f13.net

Link (http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/06/ataris-secret-weapon-neverwinter-nights.html)

Wow. I can't believe it's been this long since NWN 1 was released. I still consider it a new-ish game (guess I don't get out much). This could be interesting if Cryptic includes something akin to CoX's Mission Architect. Letting the players roll up their own mini-modules would be cool.

(http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/bash.gif)

Fuckstupid idea. Seriously, do none of these clueless monkey fucks with money realize how saturated the fantasy MMOG market is?

Nope.

Atari hasn't been known for cluefullness in quite a while. Otherwise they wouldn't have had to sell off major parts of the company to survive. And everyone is blinded by Activision/Blizzard's moneyhats.

I would hope it would at least be based on 4e?

Click-to-move with autoattack.  Kill ten kobolds.

I wonder how many titles Cryptic will be developing simultaneously before actually having one out making money.

bwahaha!

So...NWN persistent worlds are still running today, by players for players, and now Atari wants to make their own and charge money for it.

Heh.

And they have more actual roleplay and oldschool D&D feeling than any MMOG could ever hope to capture at least until you can program an AI Dungeon Master.

This is totally the wrong direction to take the NWN franchise.  I would welcome a NWN3 that lies somewhere between 1 and 2 on the builder complexity scale though.  I liked a lot of what you could theoretically do with NWN2's toolset, but it was frankly much too complex for me and I never got anywhere with it.  NWN1's toolset was easy to build a working module with, but I felt limited too often, especially since I tend to go nuts over little things like the exact angle of one building in relation to another and so on.

A system based on tiles like NWN1 but with those tiles being able to be tweaked down to the tiny details would be ideal.  And for the love of the gods, the DM client would have to be a top priority.  In neither NWN or NWN2 was the DM client a top priority for devs, and that more than anything else hurt.  Toolset weaknesses could easily have been overlooked and worked around with excellent DM client functionality.

They have the tools, the engine, the settings, the precedence, and an entire groups of fans who have written content for examples.


I bet they make this for under 4 mill.

I'm a pretty big fantasy fan but you and I are in complete agreement on this. Saturation? We're beyond that.

Being as there are only two decent fantasy MMO's on the market, I disagree (WoW and LotRO being the two).  Box sales of recent fantasy MMO losers demonstrate that the fantasy MMO market still has room for a good MMO.  Unfortunately we haven't seen any good fantasy MMO's release in recent history.  

I agree with your sentiment that we need something fresh, but there's definately room for a well built fantasy title.  800k+ people bought AoC and WAR boxes... the money is out there to grab.  Someone just needs to develop a game worth sticking with. 

Yep. There's always room for more elves.

Motherfuckin' elves.

Cryptic and Atari seem well suited to one another.

More seriously it does seem hard to imagine that Cryptic has the depth of talent and resources needed to develop three MMO's simultaneously.

Thinking a little further about this, if it *is* 4e, that means the 4e Forgotten Realms setting, which discards a lot of the things that established NWN players would expect to see (along with a bunch of game mechanics.) I can't see WotC granting a license to use the 3e stuff, so either this will be 4e, or it takes advantage of some aspect of the license they were already granted for NWN 1/2 in which case it will be behind the times mechanically.

There are a lot of mines in the minefield on this one I think.

Mechanically, 4th edition would make a much better MMO (Hell, 4th edition OBVIOUSLY takes a lot of cues from the current generation of online RPGs).  The setting isn't a big issue for me, I like both 3rd and 4th edition forgoten realms from a setting standpoint.  In fact, the more I think about it the more I hope it is 4th edition based, because I think that would translate much better into an MMO experience.  Third edition is fantastic if you are turn based, but I think it doesn't quite translate as well into a real time game.  Even NWN had some major problems on that front in my opinion.

I know they could never do it justice, but Neverwinter should be the tutorial, if that.  It needs to be set in Planescape.  Use the 4e rules, but they don't need to tie themselves to any existing lore.

Planescape has an ABSOLUTELY HUGE lore canon, actually, and I don't expect WotC to license it out because it is out of print. They'll typically only license settings that can turn around and drive rpg book/novel sales for them.

Good Planescape is mostly undoable in a game form, at least as far as more general stories go (Torment was a great story but very specific and even IT had a lot of issues with the Planescape setting, going too far or not far enough on any number of things).  It's dependent on thought and ideas and influence and all sorts of stuff that can't ever be done well with a pre-scripted game and pre-scripted dialogue that has to apply to thousands of individual characters.

It's like trying to put together an MMOG with the already admittedly difficult ideas of SWTOR's story-based gameplay and multiplying it's complexity a thousandfold to take into account the nuances and difficulties of Planescape's grey morality.  Planescape isn't about combat, either, because around every corner are gods or archfiends or something that can crush player characters like bugs without any serious effort, so shoehorning a combat-light setting into an MMOG where almost all gameplay is necessarily combat-based is a tremendously bad fit.

And don't forget that even though PS:T was critically acclaimed, it bombed terribly in sales.  It was too weird and didn't have enough elves.  Clearly WoW has proven that we need elves.

With big floppy ears.

What does a good MMO have to do with anything with the Atari or Neverwinter Nights name on it?

That's right, nothing and no one.

With there being so many better non-fantasy IPs out there that Cryptic could be chasing, I'm hoping this rumour isn't true.

Fantasy?  Sci Fi?  Spelljammer!

Just to fuck with you all.

 :awesome_for_real:

Motherfuckin' elves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NPZkgK-TkY)

Oh fuck ya.

Heh. Man, my kingdom for a sniper rifle and a minigun in any fantasy campaign...

Clearly it's time for Dragonlance to make a come back.   :why_so_serious:


Shadowrun it is!

Your wish is granted! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ElmjHRQ9Y) ;D

(You may hate me now.  I'd much rather sickrubik's solution though.)

What made Neverwinter Nights stand out was the ability to build your own modules and run servers fairly easily. Without that, it was a decent but sub-Baldur's Gate D&D RPG.

Creating an MMO using D&D rules and set in the Forgotten Realms isn't enough to call the game a NWN sequel. Maybe they have something more interesting planned, like making it easy for players to add their own content.

That would lend more credibility to the idea of setting it in Planescape.

Were Cryptic to do this (rather ordinary) title, it would make sense to have the player created content feature as front and centre for launch. They'd have looked at Paragon Studio's experience with CoH/V (and others) so hopefully could avoid some of the basic pitfalls of such a title.

And, if it is true, that puts Cryptic across four titles - ChampO, STO, an unannounced one that is referenced from time-to-time and then this.

When they said legacy title I actually kind of thought they were referring to the AOL Neverwinter Nights from the early 90s.  I guess that wouldn't make much sense though.

That's the best advertisement for anything ever.

Sold!

I'm not an elf hater, and I'm not one to bag on the fantasy genre, but that vid rocked.

Atari desperate to turn its "valuable" IP into cash cow MMO's, Cryptic with no titles released and needing cash... I can see a deal being done.

I don't see anything good coming of it though. A cash strapped developer spread across multiple titles with Atari involved seems a recipe for a bunch of mediocre money grabs.

I think they'd have to fail upwards to even approach mediocrity with this title.

Another rumour around Cryptic: angry fanboi claims Cryptic working on a Godzilla / kaiju MMO. (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=194341) He's using this image as a hint:

(http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/3077/watching.png) - I recognise it, but just can't place it.

Only reason I give this rumour any credence is that Emmert has already indicated he was interested in doing a Godzilla MMO (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/50978), right at the same time he talked about his interest in doing a D&D MMO.

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.

Lol. I used to like him, but that show really went downhill after the fifth season.

I'd rather go back and play on a Neverwinter Nights PW story server(there are some STILL running!), than play an NWN MMO.

Did NWN2's online community ever take off like it did in NWN1?

What the fuck is a Godzilla MMO?  Are you Godzilla or are you a military guy and the final/only boss is Godzilla?  Huh?  Or do you play Mothra vs. Godzilla?

It was too much of a pain in the ass to get into an online server on nwn2, they recently added an autodownloader to make it easier but at this point the chances of having an online community like the first game are pretty much nil.  The only reason i still play any nwn game is the amount of character customization available, i play on a nwn2 server with 60+ classes and i am addicted to designing new characters.  If the nwn mmo has multiclassing and a robust number of classes ill probably end up playing, there's no other game out there that scratches that particular itch.

It would be like Second Life, only at random times Godzilla comes stomping through the city areas and destroys everything.

I think it would be WAY more fun if you were a monster sent to ravage Earth (as in the arcade game Rampage and Epyx's The Movie Monster Game), but an argument could be made for an Earth Defense Force styled title.

Hell, there's an in-built asymmetrical PvP design if you do them both.

Or just set it on monster island, everyone is a monster. Each monster is a different class. 'level 50 Rodan lfg to Raid Tokyo. Ginza wing'

I think WoTC is still in their quaintly bumbling way harboring ambitions of incubating something themselves, and that the 4e revisions reflect that. (I'm not a hater, I thought they were interesting. On the other hand: is there any company that has more consistently fucked up their online and digital presence than them? I can't think of any.)

Anyway, second and third to what Haemish has said. This is a valueless IP if it's not used to catalyze a design that is substantially different than the standard-model fantasy MMOs out there. And since I have less than zero confidence that the moneysuits at Atari understand that any better than the gibbering monkeys making these decisions at other media and gaming companies, this doesn't even rate a meh.

Giving their track record with this online gaming table thing (which was a feature I was willing to pay monthly for so I could play with my old group, we were all set), I don't think they could make a functioning MMO given an unlimited budget and timeframe.  4th edition obviously tried(is trying?) to make headway by emulating CRPGs, which is funny, seeing as CRPGs were always just a crude representation of D&D.  Eh, screw a D&D MMO, I'd rather just playing Living Forgotten Realms 4th edition and be done with it, thats basically what that is anyway.

4e is wretched.  The new thing tabletop rpgers are into is Savage worlds which is kind of an updated GURPS.  The primary setting is an old west/steampunk hybrid called deadlands.   It's pretty fun.

My group doesn't think so. We've grown from 5 people to 8 over the last year and all of us are finding it fun. My players are loving the character building options and I love how much easier it is to DM than 3/3.5e.
Of course, roleplaying and storytelling in a TTRPGs is only as good as the players/GM  (and I'll bet Savage Worlds has some wretched experiences out there).

Out in the real world, people are still mostly playing and loving 4e.

The game system doesn't matter too much to me as long as we have fun.  I'll find ways to creatively abuse the system and the GM will find ways to smack me down.  If I can RP, it's all good.

I'd had lots  of fun with free, very simple systems like Dead Meat or the slight-more-complex-and-not-that-expensive Dust Devils. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Best post I've seen in a while.

WOTC wouldn't be the one making the MMO. Hell they barely have enough funds for DDI development (which to my surprise has been worth the sub fees, go figure). It is a shame the game table got... well, tabled.

It's funny you use the word "crude" with regards to CRPG's, because to me in the past few years it became clear that D&D's mechanics were showing their age and a radical revamp was required. "Anything you can do I can do better" syndrome for spellcasters, high-level fights that were decided in the first round, jaw-droppingly broken feat combinations, all added up to a system that was teetering under its own weight. On the contrary, recent CRPG designs illuminated D&D's aging design and balance problems.

Regarding later comments about Savage Worlds - it's a cool system and has some pretty good ideas. Like Ingmar was saying, if you read the various neckbeard forums everyone hates 4E and is playing SW and Pathfinder. Talking to my local game store owner though, he's having trouble keeping 4E stuff on the shelves. YMMV and all that.    

