A refreshing way of fighting that feels a little more interactive. I like the Great Fighters skills, a little more flexiblity and variety in the path you want to specialize would be great.

4.) The boss fights, at least initially, were pretty fun.

5.) Stop fucking handholding us with quests and shit! The quests are absolutely fucking boring and retarded at low levels. Why the fuck am I gathering arrows? If my backstory is a tried and true mercenary and I just survived a dracoliche attack and rescued the city from an undead raid on a bridge, why am i playing courier in the city?

Im on dragon server.
Names Knuckle.

[EchoedTruth]

You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed. Neverwinter leaves a decent very first impression, but scratch the surface anywhere and it's plywood underneath. It's clear that it's designed after Perfect World's formula (and a formula that is tragically common in today's MMORPG market): they serve you a three-course meal, the first dish tastes great but the second one is crap; then they tell you that the third course will taste as good as the first one if you pay, but you have to take their word for it. Oh, and in this case, the third course costs like $200 for a dish that you can get elsewhere for $60.

It's really quite bad. The dungeons look neat at first glance but it's a cardboard facade. The combat mechanics are absolutely primitive, and the "difficulty" lies not so much in challenging fights as in just not giving classes the tools to do their jobs. Clerics can't heal anywhere near as well as traditional MMORPG healers can, but the other classes don't have the survivability that you'd expect them to have as compensation for the cleric being more like a GW2 support mage. The guardian can't hold aggro for shit, but the other classes can't really tank the mobs they invariably get on them as a consequence of some of the worst aggro mechanics since EQ. The great-weapon fighter is just a weird and largely useless failure of a tank/dps hybrid.

Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay). And that's per bag, which will bind to your character, so you'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to get bags for two characters. Want more than two character slots for your account? Pay up. Want more than fifteen bank slots, which you absolutely must have because you'll find DOZENS UPON DOZENS of items you have to save up and combine later? Get out the Mastercard. Want a fast mount so you can actually win the battlegrounds? $40 please. Do you demand the conceited right to respec your character? $5 per! The list goes on and on with shit that all other MMORPGs offer as basic features but Neverwinter expects you to pay extra for. When creating your character, you have to pick from a number of preset stat sets and the creation process deliberately refrains from telling you what the stats actually do, so when you find out later on that you have to reroll, I hope you haven't already spent $40 on BoP bags. That can't possibly be intentional, though, right? The game boasts of being free to play, but you'd have to spend a few hundred dollars to get the standard features that you take for granted in other games. It's like being offered a free soda but the bottle costs fifty bucks. Hey, you can always drink it out of your cupped hand! Aren't they generous?

It's theoretically possible to get most of that shit via gameplay and the accumulation of a currency called Astral Diamonds, but we're talking months of farming to get the aforementioned fundamental gameplay necessities, let alone any actual luxuries. Keep in mind that ADs are also the currency used on the auction house, so if you want to save up for bags or bank slots, you have to literally opt out of trading. Even identify scrolls and enchanting your items costs AD, so saving up for bags or whatever is a huge sacrifice in character power. They've done their very best to present the appearance of everything being obtainable without paying while making it so unrealistic that one might as well not even acknowledge the possibility.

People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a stack of 100 mobs that are stuck in a tiny cell for AoE grinding and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of. Meanwhile, the game itself has practically no meaningful content after the leveling phase; it's just a collection of dungeons, about twelve or so, and then they have three difficulty tiers (including normal which is depleted while leveling). The endgame consists exclusively of extra heroic 5-mans, the world is your oyster!

Everything else is equally shit. Everybody can roll need on everything, and everything including endgame purples is BoE so everybody just rolls need so they can sell it if they win something that isn't for their class. If someone leaves your group, you just have to leave and start over after replacing him. Mobs just spam-CC in PvE so that the poor fucker who's trying desperately to tank will enjoy being stunned about 75% of the time. Wanna know what the main taunt mechanics in this game is? It's an ability that you cast on your target which then amplifies the threat you generate, but if the mob hits you the debuff disappears, so the tank must not get hit by the mob he's tanking. Brilliant design.

The list of criminally poor game design could go on like that for five pages, but the worst part is that you get to suffer through it while being constantly bombarded with reminders that everything would be better if you paid. When you die, you're given the option of rezzing instantly at full health if you pay a little. Crafts tend to take hours, but you can click a button to make it instant for a price. Your companion needs to go home to the farm for an hour in order to level up, but you can do it instantly with a small injection of sweet problem-solving cash. You can swing your credit card at literally everything in this game and fix the gamebreaking issues that the developers have intentionally implemented in order to tempt you into doing just that.

But the controls are kinda neat and also leveling is fairly cool for the first few hours because there's a lot of solo quest instances and it almost feels like playing NWN during that delicious first course of the dinner. The developers seem to have been under the impression that they were developing an action RPG, because the few places where it emulates that genre is the few places where it's decent whereas the game fails spectacularly whenever it tries to be an MMORPG. After making a mockery of Star Trek Online, Perfect World must not have felt like they'd ruined quite enough beloved franchises, so I guess they set their sights on Dungeons & Dragons this time around and they certainly did their part to ensure that nobody else will try to put D&D and MMORPG into contact with eachother again for a long, long time.


The letters TL;DR have never applied more than in this instance. That being said, if you think this game sucks and/or shits on D&D, you haven't played it. Nice essay, though. 4.2/10

[Knuckle]

The letters TL;DR have never applied more than in this instance. That being said, if you think this game sucks and/or shits on D&D, you haven't played it. Nice essay, though. 4.2/10

Actually it DEFINITELY shits on the D&D series. Are you kidding me? The story telling aspect and questing is complete fucking fail and absolutely hand hold mode. I feel like I have zero control over my characters ability to make choices or handle a situation creatively.

[Highbrow]

This game has nothing to do with D&D except they've used the same names for primary attributes and some of the items have a 'thing of protection +1' theme.