Balance problems are inherent to any system that gives players a ton of freedom.  CRPGs generally achieve balance by taking that freedom away wholesale.  There were legitimate issues with feat combination and such, but that can be solved on a group by group basis.  A DM says, well we can modify how that will work, or maybe the DM can just toss extra stuff at the players to balance it out some.  High levels were always an issue, but my group always got around that by just starting over at level 13 or so, rarely going high levels.


I actually like 4th edition, don't get me wrong.  I think it has excellent combat mechanics, but the system to me seems far more limited than previous incarnations of D&D.  While they are doing a good job keeping new options coming out for people, in 3rd edition character concepts were basically totally up to the player, with feats, skills, and class combos giving you a TON of customization.  4th edition seems shelves that in favor of more balance.  Its not the worst thing ever, but I do miss being able to make, for instance, a fighter who uses archery as his main focus, or just other quirky ideas.

Also, I played Pathfinder for about 6 months last year -> this year and I thought it was excellent.

Next you'll say Eberron wasn't a huge failure.   :ye_gods:

Wasn't sure this deserved its own thread, and this seemed potentially related.

Hasbro is suing Atari over the D&D license. (http://www.industrygamers.com/news/hasbro-casts-bigbys-crushing-lawsuit-on-atari/)

Prediction: Atari loses access to D&D licence. Cryptic announces Tunnels and Trolls Online.

Oooooh I hope the CE version comes with lots and lots of six-sided dice!

It worked with Champions!  And by worked I mean... happened.

Between this and Turbine suing them for breach of contract over DDO, I'm thinking NWN online probably isn't too likely to ever see the light of day.  But stranger things have happened.

Hah, Christmas comes early for me apparently:
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17717.msg696195#msg696195 (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17717.msg696195#msg696195)

Having been reminded that Hasbro used to own Atari: this is one messy, messy lawsuit.

Rise from the grave!

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverwinter/news.html?sid=6274162&mode=previews

One of the odd things I find with games journalism is the way that the writers copy press releases verbatim without thinking and publish it as "journalism".

Consider


I can see why Jack Emmert might try to claim that PVE grouping is new and innovative but shame on the journalist. The other D&D MMO is entirely based on cooperative pve.


Omg. Did he just say playing D&D with a bunch of friends is a brand new way to experience it. Omg.

Wait, what?

You basically connect to the game via a series of tubes. A revolutionary concept.

Dropping the 'massively' part does make sense (to some extent) for heavily instanced titles as Cryptic's tend to be.

Also, it seems from this early press that Cryptic is aiming to make Neverwinter reflective of the NWN toolset experience rather than a full MMO.  

Release for Q4 2011 (http://www.playneverwinter.com/press).

EDIT: Interesting that RA Salvatore's work is going to fuel both this and 38 Studio's title.

For his next trick, Jack Emmert shall invent the wheel !   :uhrr:

I actually agree that its better that they make in a multiplayer rather than "massively" multiplayer game.  What I don't understand is why they are trying to market this as something new or ground breaking.  A new genre called Online Multiplayer Game, COME ON.  I really hope he was being ironic or something.

His ignorance is disheartening.

Cryptic?  Really, WotC?  *sigh*  RIP, NWN.

Well, that is what action points did in some of the d20 system games.  In 4th they let you take an addition action, but its not a totally wrongheaded statement.

Oh Gods.  Let me stay out of this discussion now.

Well they do seem to be doing something "new"ish: CoH/CoV character customoization in a fantasy game. This is long overdue.


From: http://www.playneverwinter.com/about

This does bring up the question of what happened to the Turbine and Hasbro lawsuits that I was pretty sure would have caused this to be torpedoed.  Anyone been keeping up?

Cryptic and DND. Two phrases that make me completely uninterested in whatever is talked about after that.

I am more optimistic. The 4E rules - which I like - has things that Cryptic has proven do do reasonably well: push, knockdowns, teleporting, etc.  These things haven't been in prior versions of DnD.  CoH felt like as real 3D world for the most part.  I think instancing is the best way to handle DnD as well.

Best source of data that I've discovered on this is the DDO forums. Read this thread from page 11 onwards:
http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=208807&page=11

In short Turbine v Atari was settled out of court shortly before Turbine's incorporation into Time Warner. Hasbro v Atari seems to be ongoing.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/12/has-atari-gone-chaotic-evil-over-dd-dd-franchise.ars

In any event Atari's licence to operate a D&D MMO runs out in July 2017. It seems unlikely at this point in time that Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro) will be enthusiastic about renewing it so that might mean that this new Neverwinter MMO closes in 2017 regardless of how popular it is.

Seven years is an eternity in the gaming industry. So many things can change before that license runs out.

Speaking of, why on earth would Hasbro let Atari have the license for that long of a time?

Thank god, it is NOT an MMO ...  :why_so_serious:

Heh, well I haven't read the licence so I can't relate exactly what rights Atari has in relation to online provision of Dungeons and Dragons games. It would seem though that they have the rights to release this Neverwinter game even if it is not technically a MMO.

It would be hilarious schadenfreude if, in the desire to reach new heights of rhetoric, Emmert has put them in the position where they don't have the right to release it because they only own a MMO licence.

I don't disagree with you, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people treat CoX as part of Cryptic's current repertory. Cryptic as we now know it has entirely changed from the Cryptic that made CoX; it has none of the same employees except for Emmert and maybe one other guy. You might as well say their next game will probably involve lots of clicking because Diablo 2 did.

That said, the online model that Emmert is floundering at describing sounds like it falls somewhere between Guild Wars, Neverwinter Nights custom multiplayer, and Diablo 2 closed servers. It would amuse me if the game ends up being a worse-designed Guild Wars with a worse-designed CoX-like mission creation system, establishing a "let's make a poor version of whatever was popular with NCSoft a few years ago" trend at Cryptic.

Argh why Cryptic arghghghghgh

We already have WOW, LOL, and now OMG.... when is someone going to create a WTF and a ROFL video game?

I get a chuckle every time i see Duke Nukem Forever listed as DNF, as in "Did Not Finish"...

Oh yeah, in terms of this game, devils in the details and all that.  Focused on small group adventures with no massive overworld and a content creation toolkit?  Sounds good.
Cryptic doing it? Eh, we shall see.

I still play on a NWN persistent server.  Just give me an updated NWN!!!  Argh

Sorry, but wrong.

A number of Cryptic people cut their teeth on CoH/V and kept on to ChampO and STO. Geko, Poz, Tumerboy, Zinc (recently left) and others (Arkayne, Balseraph, I think, plus those never given catchy forum nics) have worked across different Cryptic outputs. Cryptic have certainly expanded during that time and there have been changes - for instance, I only found out recently that when Atari bought Cryptic, then President Michael Lewis sold out and the head of Cryptic is CEO John Needham (ex-SOE). True that the CoH/V live team plus one (pohsyb) elected to stay on CoH/V, but they were around 25% of Cryptic's staff at the time of sale iirc.

There's a meme out there that Cryptic was just Emmert when NCsoft bought CoH/V and they parted ways, but it's wrong. Now, Emmert may be the face that people assign the cult of personality to, but he's not the only employee either then or now.

EDIT: The title thread needs to be changed to "It's not a rumour!".

Gah, my bad then. Thanks for correcting me.

Yeah, it's not a rumor!!! It's...

(http://i.bnet.com/blogs/its_a_trap.jpg)

And this is virtually guaranteed to be using that asstastic Champions engine as well. Great.

My girlfriend got burned on Champions and I got burned on STO. Sorry Cryptic, no matter how polished your turds get six months to a year after release, I'm not falling for it again.

Source (http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverwinter/news.html?sid=6274162&mode=previews&tag=topslot;thumb;1)

It sounds as if players will be able to add dungeons and quests to the official game world rather than creating their own separate worlds as stand-alone servers or downloadable modules, as they could with the previous Neverwinter Nights games.

Any bets on their plans for the just how much they'll rely on user made dungeons at release?

Yeah, instead of adding enough content (like STO) they will have contests for the 'user made dungeon of the month'.  Then they'll patch it into the game.  Don't have to pay silly devs and the fanbase finishes your game for you!

Once again we fall victim to classic Cryptic marketing voodoo. Bazinga!

Given the MA / user-generated content experience of CoH/V, having this implemented at launch may help get around some of the problems seen in CoH/V.

But for this to really work, Cryptic is going to have to deliver map-building tech - something they had problems with when superbases were implemented. Parts of the system were very robust (someone built a base with over 16 000 items in it before instability issues set in) but others weren't (like pathing through the base). And those were just static items or turrets.

No issues with Cryptic's ability to deliver a good character / monster creater, but other elements are certainly open to question. But a title where you can build your own maps and missions could have legs. Too soon to tell though.

Ok, so no massively just multiplayer.  You can create your own maps and missions.  Isn't this exactly the same as previous NWN games but without the shitty single player story?

Previous NWN games allowed people to set up their own servers with their own settings, rules and character databases. From the information that Cryptic have released so far, it doesn't look as if the new game will allow anything like that.

That would suck, I haven't used it myself, but I hear the suite of tools that came with the NWN series was a huge selling point for the series and its life span.

It was a huge selling point, the tools just happened to be buggy as fuck for the first year after release and not nearly as accessible as promised.

It should also be noted that this game is slated for Q4 of next year, 2011. I don't know how long Cryptic's been working on this, but I'm willing to guess "not very long."

I wonder if, a month from launch, the user-generated content system will be pushed back to a "six week patch."

NWN1 is still around; if the toolset had been designed from the ground up to better support content creators (i.e. persistant world support, importing new models, better DM interface, erx) it would have been awesome, but even with what it delievered the gamer gestalt delivered a ton of fun and usable content.

BTW, did anyone else notice they are only going to have 5 classes and a few limited races?

Way to proactively set the stage for future expansion pack material guys!  :oh_i_see:

About a third of the design staff currently at Cryptic has been here since CoH/CoV shipped.  The ratio is somewhat higher on the Neverwinter project.

Expansion pack my foot. It's virtually guaranteed you'll see extra races and classes on the C-Store under a month after release.

They're going to fast-track this motherfucker to completion using the same engine and conventions as STO and ChampsO, are they not?  Same old shit, then.  Sell a million boxes (or whatever) and then let the premature fetus die slowly once it starts trying to breath oxygen.

I always thought one of the brilliant things about WoW was the way they harnessed the player base to write their UI. WoW would be much less of a masterpiece without Decursive, Questhelper, Auctioneer and so on. (Even if you don't use them and proudly walk uphill in the snow barefoot you need them to exist in order to have something to feel proud about not using).

User-created content could be simply wonderful. Especially in D&D where there is a tradition of homemade campaigns which are more fun than the professional ones.

I hope they can avoid some of the more obvious traps (miaow missions, griefing Tomb of Horrors dungeons, tilesets sculpted to look like penises, etc) and engineer a system where players make fun dungeons for each others. It's a big ask but a worthy goal to aspire to.

Actually, I think this is one case where Cryptic has more experience and demonstrated expertise than anyone in the market for this specific game design.

The CoX/CO character creator was very well done.
The CoX basebuilder was pretty to very well done.
My guess is that the CoX mission maker was begun while they were still in charge, so they also have experience with that.
The CO/StarTrek netcode seems decent enough (I never had any problems with it).
The CO instancing engine does a good job.

Third time's the charm?

... Lol, naaahhhhh.

Ryzom Ring (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27yMHnfAGkU)

You can't sell subs to a user-gen game. Microtrans works much better and the way Cryptic is set up (with a C-Store) could work very well. Basic game is F2P but the extras cost.

Eve does.

:oh_i_see:

I concur with that smiley.

I really want to not care about this, but sadly, knowing it is true that Cryptic is making this makes me angry.

Are people going to pay for user-generated dungeons and etc? Or, to be more precise: are people going to care that there are epic, well-thought out, user-gen dungeons when they could just be downloading: "powerlevelz room lol exploding barrels #753" and zooming to cap?

If the answer is, because you give worthy rewards to the good modules and not to the spammy rooms, then how do you do that on a large scale?

And come on, this is Cryptic: they've proven themselves largely unable to handle even reasonably simple design questions. Now they're tackling how to make user-gen maps and dungeons drive a MMO?   :awesome_for_real:

I don't think people will pay to dl user dungeons, but that's not how I'd have my business plan. You'd sell map / weapon assets in packs so that those who wanted to create a particular type / style of adventure could use them. The dl of the user created things is free, but someone has paid to unlock them so they can use them in a module.

From the dev side, release a mix of free and paid-for content, with the paid-for stuff having some kind of unique unlock associated with it - you can only get the Sword of Turninatrix from the "Saga Of Emmert The Brave" content, for instance, which also unlocks a new tileset for content creators.

Key thing is that the basic game has to be F2P. And then time and effort has to be spent culling the weak content. With this kind of title you are practically opening the door to exploitation of in-game systems / farm content, so you do need a way to keep that from overloading the quest search function.

However, for all of this to work Cryptic has to deliver an incredibly fantastic map creation system. The CoH/V supergroup base system is a start, but it was always a static map. NW needs to have a lot more dynacism in its maps to keep players / creaters interested.

As someone who was deeply involved with the PW crowd for NWN1, I found NWN2 to be a gigantic kick in the dick and 100% the wrong direction to take the franchise.  We had whole planets modeled with thousands of areas stretching across multiple physical servers.  We had true persistence with a runtime hook to MySQL.  We even had the ability to ftp your character files to other servers across the country or around the world with a framework in place for rudimentary planar travel.  NWN2 can't support 1/10th of that.

NWN3:Online in whatever incarnation they come up with can suck it.

This, pretty much.  NWN 1 had a stellar PW community, and one that was coming from a pencil and paper background that was used to putting in lots of labor to get a great game world out in the first place.  There were PW servers out there that, aside from pure server capacity, were on par with many modern MMOs.

I really like Unsub's business model but it seems to me that the people who are planning the business models at large companies are generally terrible. Eberron Unlimited was obviously very slick but before that you have to go back to UO for a genuinely good new business strategy in Western MMOs.

Some of them look like they've pinned their competitors' models to a dartboard and thrown darts to see which bits they should nick (cough EQ2E cough).

Not only do I not think most of the professionals are as smart as Unsub but I don't think they're even planning the same kind of thing. Cryptic remember had the fiasco of introducing paid retcons paired with a radical rebalance and was apparently completely surprised their player base exploded.

http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/business_models/bill-roper-computer-game-poison.html

I would be astonished if this product launches with a business model that minimises how much we slam into an objectionable pay barrier while still incorporating plenty of opportunities to make money. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act and Cryptic's track record is completely different. (ie how much can we sneak into the cash shop while still getting box sales plus subs?)

How was UO anything but the common subscription model?

That was new in a mass marketed game at the time was it not? There may have been precursors but they didn't have widespread appeal so can hardly be pointed to as marketing successes.

Some MMOs before UO used to charge by the minute to play. A monthly sub was something different, especially in an era where (locally at least) they were contemplating pay-by-the-minute charges for internet services - and I believe that occurred in the UK.

IIRC.

So please laugh at my pathetic naivety if this is part of his usual dog & pony show, but here is an interview with Emmert explaining what went wrong with CO and STO and why it won't happen with NWNO.
http://www.massively.com/2010/08/23/massively-exclusive-jack-emmert-speaks-about-neverwinter-and-a (http://www.massively.com/2010/08/23/massively-exclusive-jack-emmert-speaks-about-neverwinter-and-a)

Here are some excerpts that caught my eye.

This may actually be an example of an MMO Dev. trying to learn from past mistakes.  That is either a great thing for me or a horrible thing for me, depends if you emphasize trying or learn.  I really enjoyed the original NWN's private servers and this part made me feel like that magic could maybe happen again.

He's saying the right things but talk is cheap. 

If they had had three fully playable factions; Feds, Roms and Klingons with full storylines and RvR and enough content, they would STILL be adding servers to STO.

Instead, they thought they could half-ass it and wear money hats and, now that the subs have dropped thru the cellar, realize they should make a good game.

At least that's my perception of it.

This.  They could have paid any one of us a bundle to tell them to get their heads out of their asses and it would have been a bargain.

It wasn't a lesson they needed to learn, especially since they already had a shipped game.

This is very much a part of his usual dog & pony show. He played the "candid self-deprecating" card heavily and often during the development of Champions (in reference to CoH), and had he been the PR voice for STO instead of Bill Roper, I suspect he would have there as well.

So yeah, he's saying the right things like Tannhauser mentioned, but if they end up meeing that Q4 2011 projected release date (meaning that this game has likely only had roughly two years in the cooker), I suspect it'll just be that: all talk.

I think this is what made the beta STO a huge warning for me.  I think the first post i made in the STO thread after the NDA went down was like "total crap avoid at all costs" or something.  The number 1 thing behind that statement was that they were making EVERY FUCKING MISTAKE they made in Champions beta over again.

So five classes: fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard and... ? ranger? druid? monk? bard? paladin?  All four of those are mainstays of D n D, game is gonna feel weird without them.

I must say I'm utterly appalled by Jack Emmert's comments. There are people who bought lifetime subs to CO a year ago and to STO 6 months ago and now it's being implied "the focus was on hundreds of hours of mediocre (some would say even worse than mediocre) content".

If I were a Cryptic customer I'd find this completely unacceptable. Saying that a game you made several years ago was poor is one thing. Saying that games you just brought out are rubbish and no one at the company gives a toss about them any more, which is what Emmert is implying, is just not on.

If you look at successful MMOs they clearly employ staff who absolutely love their game. CCP, Blizzard, EQ2 has enthusiasts like Domino. I want the people who work on my game to be people who would play it if they didn't work there. That may be a little starry-eyed but the minimum I expect is that they not slag off the game I love in public.

So what does the future hold for 6 months after Neverwinter's launch? Emmert self-deprecatingly saying that user-generated content was an experiment that didn't work and telling us how hyped he is about quest hubs, a feature of their next game?

Ranger.

The announcement listed them.

The Gamasutra interview (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6041/not_so_cryptic_neverwinter_and_a_.php) is also interesting. He puts out that Cryptic have traditionally made games pretty quickly - he got CoH out in two or so years when he took over, CoV in about a year - and for cheap - $8m for CoH and $6m for CoV. (I've always heard that CoH cost closer to $13m, so I'm wondering if Emmert's figure doesn't include some kind of initial development costs or something.)

He confirmed a theory of mine: Cryptic saw all these complaints about CoH but the game still exceeded expectations, so thought the same applied to ChampO and STO. Feedback was mixed for both titles during the beta, but there certainly were boosters for both titles. Of course, following ChampO's launch, I would have thought that Cryptic would have delayed STO's launch, but there was this underlying "we have to launch!" attitude that makes me wonder if Atari and / or Paramount had some ironclad deadline that had to be met.

Both ChampO and STO have been improving since launch, but it is very difficult to get over initial shortcomings / perceptions. I'm happy with ChampO - log in, tool around for a bit, log off having achieved something minor - but it is very much in the casual MMO space. Where Cryptic's business model - get an existing IP, develop a title on a short time period, release and work to improve the shortcomings - falls down is that the people who really like the IP get pissed off and help fuel a nerdrage ball that is damaging to Cryptic's reputation. Plus then they get to max level within 30 days and don't bother re-subscribing.

I think the problem is that most people aren't going to pay a monthly fee for this experience.  Maybe if you REALLY like super heroes.  I'm a firm believer that its the metagame that keeps people playing MMOGs most of the time, with a few exceptions perhaps.  The last two cryptic titles have had barely any compelling meta game of which to speak.  The result is, even the people that generally think its sort of fun to play don't feel compelled to keep playing the game long term when there are 100 other good action games out there.

Emmert's problem is he listens, but doesn't hear.

CoH was a fun game, it just had issues people wanted to make better.  He heard "<rabble> <rabble> <rabble>".

CoH and STO had massive issues and people were savaging it, though the helpful ones were still offering suggestions.  He heard "<rabble> <rabble> <rabble>".

During the ED, and any other important change, he acted the same way.  His attitude is "I'm right, you the customer do not know what you're talking about".  Now he's finally found out what happens when he lets his ego get out of check and he doesn't have lucky coincidence on his side (or y'know, being the only super hero game on the market).  Sure there are idiots in the masses, but they do actually sometimes know what they want.

I used it quite extensively. My programming career basically started by making NWN1 modules. You could do damn near anything with them with relatively little skill at all. The persistent servers would range from Complex team death match systems where you'd gain levels, skills, and money to buy equipment from a vendor to full scale mmos very similar to Ultima Online. The offline player made content was staggering in its breadth. There were player made campaigns that dwarfed the original game content. Some even had voice actors to cover the parts of the main characters. Some done kind of cheaply but a few had real production quality to them. To this day I think buying NWN1 Diamond edition is probably the best value in the gaming market... followed by Valves Orange Box of course.

Yeah, it was just a great toolset.   I think you are overestimating its accessibility.  The actually world building was a since, but there was quite a bit of scripting to be done if you wanted to do most things.   I think the community was extremely willing to dig into the tools though, and there were great resources out there so that if you wanted to put in the time you really could do a lot.

I had years of fun with that game and still install it every so often.  There are still great PWs up and running with communities.

The thing that surprises me about the Emmert interview is that he's allowed to talk about what the subscription impact of various things was on CoH - I would have assumed that somewhere in the Cryptic->Paragon/NCSoft transfer deal there would be some gag rules about stuff like that.

This is why I'm so firmly behind the F2P experiments like LotRO and EQ2X. Get in for free, put in as little or as much money as you want, play when you want to, don't play when you don't want to. It really can be the best of both MMOG worlds, so long as the system doesn't fuck you over for things you need. If NWN is a sub service, I'll never even look at unless the beta gives me blowjobs.

No, and it's a crying shame. They could make that game browser based, and free to play with a lot less effort than they put into their last worthless 3D upgrade. People would swarm to it. I'd even argue there's a good chance it would dominate the F2P market.

I never even thought of UO as a browser possibility.  It should be done.

I would go back to a "professionally"-run F2P UO in an instant, even if it were monetized to hell and gone. Something about free shards just never clicks with me.

You're both making me nostalgic for NWN1. I did a lot of work with the toolset working on a persistent world, and loved the level of freedom and creativity it allowed.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I assumed that NWN2 would be just like this but better, or if it wasn't then somebody else would make their own version instead. Toolsets like this were here to stay.

But that hasn't happened and there's nothing on the horizon that I know of. The "make your own adventure game" genre hasn't taken off.

Bioware did explain once that supporting online games (whether persistent worlds or just small-scale co-op play) hadn't worked for them from a business point of view. Most people who bought NWN never played online at all - they just played the official campaign that came with the game - yet significant resources were spent supporting those that did. I don't have a link, it's just a comment I remember from some years ago.

I remember that comment as well. I think it was around the release of one of the Premium Modules they did. Those were pretty damn good too; reasonably priced and included new stuff for modders to use. Infinite Dungeons alone was pretty wild (I didn't know the Aurora Engine could even do something like that), and I still fire it up on occasion if I want to just take a dude around and beat up some stuff while getting ridiculously overpowered.

What I remember about the NWN toolset is I could make fully populated castles or towns or forests or whatever I wanted all day, but I could never make any of them more then static objects or basic dialogue trees.

Anything past that involved scripting, and that was just way more investment then I was capable of.

That's how I remember it too. You could see that it was capable of just about anything but I spent about 80 hours designing an inn where people could meet quest givers, realised that it wasn't even a quarter done yet and decided that designing a whole world with these tools was beyond me.

To be fair I'm not a good level designer and scope creep hit my project hard.

I think while NWN1 was a wonderful tool for people who simply enjoy designing it wasn't yet the tool for people who don't mind designing but are mainly interested in the end product. It nearly was. Wonderful game, decades ahead of its time.

It was certainly a lot better than NWN2, which was so difficult I never managed to make a single area.  My main problem was definitely scope creep and perfectionism, because I obsessed over every minute detail, but I was able to do a good deal with the scripting system just by putting some time into it, although I can see why many wouldn't be able or willing to put in enough time.

Its real failing, however, was the buggy DM client and the lack of good tools there.  If the DM client had been the most well-polished part of the setup, then the scripting difficulties wouldn't have been as bad, since it would be easy to do everything simply by actively DMing.  But there were so many things that could not be accomplished at all through the DM client that it made the scripting absolutely necessary to create most anything that was moderately complex or more.

There were some DM tool mods out there that were absolutely fantastic and really put a dent in the shortcomings.

Cryptic has released two stinkers of games, and pretty much damaged their image with a lot of folks.  I don't care what the game name is but I would not try another Cryptic made game unless it was Free2Play first.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1119900p1.html

"Exploring the New Neverwinter"
Not very interesting, honestly. Maybe someone in here will get more out of it than I did.

Hm, sounds like just one character advancement path. Ugh. If there's really robust support for user-generated content, I'll check it out after there's more than just "Go under Neverwinter AGAIN!"

Regarding the old Aurora toolkit, I think my favorite modules were just simple towns and dungeons without a lot of dialog paths. When players bogged down their modules with all sorts of funky rules, they just got, well, bogged down.

Just discovered this game tonight while reading the new Salvatore book Gauntlgrym. They advertised the game in the books jacket.
Thus far it sounds like DDO with 4ed rules, fewer classes and an attempt to shoe horn in player created content (has this ever been succesfully done in a commercial title in a persistent online world?).

City of Heroes' architect thing is pretty good.  Its main failing is that the risk/reward is often out of whack because the automated system can't tell whether an NPC is overpowered or underpowered.

Beyond that, its failing is the same failing of CoX in general, and some of the AE story arcs that I played were well and truly superior to pretty much anything official.  I suppose the other failing would be the rating system.  Finding the really good story arcs can be challenging, at best.  This is the main thing I think any attempt at player created content will run into difficulty with.  There is going to be loads of crap out there, and if they cannot make it easy to find the good stuff, then it won't work very well.

Someone shoujld make a single player DnD 4E game before some clowns try and MMO it.

Oh fuck...it lives!

http://www.playneverwinter.com/splash?redir=frontpage

There aren't enough  :why_so_serious: faces on the net to satisfy how 'artarded this will turn out to be.

Given how poorly Daggerdale has done, I hold no hope that an NWN mmo will be anything other than an utter disappointment.

The marketing material seems to be specifically avoiding calling it an MMO. "Onilne co-op RPG" is what they seem to be using.

That would have been a fair description of NWN 1 and 2 in multiplayer mode. I won't be sorry if this one goes down the same path.

IGN put up a preview a few days ago. (http://pc.ign.com/articles/117/1172727p1.html)

This is the short page on the content creation tools - the Foundry (http://www.playneverwinter.com/foundry)
That actually the one part I think Cryptic could do well based on their experiences in CoH...

Mission Architect came out nearly 2 years after Cryptic was no longer in charge of the CoX games. That doesn't mean they weren't there for at least some of the development of course, but it is a good bet that most of the work on it was done by the people who turned into Paragon Studios, rather than the ones who stayed with Cryptic.

Cryptic has since launched the Foundry for STO, which is their player generated mission system for that title.

Also, this isn't a MMO - it's an online co-op title, so it should be shifted to the PC games forum.

Also, I'm curious that PW will be launching the Torchlight MMO and Neverwinter since both seem very similar... I wouldn't be surprised if one managed to fold into the other and I suspect that Torchlight would be the one left standing.

I dunno, the co-op support for the original game was kind of spotty.  It flat out didn't work for Hordes of Underdark if I recall correctly, issues with players getting stuck in "cinematic" maps (the opening dream sequence/vision, for example) with no way out, not getting the resurrection item, that kind of thing.  I don't even know if it was officially supported at first.

And in NwN2 it was just nightmarish, as I recall.  Every time one player talked to someone (and if you've played the game, you know this happens every ten goddamn seconds when you're not in a combat map) the other got locked out of the game until the conversation finished.  And if you're not talking to someone, you're fighting, which is slightly better, but kind of pointless in multiplayer since you don't ever die, you just respawn at the entrance of the map if you lose all your HP.

An interesting quote from a recent STO "Ask Cryptic":


It appears some form of the Foundry is also being used for Neverwinter.

Jack's comment on removing the Night from the title kinda made me go, "uhmm." I really would have thought someone would have explained the historic significance of the name.

This is Neverwinter's Foundry page (http://www.playneverwinter.com/foundry).

Is there a reason it was called Neverwinter Nights other than that was what happened back in 1991?

I hope players can run adventures in real time (with a DM tool or something), that would probably be enough to make me seriously consider this, but if its just a mediocre RPG with a lot of player made (aka probably terrible) premade adventures, then that isn't so interesting to me.

Wasn't Neverwinter wiped out with 4e? Or was that Luskan?

Whoa, you mean it isn't another world to explore in their DDO F2P model?
I got the mailer and immediately assumed that.

I think it has been rebuilt.  

Also, I heard that players will be able to DM adventures for their friends, but how or what exactly that means remains to be seen.  The combat is apparently also totally real time (not even the sort of hybrid that the other NWN games had), which is maybe a slight warning sign, but not something that sounds terrible.  Its really so early on that everything and everything we know isn't enough to be excited or to write it off.  My gut feeling is that at the end of the day its going to be an easier to use but way less powerful version of the NWN toolset/dm client.  There are a lot of people on the forums clearly hoping that this game will allow them to effectively run private D&D campaigns in the engine, and I agree that it would be the idea, but Im not convinced it will be really possible.


Edit: I just realized that the Wizards virtual table software for Dungeons and Dragons insider is actually in beta after all this time.  When that comes out I would absolutely rather subscribe to DDI than play Neverwinter, so this just lost a lot of its attraction.

There's lots of hype floating around to tie in with E3. Here's one article on the Foundry system in NW from The Escapist: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/110876-E3-Neverwinter

From what I've read, I get the impression a key difference with the previous games is that you won't be able to set up your own worlds. In NWN and NWN2, players could create and control their own servers. In Neverwinter, it looks like you add stuff to the official server.

Neverwinter delayed for 12 months; Hasbro wins digital D&D rights back off Atari. (http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/dungeons-and-dragons-neverwinter/news/6328979/neverwinter-delayed-as-hasbro-atari-settle-dandd-dispute)

Perfect World is investing more into Neverwinter's development and has set the new timeline, which makes me think Atari wanted a Q4 2011 release just so they had a new MMO in the stable.

Of course, what it means for Hasbro to have taken the rights back off Atari (who can still license D&D games from Hasbro) and its impact on the Cryptic Neverwinter title remains to be seen.

Forum the Neverwinter forums:


 :why_so_serious:

This game is so dead man walking now.  God knows what Hasbro suits will do to it.

It's a fantasy dungeon crawler. The name is less important here (and tbh I think Cryptic would be better served in owning their own IP than paying the licensing fees).

Cryptic Officially Makes Neverwinter a F2P game. (http://pc.ign.com/articles/119/1198498p1.html)

I'm sure Gygax is rolling over in his grave  :uhrr:

This game is dead to me

Sounds good to me.

It's a fitting place for a company of cryptic's quality.

Vindictus is rather high quality. So I don't understand.

I'm not a big fan of Nexon's portal for games, but Vindictus and Dragon Nest are both great games.  If Neverwinter will be like that, it has potential for being decent.

I'm not able to play either of those so I'll take your word for it.

I think one of the more interesting bits in that article is Cryptic's basic admission that their cash shop model has some serious diminishing returns.

How'd you get that from the article? The closest I saw was the admission that they'd learned from their other F2P launches and would be using that learning in Neverwinter.

I'm not sure what I think about the change.   It'll be interesting to see if Perfect World "gets it" or if they've basically pushed Cryptic to make a pay 2 win game.   If it's not pay 2 win then this will be the first MMO actually designed for the new model.

I still have hopes they'll lose the license.

I found this post in response to the article on their forums by h2orat (he's an employee and if I remember he was a dev on ChampO).


Sounds like a fair case of the reporter taking comments and running with them.

More than five players = massively multiplayer  :uhrr:

Maybe he meant "mMO" - moderately multiplayer?

That was supposed to be a PM. Old post is old

Neverwinter Game Story Trailer  (http://youtu.be/HnCF5yNVxhI?hd=1)

 :oh_i_see:

A man in the corner of a bar says, "There was a dragon. I killed it."

*checks link*

This is the story trailer?

I get more and more bummed that NWN1 is still the best implementation of "make your own sorta-MMO" out there. Why waste this IP on an MMO again?

Uhyep. Not knowing the control scheme, but that looked really dated too.

Same engine as Champions Online/Star Trek Online.

Because unapologetic D&D geeks like myself will play it. The same way Im buying and playing SWTOR no matter what because its in the Star Wars universe.
Talk about dated? Im playing the shit out of DDO right now and its from 2006.

And the dev's say it will be F2P.

I'll cheer for stylized graphics in a lot of things.   Keep it the hell out of my DnD though.

I don't mind the graphics so much as the fact that compared with the terrible voice acting it makes the whole thing seem like a low budget saturday morning cartoon.

I was meaning top down, or orbital cam style.

Since this is D&D I'll probably still try it when it comes out.

I am still praying to the Dark Nine that Cryptic loses the license before this can be inflicted on it.

It would take some doing for Cryptic to release the worst D&D game in even the last 3 years.

I am sure they can do it.

The people drinking at the bar were 3 feet away from it.  Hilariously bad all around.

This is transitioning to beta.

http://nw.perfectworld.com/news/?p=805541

Feel free to ridicule me, but I'm actually looking forward to this game  :ye_gods: Not as much to buy into their 'buy 2 beta', mind.

I know I know, lolcryptic. But this is the ONLY mmog coming out in the near future that actually concerns itself with user-generated content, and the new Foundry system looks a lot more interesting than STO's version (aka. 99.9% of the population only plays 'click once and complete' missions to get their tokens). I have been a huge sucker for player-generated content systems in online games ever since my MUD days in the early 90s. City of Heroes' Mission Architect was really great, too... and as long as the tools are actually powerful enough to provide storytelling flexibility while not requiring users to do shit like modelling / skinning / etc, this may just become the mmo that has the most amount of varied decent-quality content evar. Purposefully terrible missions excluded, of course... and yes, 95% of everything will be shit.


(I omitted ryzom for several ryzomsreasons. Ditto EQ2's dungeon creator :awesome_for_real:)

I will likely check this out after launch. The combat system is at least progressive for the genre. However, i am finding it quite difficult to find out about "The game" from the website. Is it instanced based? open world? Town hub style? ETC..

My big issue is that I was BIG into some persistent world servers in NWN, played on some, created (extensive) content for some, and I know that no matter how good the Foundry is here, it won't live up to that.  The NWN label on actually hurts for me, because NWN was probably my favorite online RPG of all time.  I hoped for so long that an MMO would come out that allowed for similar stuff, and while this is mildly interesting for that reason, I know it will disappoint.

That being said, I actually enjoyed Champions Online quite a bit for a while, so maybe I will try it out at some point.

As best I can tell, it's Cryptic's usual mix of open areas and instances for the more particular stuff. I believe they'll be using the "instanced world map" approach as well, so that everyone plays on the same server but you might end up on map #5 but your friends are on map #7 and you can easily switch between them.

I'm interested to at least have a look too, but no way am I paying for Founder Pack access.

The stuff in the founder's pack, and the fact that it's $200 was enough to turn off my mild interest.

I checked  the website the other night thinking "how the hell could I not hear about this".  Then alarm bells went off : Switched from Atari to another publisher, switched from instances multiplayer to MMO, no gameplay videos, little in game art work.  Holy moley this is going to be a train wreck of Descent to Undermountain proportions.

There's a $60 and $20 version too... but even so, my earlier rant about Founder's Packs stand. I'm not about to pay you to beta test your game, nor pay full price for a game that hasn't even been finished yet.

They had to dump Atari with that company going under.  The rest of it's valid criticism, though it would have been faster and easier to say LOL-Cryptic.

Cryptic didn't dump Atari. Atari dumped them  to the tune of $50 million.

There are videos and in game artwork.

Atari sold Cryptic to Perfect World for US$50m after Cryptic wasn't a revenue generation machine (although arguably they were still Atari's biggest single revenue generator). Neverwinter went from being originally announced as something like a module-based multiplayer title under Atari (who wanted a quick release title to make more money off box sales using the D&D license they had from Hasbro that was under a law suit) to a fuller featured MMO under Perfect World.

Say what you want about Cryptic but they've really turned STO around. Maybe they'll pull something out of their hat with Neverwinter. Launching with the Foundry is a good thing. The version in STO is pretty cool already and can make some awesome missions. I heard the version in Neverwinter is even better. That said, the "spend $200 and get to play Drizzt" stuff irriates me.

If anyone is interested, I have a code from PC Gamer for a free mount for when this goes into beta (don't know if it carries over into live, though I don't see why it wouldn't).  PM me if you're interested.  First come, first serve.

I'm interested enough that I want to check this out, but not interested enough to drop money on it after MWO.

Damn you marketing gurus, knowing how to tickle a man's fancy.

It's going to be F2P. You can have your fancy tickled for no money down.

So...who wants to be my friend? :awesome_for_real:  I have 2 beta keys.  PM if you're interested.

And yes, I spend far too much on video games.  No kids or significant bills makes it all possible. :woot:

True.  Really the only issue is knowing how much they'll expect me to drop for the Drow so the wife will play.

$200 for the lifetime membership.  Only Founders get to be Menzoberranzan.  At least until they need to boost quarterly earnings, then it'll be in the C-store for $20, they'll call it something slightly different, and the forums will overflow with Founder-butthurt.

http://nw.perfectworld.com/founderspack/hero (http://nw.perfectworld.com/founderspack/hero)

I think that's only for the Renegade - drow are listed as playable int the Race FAQ   http://nw.perfectworld.com/about/races

Yes - I believe Drow are a playable race, but Super Drow require that $200 down payment.

My bad.  I'm rather tired of high fantasy titles, so I hadn't read the FAQ -- I just saw the Founder's splash page.

I was laughing until I got to the Robe of Useless Items.  Now I kinda want it. :sad:

Yeah that's what I was figuring.  They word it very sneakily to make you THINK it's only SuperFounders who get to be Drow, though.

Renegades are boring, however. Everyone wants to be a non-conformist breaking from society and dry-humping humans 1/3rd their age.   :drill:

They should add a naming filter that bans all names starting with D and having the 'r', 'i', 'z' and 't' characters in them -- unless you get the $200 founder's pack.  :why_so_serious:

Anyway, prepurchasing at this point seems kinda rash. I'm really interested in the game (mostly due to the Foundry), but I'm not going to shell out $60 or even $20 for some dubious cosmetic rewards, paying2beta, and some minor cash shop offerings. If the game was b2p instead of f2p, maybe...

Both keys spoken for.

I justify spending money on video games by saying to myself that I don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs, don't gamble and don't waste my money in many other ways.  It might not make me a very fun guy to be around but it lets me afford to buy the things I want without worrying too much about my finances.

You get that with the $60 pack as well. Plus a cooler (IMO) mount and pet.

http://nw.perfectworld.com/founderspack/guardian

I can understand that -- my finances are kinda tight (yay Hungary!), but I don't mind prepurchasing a game I know I will REALLY like for $60. I did it with GW2 after all (digital deluxe even  :why_so_serious:) It's just that for Neverwinter I don't know enough about the game to make that kinda decision yet. Maybe if it turns out really awesome after a few beta weekends, I may pull the trigger on the $60 pack...

Thanks for the heads up.  I'm not sure I'll be playing this at even the f2p level though, so I'm going to hold off.

I don't think it's been linked, but TotalBiscuit's got an hour long look at the beta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0E6Yw-M1YY

I'll take a beta key for this if someone has one, because I cannot help myself, I have to see what horrors are being unleashed on the D&D brand this time.

From the video, game does not appear to actually be D&D in any kind of way other than "hey look 6 stats" and class names, so off to a real good start there.

I was never really into D&D, so I'm curious as to what fans are looking for.

Whoever decided that those accelerate/decelerate movement animations look good needs to be taken out and shot.

Watched it.  Looks pretty actiony, very much inspired by GW2.  Yeah, the animations are a bit clunky, but it's beta (I hope).

More than lip service to the core mechanic is one thing. It isn't really D&D unless a d20 is involved; DDO at least has that. This appears to be more an ARPG in a D&D costume than D&D. That's not to say anything about its merits or level of fun or whatever, but I question how much value having that license is going to add if they're that far away from it.

I hear you, but they do have a 'd20' die right in the middle of the screen.  When you fill it up you can cast your 'daily' power. 

I figured it was going to be more like the Dungeons & Dragons of "Bauldur's Gate, Dark Alliance"  which is fine with me. That game was fun.

It's D&D in setting only, which is good.  DDO never really caught my attention.

Remember how (some/many) D&D fans bitched about DDO using Eberron because blah blah Eberron isn't iconic enough etc.? Wait until you hear the bitching about using the post-4e-WotC-ruined-the-setting-with-a-cataclysm-omg-BETRAYAL Forgotten Realms.  :why_so_serious:

Actually it IS D&D. It's just not 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Ed. Watching the videos I instantly recognized 4th Ed mechanics. People bitched when 4th Ed came out that it was a tabletop MMO and lo and behold, those mechanics have been ported to an MMO.

I do wish it was original Forgotten Realms but we all know WOTC wouldn't license that since it wouldn't advertise their current products.

I am really tempted to see how this game plays out. Heck, I am even tempted to get one of those founder packs. The $200 one turns me off with the blatant "Be Drizzt" BS though the Regalia costume looks kind of cool. I agree that the $60 one seems a lot cooler lacking only the full Regalia and the "you get to log in first if there are queues" which is useful only if the game is a big hit.

I see that the founders pack gets you 750,000 Astral Diamonds.  The currency will not be a true translation (or the economy is fucked) of 4e rules as 1 AD is 10,000 gold.  A founder gets 7.5 billion gold, or, using old material since they do not print cool stuff like this anymore,  375 billion chickens.

If anyone else is on this weekend, I'll be playing my cleric mostly.  Not sure how to contact people in game but my character names are Ginaz (rogue), Jinaz (guardian) and Hellica (cleric).  I'll post my thoughts on the game tomorrow or Sunday.

No doofy DM voiceover, no peace!


(If there is doofy DM voiceover, I will totally try this game.)

I want Morgan Freeman to narrate everything.

Like some, my primary interest in this is the content creation tools of the foundry.  Naming it Neverwinter and allowing for content creation seems such a bait and switch attempt for people looking for a actual successor to NWN, and an action RPG seems well, nothing like that.  But, if you could actually create modules that dont revolve around frantic combat just maybe it will be worth playing.  Dialogue, stealth and non-combat challenges FTW!

My magic 8 ball says "seems doubtful".  Thank goodness it will be FTP.

Weekend Beta testers aren't under NDA, so feel free to post if you're playing.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?41181-Any-updates-on-NDA-for-Beta-weekend

I dropped some cash to try it out after watching some of the videos.  They're limiting classes and archetypes on the weekend testers.  This weekend you can only play a "Trickster Rogue" "Guardian Warrior" or "Devoted Cleric."   Foundry content tools are also locked-off but you can run content created by the Alpha testers and Developers.

Here's a shot of the default UI for a  cleric:
My thoughts about it playing like BGDA proved correct.  Don't go in to this looking for a Dungeon Master, there isn't one. It's an ARPG in combat style, but not in loot. Think of it like WoW in terms of loot drops and gear but with faster-paced game play and only 7 abilities at a time. 

There's fast-travel at zone-lines but within the zone you can't just fast travel wherever you want. It's a nice compromise between making things feel too much like a lobby (Which is GW's problem for me) and making travel consume too much time.  You can swap instances whenever you want in a zone, however.  Instances seem to cap at 15-20 players so no real worries about mob competition.

There IS a queuing system for dungeons, events and PVP, however.
Events seem like WoW's scenarios.  Small, focused group content that doesn't take too long to get through.  You're guaranteed a reward at the end in addition to chances on whatever drops during the event.

Dungeons don't grant automatic rewards at the end, but the loot is better.

Xp is granted across the board for helping on kills, so you're not kill stealing or ruining anyone's Xp by helping them out with damage or heals.

Inventory is Limited, of course, but has a nice auto-sort/ stack/ tidy up button.  Bank was about the same size as your starter bag.

The Quest HUD/ Minimap is pretty standard stuff. Everything you expect at this point in the greater cycle of MMOs.
The tabs off the minimap are showing events and contests that are scheduled in the zone and when the next (3) will happen.  The contests are "run around and collect world spawn" things.  These events can also be Bonuses to crafting, PVP events or special rewards for running specific dungeons during the contest.

The grey sunburst to the upper left is your "invocation" timer which is a pretty interesting addition.  Invocation can be done at any rest point, the main city hub or using a dropped item called a holy shrine.  Invoking can be done once per hour and gives you special bonuses (rated Green to Purple)  I've gotten astral diamonds (currency) damage bonuses and even double XP by doing this.

The "1" in my UI shot is how many astral coins I have.  You get one astral coin the first time you invoke in a day.  If you don't invoke again within the next 24 hours you lose ALL your astral coins (you can only have 7 at a time so not a big deal.) You can trade these in for bonuses, seen here:


There's also coins for ardent favor items which you get randomly.  They don't go away if you don't invoke but you also only get them on chance.  These range from health potions up to special companion characters.
Speaking of companions, everyone gets one.  Here's the UI for them:

There's quests that grant them and some are purchasable for Astral Diamonds or, as I said, the favor coins.  You can name them whatever you want, rename as you wish and there's unlockable skins for them.  They also level independently of you.  Leveling requires sending them off for training, which varies in time based on how many levels and how high in level they are.  My warrior companion took 1min to go from 1 to 3, but it could be rushed by spending Astral Diamonds.  The locked inventory slots will be unlocked as the companion levels up.

Companions are also able to be active in dungeons, so you're essentially going to be a group of 10 in a dungeon.

Foundry stuff is laid out pretty readily accessible. 
You can access it by hitting "L" and going to the "Catalog" tab. It lists ratings and looks like the content author can chain missions together in a content arc.  You can also browse by author and subscribe to a particular author to see when they publish a new module.  Very nice.   I think you can only rate after completion of a mission. I haven't done one yet to find out.

Lastly on the basics, when you login you're greeted by this screen:

Suggestions for what to do that day, news, foundry items and upcoming events.  They're really trying hard to make sure you know what's going on and have something to do.  We'll see how it holds up for top-level players.

When I get in to specifics on the following it'll be about the Cleric as that's the class I spent the most time on this weekend. I tried the fighter and rogue but only up to level 6 or 7. 

Character Screen:
What you'd expect.  A paper doll, slots for equipment. Stats, etc. Nothing surprising here in terms of info displayed or stats used. The two that might have questions are power and recovery.
Power:  Straight attack or damage increase.  That 242 score gives me +16 to damage and healing.
Recovery: Reduce Cooldowns and increase Action Point gain.  19 gives me a 2% CD reduction.  AP gain seems to be bugged because it says +-98%.

All the secondary stats work on similar ratios, so the Deflect, Crit and lifesteal numbers don't really modify anything on my character since they're so small.

Nice thing is the game has dyes and item appearance modification from the get-go.

You also come to this screen to add enchants to any gear. They're dropped or purchased, not a skill you need to hunt down from players.

Powers Screen:
Like D&D, you can see that powers are divided in to 3 types: At-Will, Encounter & Daily. 

At-Will powers cost no resources to use and can be spammed to your hearts content. Like other ARPGs, if you hold the button you'll spam the attack.
* Lance of Faith - Basic attack you start with does damage based on your weapon at range.
* Astral Seal - Does initial damage but also provides a "seal" that heals anyone who does damage to the monster after that.
* Sacred Flame - Single target attack.  Every third hit causes increased damage and grant Temporary HPs to all allies in 25' range.  (At level 19 this is one THP.  I don't know how long it takes for these to wear off.)

I found in groups that Astral Seal is what I spammed 90% of the time when using at-wills.  I'm not a damage dealer, after all, and the THPs granted are pretty small compared to spreading healing to the mobs everyone is attacking randomly.

General Skills are just that.  Everyone can dodge, Racials are by race (Humans get +2 feat points and +3% defense) and skills are by class. 

There are little nodes in dungeons that are usable only by certain skills that give you crafting mats.  There are temp buffs you can buy from vendors to grant you the skills from other classes.  (Religion, Dungoneering,  Arcana, Theft, Nature)

Dodge is done by double tapping in the direction you want to dodge. (And clerics can also shift-tap) Very useful when mobs are doing wind-up skills that do heavy damage.  The mob puts a big red Area marker 1-2 seconds before they use their skill.  The usual MMO caveats about morons and fire apply.

The Encounter powers have a cooldown.  As I mentioned under stats these cooldowns can be reduced by the "recovery" stat on the character panel. 
* Sun-burst is a PBAOE damage and heal. 
* Healing Word is a targeted HOT with 3 'charges'  Charges take 15 secs to recover, but stack. So if you have all 3 on one player it does a lot of healing.
* Chains of Blazing Light is a damage and snare.
* Daunting light is a small-radius targeted AOE after a small delay. (1s delay)
* Forgemaster's Flame is a high-damage single-target snare
* Searing Light is a beam that does decent damage in a straight line.  Good for groups, not so much for soloing.

Daily powers work by filling in the D20 symbol in the middle of your HUD. As a cleric, any action that damages or heals fills a portion. There's Feats and class passives that increase this gain in addition to the Recovery stat.
As you'd expect daily powers are much more powerful than Encounter or At-Wills.

* Guardian of Faith - Summons an angel that does massive damage with a knock-down then takes off again, healing your allies.
* Hallowed Ground - PBAOE that grants 20% increased offense and defense for 15 seconds.
* Flame Strike - Targeted AOE with a Knock-up and splash damage.

To put some numbers to this at level 19 - My Best at-will does 135 damage, Encounter does 835 with a 15s CD (Daunting Light) but is hard to hit with so I use Sun Burst which is 276 dam/heal, and Flame Strike does 1,157 damage

Feats:

Feats are Neverwinter's talents.  They follow the old talent paradigm but you're not locked in to any particular tree until you hit the Paragon levels.

Cleric feats include better heals, better recovery bonuses, increased AP gain, more crit, increased HPs, Tempory HPs after getting damaged, etc.  Respecs can be done at any time but cost Astral Diamonds.

Lastly that Tab is the special class power.  For priests it's Divine Power.  That's what the Arc with the + symbols are on the Cleric HUD.  When a cleric hits TAB they go in to a special mode that expends Divine Power.   Each Plus is one arc-full of power.

Left click and right click are channeled powers that reduce DP at a continual rate when channeled.  Left is damage right is heal to self and target (non-enemy)  Your Encounter powers gain additional abilities/ strength but consume a full plus of power when used. For example, Sun Burst adds a knockback and Healing Word adds a direct heal to go with the HOT component.

(Note: I understand this is how stealth works for Rogues as well.  There is no "invisiostealth" like other MMOs.  Instead it's a limited duration buff.)

Shnikes this is a lot. I'm going to post now and will expound later if there's questions.

Wow, that was a pretty good preview Merusk. Which Founder's pack did you buy FYI? Also, you went into a lot of detail about stuff but you didn't say how much (or little) you enjoyed your experiences with the game. Also, will there be any perks to playing this if you play their other games?

I knew I was missing something important. It took me 3 hours this morning to put that together and I realized I'd better hit post or else risk losing it all.  (I nearly closed the tab 3 different times on accident.)

I picked-up the $60 pack because it had the Diamonds.  Previous experience with F2P told me that this would be a better choice than just the $20 pack if I enjoyed it.  If I hadn't watched TB's video I would have dropped just the $20 and not felt cheated.  I still don't on the $60 but feel you have to be insane to drop $200.  Yeah there's a lot of stuff in it but unless you've just GOT TO be a Drow with a panther and show off how unique and special you are with the exclusive title and armor enchant nothing else in the pack would be worth the price.

Oh and 125k astral diamonds is *nothing*.  That ghost companion cost me 96,000.  The level 47 gear cost 57.5k each piece.  You can get unrefined diamonds in game but can only refine them at a limited amount per day.  So that means AD gear is going to be expensive, good thing you can buy them for Zen!  :oh_i_see: (USD -> Zen ->AD hiding true cost between two barriers as is Cryptic's style.)

I had a good time. It's no better or worse than any other DIKU/ DND style game, IMO.  If you've got a fantasy MMO you're playing regularly  and enjoy I can't see moving to this unless it's to drop a sub or because you want something more actiony.  Since gear is much more accessible right now and it's something different I'd be more inclined to play this than return to WoW.   

Not to mention they're not looking to lock things away or give a rats ass about limiting/ gating content access because it "matters" that you "work" to get there.  Limiting things means fewer dollars in their pockets so that's always been a bit of the F2P model that's attracted me.  Drives off the uberhardcore "games matter!" crowd.

I was able to get some playing time in this weekend too (thanks Ginaz for the friend key!), and I think Merusk summed how the game works pretty well... thanks for doing all the work so I didn't have to :awesome_for_real: (I played a cleric too, btw). If I had to sum it up, it was sort of like an ARPG-MMO hybrid.

I did play a few Foundry missions. The Foundry itself was not available to beta testers, so I couldn't see what kind of stuff is possible, but the few missions I played were promising; Foundry missions integrate into the game world directly, with their questgivers, entrances and everything (you can even use the world map), there's a working dialogue system, seems to be a good deal of customizability within maps, etc. Definitely more potential than COH's Mission Architect, and it is the main draw for me.

There are a few things that are sort of rough around the edges - stats during character generation use a 'fake roll' system (roll button just takes you between a few preset stat distributions), which is both annoying and doesn't offer anything that a point buy system wouldn't. I'm not a huge fan of the "you have to stand still while casting/using abilities" thing -- it makes combat a lot less fluid and makes the effects of bad ping a lot worse (try dodging out of a red circle when you're still in the latency-induced aftercast!). GW2 does this better, even if the animations don't look as powerful as they do in NW (which is one of the devs' main arguments for rooting the player during attacks). Looting in groups is a bit regressive after games like GW2 where everyone gets their own loot without taking it from others -- in fact, there's a lot of ninja potential with resource nodes and random white loot from monsters, not to mention rolling need on everything. Finally, that entire system with invocation and 2 different reward coins (this is beyond the astral diamonds) is needlessly over-engineered.

That said, it's clearly beta, the basic gameplay is solid (if a bit too easy, maybe it gets a lot harder later?), and the main thing I'm interested in (foundry) looks pretty awesome; I am definitely springing for the $60 package myself. Astral diamond prices seem WAY out of whack right now (there was a horse for 2mil diamonds or something silly like that), and it works exactly like dilithium does in STO -- log in every day to can refine 23k (not sure if that's per character or account), or take a shortcut and buy it from the cash shop. Some forum people are saying AD prices will be a bit more sane when the game launches etc etc, but I'm not so sure.

Is there any pvp?

Yeah, I've never liked Cryptic's cash shop pricing, and it's gotten worse since they've been under the thumb of their new Chinese masters. Even subscribing, there's still a ridiculous grind for the for-pay currency, which is a huge reason I'm probably not going to dig into this.


Do you really want more shitty Cryptic-brand PvP?

There's a building with a battlemaster where you can 'queue up for domination', but it was disabled; another pvp possibility I saw in the 'extra rewards from pvp' event specifically mentioned 5v5 arenas, but it may be the same thing as domination. I also saw some hints of "competitive pve" (maybe two teams have to run the same dungeon to race th clock, or is it like a public quest?) in the activity page, but haven't had the opportunity to check out how it works.. I think it was level 60 (max level) only.

Honestly though... what koro said.  :awesome_for_real:

My experience has been pretty much the same as others have posted.  I had almost no expectations for this game and had written it off awhile ago.  I've been very pleasantly surprised at how much fun it is.  I played a cleric as well, and found it might have been a little OP as I haven't come anywhere close to dying, yet.  Still pretty fun, though.  The game play is pretty good and the rest of the standard MMO features are solid.  Character models are pretty low res and average looking at best but the performance has been great.  I've had no lag at all and the time between loading screens is very short, so maybe its a tradeoff to increase performance, which I'm ok with.  My only real concern has to do with the cash shop.  I'm not familiar with how Perfect World runs its other MMOs but how they operate their cash shop here could be what makes or breaks the game.

Thats... pretty damn impressive.  I'm loving the player creation stuff.  I think I read there will be pvp in NWNO but I don't know how that'll work if you can just buy gear with money/zen/ad.  I think they were brilliant for milking the drizzt fanboys with the 200 pack though.

Is it different than anything we've seen yet from MMOs?  What makes this title stand out?

It's free and actiony-based.  That's it.

HPs, levels, graded loot, dungeons, classes, resource limitations, cooldowns.  All staples of the genre now, all here.  You may as well ask what makes Family Guy different from Cleveland Show. Not much once you examine the formula.

Nobody's reinventing the wheel in the next 4-5 projects to be released that I know of.  If you don't like the genre as it is now, look elsewhere for your entertainment.  Maybe hang your hopes on TES online doing Skyrim combat, but that's about the extent of changes to be seen on the horizon.

There's queues and events for it, so yes.  What sort of quality is it?  Probably terrible since it's just tacked on to the PvE and level system.  No long duration CC from what I've seen so far, though. So there's that at least.

The player made content is what I think is going to be its selling point.  Its combat is also more action based.  Think Diablo or Tera, though I like how they did combat in NNO better than both of those.  I just couldn't get into Tera's combat at all but even though the two are similar, NNO's combat works for me.  Its hard to explain.  I might even go back and give Tera a try again now thats its f2p just to see if I can like the combat after enjoying NNO's.

Well it's my only reason for playing MMOs so it kinda matters.

As a PVP enthusiast... you set your hopes on MMOs?   God speed you magnificent beast.

Well I'll save you some time: If you're looking for some kind of game to play with some in-depth PvP on a long-term scale, avoid anything by Cryptic. CoH, Champions, and STO all had PvP that was amusing for a couple hours until the novelty of seeing how these largely unique game systems do when they're stuffed into a PvP environment wore off, where it then became nothing but poorly-balanced ball punching.

Any reason to play this over DDO, especially since DDO has now expanded to the Forgotten Realms?

I'm glad it's coming out and based on 4E.  My opinion is pretty negative regarding 4E, but I've always said it was created to be tailor-made for computer gaming.  Didn't feel the need to drop any money on this beta, but I watched the TB video and it looks decent.  I mean what can you do with DND in 'real time' gaming?  No one wants to see chess-like DND (OK maybe I do a little), so you go with a bit more action.

It looks like a Cryptic product, pretty and shallow.  The fan creation ability is really interesting at the least.  I'll definitely play it and may get my old DND buddies back for some action.   

The UI seems very similar to DDO and LotRO. I wonder if that's intentional.

Action vs. whatever you'd classify DDO as.  DDO tried to make D&D in to a real MMO.  From what I can see, Neverwinter isn't attempting that.  There's elements but it's more action-focused.   So it's really a personal preference thing.  I didn't like DDO when it came out, but this is pretty fun.


The patchers are pretty damn close  too,  so I'd say yes.

In fairness that's the same layout STO uses for the most part, just with a D&D skin.

Well fuck me. Someone talk me down from $200.


AHEM.

This still looks hella fun though.

$200.  You have not played it. 

Done.

In my opinion, Cryptic's trademarks are deep customization combined with deeply fiddly but practically undocumented systems.

NONEDIT: What Rasix said. I've dropped $200 on a game more than once, but always ones that I already knew I enjoyed.

I liked the TB playthrough, game looks fun and neat.  Somewhat hard to find info about it, though.  Is there any semblance of an open world, or is it pretty much all adventures/Foundry?

Fairly happy that I can try it F2P first before spending money on it.  It looks quasi-casual from a time commitment standpoint though.  And that's what I need these days.

The only real difference between the 60 and 200 packs is one lets you be Drizzt.

Don't be that guy.

Edit: For the children.

Dammit, I wanted to post this.

Seriously, the $60 pack is where it's at if you really want a preorder... and even then, the tiny still-sane part of my mind is screaming at me "DUDE, you are basically spending $60 on some cosmetics and cash-shop goodies of dubious value for a 100% cash-shop based f2p Cryptic game published by a Chinese company. Are you crazy?!"

Remember, I have no spawn to spend my pocket money on.  :why_so_serious:

But yeah, I don't give a shit about Drizzting.

Ingmar, my darling. Don't make me be That Wife. The shrew-y one.

Further, a D&D-based game is just NOT going to be the game that steps away from any of that.

You can buy your wife lots of collectable Hawke figurines for that cash.  Or a really nice dinner.  Or like 300 snickers bars.  All better than blowing $200 on something that could be worse than you imagine.

You can send me the money.  I'll just follow you around in game calling you Drizzt for a month.  They'll believe.

 :why_so_serious:

It's definitely not an open world in terms of getting out and just exploring at any level.  Places don't appear on my map until I'm sent there via the main storyline.  Those looking for that should look elsewhere, it's a totally hand-holding walk from quest to quest, zone to zone, unless you start jumping in to the foundry stuff.

There's a story the devs want to tell and everyone has to do it.  There might be alternate or branching quest paths once you're higher level but I didn't see signs of it. (I only hit 20, this weekend was capped at 30)

I definitely would consider it quasi-casual, though.  No need to sit down and grind for the endgame when there's no endgame yet, and leveling is so quick there's no need to obsessively play for long stretches.  People on the forums were bitching that they hit level 30 in less than a day.  Yeah, if you sit your ass down and grind you're going to do that.  At level 20 I had 11 hours /played myself due to a rare weekend where I couldn't go anywhere.  With 60 levels that's probably going to be about 24-30 hours to hit cap.  

It's much more important to login every day and do your invocation and astral diamond refining than it is to play multiple hours.  Hop on, hit up a few quests or Forge segments, logout.   The setup is there to reward long-term players not just long-session players.

Ingmar - Buy the $60 package,  Make a normal elf, make the skin white and call him an albino Drow.  There I saved you $140 and you'll be actually unique and clever at the same time.

It's not $200, it's $400.

I am going to be an uber-nerd and ask this. Does it look like roleplay will be possible in this game?

That's a bit broad... roleplay is possible in *any* game, even Diablo. Obviously games with no levels or a strong mentoring system (COH) fare better, as do sandboxy games (UO, and yes, SWG). This game isn't particularly sandboxy except for the Foundry, though.

*I put on my wizard hat and robe*

Fair enough. I'm taking a SharePoint class today so my post was somewhat hasty. I mean, does it have anything to support it beyond "Yes, we have emotes and chat." For example, in STO, Starbases and Embassies for fleets have also turned into RP hubs. Does this game have, at the least, things like bars and other interior spaces that are not dungeons/mission areas.

SharePoint? My condolences.  :why_so_serious:

There are a few gathering places like that in the city itself, yeah (inn in Protector's Enclave could work)... though I'm pretty sure they do 'soft instancing' within city zones too, and you'd have people running around doing Foundry missions (you can pick them up from inns, and a few of the "embeddable" quest NPCs are in the inn).

My question on this subject is basically, are there any non combat skills/abilities/stuff to do that you could build in with foundry missions.  Beyond just detect traps/disarm traps or open locked stuff.  Trying to get a feel for what sort of non-combat focused modules you could make.  Do they have dialogue skills checks, or known language stuff, or basically anything besides action combat that would validate the use of a D&D license?

Nope.

There's not even a pick-lock skill.  The one hidden area I found was unlocked using a glowy "Dungeoneering Required" harvest node.  If I hadn't had one of those buff items I wouldn't have been able to unlock it as a solo Cleric.

It's a pure combat ARPG.

I didn't see anything in the few foundry missions I ran that they have what you were asking about.  They were all combat in nature and none of the quests, even the non-foundry ones as well, had any real dialogue choices like say SWTOR or TSW.

Yeah, the extent of dialogue trees seems to be flavor - you can have conversation options that are greyed out unless you have a certain class skill (or use the appropriate consumable) like religion/dungeoneering/thievery/etc... but I wouldn't call that a real skill check.

edit: you MAY be able to trigger certain events through conversation (answer the riddle wrong and you have to fight 50 demons), if that counts.

Can the characters jump or fly at all? Is there any climbing?

Wow. I tried not to care about this game but reading the reports I couldn't help growing an interest. Reading how badly they disrespected the D&D pnp roleplaying origins and nature, I think I'll make a point of not supporting this title. This coming from someone that thinks D&D has been an insult to roleplaying since 3rd Edition, but there's a limit.

You guys are really looking for game & tech systems way far too far beyond "Dude, it's an MMORPG made with the STO engine."   There's jumping, even a little platforming but that's it.

It's not D&D with some crazy never-going-to-happen engine like HeroQuest or DerekSmart: Themmoining. It's D&Diablo.  Those are your game systems.

I'm a sucker for bug mounts, but i'm not $400 sucker for bug mounts.

I guess I'll get the $60 version and pretend i'm on a bug mount. Until they sell me the bug mount standalone for 20 bucks.

I think the question probably comes from the fact that the engine is also used for Champions Online, which has a lot of different movement styles (travel powers). 

I never played any PnP D&D and have only had a mild interest in it over the years.  Which is probably why I enjoyed this so much.  I didn't hold a grudge and expected the game to match any nostalgia for the past.  I think the sticking point for a lot of people is slapping the D&D name onto something they consider not to be D&D in any way.  If you can get past that, theres a fairly entertaining game to be played.

 :heart:

Eh, while disappointed, i am not really surprised.  I'll still give it a go with clear eyes; as much as I'd love some deep player content creation there just doesn't appear to be anything like that on the horizon.  I enjoy ARPGs as much as the person, but with D3, TL2, and PoE i feel like that itch gets scratched pretty well (and I also assume this game isnt a loot-a-palooza like those games).   I actually understand what WotC is doing the 4E version of D&D, positioning it to be a better fit for easy adoption into video games.  Doesn't mean i don't wish someone will try to go un-massive, slower paced, deeper party style games.

I understand that I'm just seeing a lot of people (not really here) arguing over what D&D should be or which edition is better and which should be used.  It gives me a bit of a headache TBH.  From what I've read, many people stopped playing with anything after the 3rd edition and aren't familiar with whatever edition (4th?) this game is using.  For example, in 4E you had two basic types of Clerics: Ranged and Melee. The ranged cleric, which is in the game now, primarily casts spells from range and heals. The other cleric, the melee cleric, is primarily strength based, and uses a mace and shield in battle along with healing.  Again, I'm not really familiar with D&D but didn't the dungeon masters have the ability to say what can and can't be used or done in the PnP version?  Maybe think of Cryptic as the DM and this is how they want the game to be played? 

2nd Edition fo' life yo! 

I think its more about play style than specific mechanics.  Dungeons and Dragons, for those who have played pencil and paper, is often about long sessions with friends, turn based combat, and lots of ... roleplaying.  The most memorable moments in all of my D&D games over the years come from interesting out of combat situations.  Reducing D&D to basically an ARPG just isn't D&D anymore, at least not like most of us who play D&D think of it.  I'm not saying you can't have an ARPG that is loosely based on D&D ideas.. hell ALL RPGS are pretty much loosely based on D&D ideas, but there is just so much history wrapped up in D&D that you are bound to rub PnP players the wrong way with something like this.

It is made doubly worse by the fact that Neverwinter Nights, which was arguably the greatest D&D RPG on computer (mainly because of its AMAZING toolset and DM client), really blended the great parts of D&D with the advantages of a computer RPG.  Taking that name and marketing on that legacy makes it all the tougher pill to swallow when it isn't replicated here.  Neverwinter Nights was amazing. AMAZING.  This is at best a shell of it, trying to sell itself on the same bullet points.

Neverwinter was a MMO before it was a single player RPG.

I just think that MMO RPGs are kind of literally meant for roleplaying. In some ways, they are even better than pen and paper at that. It's a shame that a MMORPG with the D&D brand offers so little support for it (from what I heard). Almost less than what is offered by any other generic Western RPG out there.

People who played P&P D&D are a small and dwindling number. Much like the EU the nostalgic folk need to go away for the greater IP to survive.   Kids play computer games.  Those who want to RP in them will do so as the imagination is greater than the game engine anyway.


Yeah, I recall the disappointment that NWN *wasn't* an MMO reboot of the AOL game, so the reverse happening now is fun.

Noob. 1st edition forever.

Preach it brother!  (Can I keep Unearthed Arcana though?  Pleeaaaaase?)

I have always described D&D exactly the opposite of the way you just did. It's always been a game predicated on the DIKU style of kill things so you can get better gear and level up so that you can kill bigger, stronger things for better loot and level up, ad infinitum. The whole idea of min-maxing starts with the first time you throw the dice and get a low strength stat and the game tells you that you can't play a fighter with strength less than 10, but if it's higher than 14 you get a bonus to melee damage and strength related actions like bending bars and breaking down doors.

The roleplaying is a side effect of playing the game because any group of people playing a game together are going to socialize and that socializing can be harnessed to tell great stories. The alignment system helped with guiding the roleplaying, as did race and class choice, but even these things caused min-maxing non-roleplaying related choices.

As far as 4th Edition, I bought it and read it and played it once with a group. It is designed around ideas from MMOs. Character classes are categorized by Striker, Tank, Healer, and Buffer/Debuffer mechanics. Every class has at least 2 different paths that you can go down with the character. I recall that Warlock has 3 different paths depending on where you decide your power comes from. Many of the mechanics require you to play on a grid (for example, there is a charge skill that pushes the opponent back a certain number of squares and has effects on other enemies if they are within a certain number of squares). Healing is based around the idea that each player can be healed a limited number of times but that the healer has no limit on how many people he can potentially heal. They do this by having each character have healing charges that are spent when you heal them. The taunt skill is neat. It doesn't force creatures to attack the fighter, but if they don't, he gets melee advantages to hit and to dmaage against them. Almost every striker class has a mechanic where they mark a target and they get a bonus of some kind against it.

It will make a great computer game. It could make a great roleplaying game if they borrowed from the Neverwinter toolset and implemented the tools that would allow the players to create stories.

Keep it? It's required! Cavaliers are go! (avatar update is go too.)

Explaining Thac0 to players for the thousandth time destroys my will to run another 2nd edition campaign.

Thac0 was the litmus test.  People who couldn't understand how it worked were the "special" people.

When my friends and I played D&D it was 90% RPing around town, dealing with merchants, nobility, etc.  We would buy land, build houses, manage serfs, etc.  As we got more and more into the world and characters we went through the utterly tedious aspect of D&D combat less and less.  I think novice D&D games focus more on combat and a lot less on RP.

I find it very weird that people were actually confused by Thac0.  Don't get me wrong, it was definitely an odd formulation, but it certainly was never hard to use or anything, even when I was, like, eight years old.

Granted, I was definitely in the "AD&D is primarily about nonviolent encounters, not combat" crowd, so I guess maybe I'm not the best judge of combat mechanics.

Yeah, my group mostly played Palladium stuff, so Thac0 was actually the streamlined, simplified ruleset for us.

Color me mad.  All they needed was original NWN with updated graphics and more user-friendly tools, and they would've had a hit.  This?  I just... I mean it's really unremarkable and a complete waste of the IP.  Like a million other shitty twitch Korean ARPGs only this is D&D-ish.  I think.

Cryptic.  The world's best "shit on a great IP" gaming company.

In a week where Aliens: Colonial Marines launched, they aren't even close.

Also, let's not hold Forgotten Realms up as an epic, untouchable setting that NWN was the beginning and end of. FR has had plenty of terrible additions over the years and is generally looked down on as a generic high fantasy setting. FR generally gets rated under Spelljammer, Dark Sun and even Ravenholme as an interesting setting.

I'm waiting to see what the Foundry adds to this title. AFAIK, this is the first MMO to launch with player created mission content as an option.

Have you been to Istanbul, Tokyo, Beirut, and Tel Aviv?  If not, I can basically guarantee you that is what you should be saving up your spending money for, in terms of value to your happiness. This $400 Drizzt pack is literally the bulk of the cost of a round-trip ticket to Istanbul during winter, and Istanbul is frickin' amazing in winter. Not to get all weirdly serious, but when we're talking "srs business money" instead of just "lol gaming" money, these sorts of trade-offs start to present themselves.

(Yes, I just talked myself down from buying the +4 tome of supreme ability in DDO with roughly this logic)

While avoiding playing the Dawnguard DLC last night I went to the official forums and browsed around a bit.

Turns out you DO NOT have to spend $200 to play Drow.  You don't have to pay a damned penny, they'll be a F2P race.

The $200 is only buying you a unique look and the "Drow Renagade" background/ race - whatever the fuck that means.   So that $200 package is a hell of a troll to get some extra cash. 

All they need to do is block names that start with "D" and have all of the "r", "i", "z", "t" characters in them... unless you bought the $200 pack. Instant moneyhats?

Bloodworth's was two weeks ago.

Surprise!  New Meta!

Yeah the $200 actually loses value in my opinion with all of the blatant Drizzt crap. I think all the renegade thing gets you is maybe some different racial passives and some tatoos.

I'm not paying $200 for a tattoo unless it's real.

But a robe that creates useless junk when invoked sounds very useful to me.  :why_so_serious:

You can get that in the $60 version too....

2nd beta weekend starts at noon PST today (GMT -8) 

The Control Wizard isn't much fun to play IMO.  It feels very weak and underpowered.  The class seems to take a lot of damage while not dealing out enough to compensate for it. 

It feels like a budget GW2.  I like a world that tries to copy GW2 rather than WoW.  Now if we can just work on improving the product rather than copying it...

The only reason I'm remotely interested in this title is because of the Foundry, which is looking to be a pretty good user-generated content system. As a veteran of the COH Mission Architect (not to mention MUD builder way-back-when), I'm a sucker for stuff like this!

I don't like ARPGs much and never played Tera, but apparently the gameplay is sort of similar. It DOES suffer a bit from consolitis (I know, right), and I don't know why they think it's such a great idea to root players during each and every ability animation... yes, even the basic 'autoattack' ones.

How high have you gotten?  I only took one to 5 and had the same concerns but figured it would be different as you leveled.

Been playing the guardian fighter this weekend.  I think I have a hang of blocking now.  I think my initial problem was after playing a cleric I thought I was failing by having to drink so many potions.  Guess not!

I got the Control Wizard to 10 or 11.  It doesn't get much better than it was at 5.  And yeah, I find myself drinking many more potions than I was with the Devoted Cleric.

It doesn't even feel like that. It feels like a really half assed attempt at actiony combat without being actiony, with extremely limited skills and builds, and nothing unique about it.

I'm not sure how this thing ended up as is. I was hoping for another DDO (which was actually pretty fun). but this doesn't seem to try to be better than anyone at anything.

"How can we use this Champions Online engine for another game?"

"Well, that Neverwinter franchise was built on modding and user created worlds, maybe we can jam our builder into that IP"

"Ok, good enough"

I'm suffering terrible horizontal tearing when I turn or move. It's disorienting and distracting. I've never seen anything like it before - is anyone else seeing it? (I have a 2GB Radeon HD 6950 and run in 1920x1200.)

I haven't had that happen but my overall performance has dropped a lot since the last beta weekend.

No idea if there's an option ingame, but if your gpu software allows it you can try forcing vsync through the control panel.

Pretty much. Sad thing is, the fact that it has an (improved) Foundry is a big enough draw for me by itself... though having actually played the game a bit this weekend chipped away at that draw. Them making the same damn mistakes COH did with the MA and STO did with the Foundry rating / browsing / search interface doesn't bode well, either. (protip: relying on a 5-star rating system does not work when there are 600000 player-made quests. Neither does selecting a handful of lucky stories every month or so.)

The Foundry beta should start Soon™ (they were taking applications last weekend), and if I get in, I'll be able to make up my mind once and for all.

There's absolutely no reason why it can't. Unfortunately, 99% of the time any online rating system fails to normalize the results based on expected variance.

Of course, I've tried to convince a number of sites to use such a system. It'd be a one-afternoon fix, and would offer far better and more fair ratings, but nobody ever listens.

I don't see the GW comparison, mainly because I hate GW and find it tedious and boring as fuck.  Tastes vary.

As for the limited skills thing, I don't know 4th ed well enough to blame that or the game designers.  Doesn't feel bad to me either way.  My only gripe is they throw a lot of AOE mobs at you but not enough AOE abilities.   

Oh, and keeping mobs in front of you as a fighter is a bitch.  They like to surround so your blocking is nullified.

Well... I admit I'm no statistician, but how does normalizing ratings solve problems like
- most of the content being crap, but everyone having a different opinion on what 'crap' means (is Salvatore a hack or the greatest writer ever?)
- players of at least 4 fundamentally different playstyles trying to grade really different content using an 'objective' 5-star system -- people who look for story-heavy missions will downvote hack-and-slash missions, people who look for farming missions will downvote everything that gets in their way, etc
- players only playing the first 200 or so quests that are displayed in the UI, and ignoring everything else, causing a positive feedback loop with those same quests getting lots of momentum and even more plays / ratings as time goes on
- authors late to the party needing to get eleventy billion 5-star votes to even have a chance of getting noticed
- anyone whose quest falls below a 5-star average may as well forget about it ever getting played again
- voting cliques (either mass-1 or mass-5 votes)... ok, I can sort of see where it'd help here.

There are a lot more problems, these were just off the top of my head... there were some proposed solutions in the COH Mission Architect community over the years, but they were never implemented because Paragon Studios was short on manpower and had to focus on things that made a more tangible profit instead.

IMO what needs to happen is to allow players to find the content they specifically want via tagging, automatically generated "if you liked this, you may like" recommendation lists, sharable favorites lists, weighted ratings, maybe even personal ranking, etcetera... these all exist in other platforms like Amazon. As it is, the search interface is borderline useless in NW, just as it was in STO and COH; in fact, the Cryptic COO flat-out admits this in a GDC talk.


edit: I definitely agree with you that this is an area that's basically ignored... mostly because its effects are fuzzy long-term stuff, and Foundry questions like "can I make pvp maps" and "can I give custom loot as quest rewards" interest a far greater portion of the player- and author-base. Also, don't take my skepticism the wrong way -- I just don't believe in a silver-bullet solution, 'sall. In fact, there's a high probability I'll mention rating normalization as part of that mega-post I'm preparing on the subject to unleash on the Foundry forums if/when I get in the beta  :why_so_serious:

Also the idea that a game that is coming out this close time-wise to GW2 somehow had time to copy it is pretty  :uhrr:.

The only GW2ish thing I saw was the active dodge/stamina thingy, and I'm 99% sure that's not a GW2 thing.

STO had it at ship.

I try my hardest not to remember what STO had at ship in ground combat <3 (actually, I liked it. Pirates of the Burning Sea however...)

I thought you were going to make a pun with the entire "STO" and "ship" thing... crisis averted.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, pertaining to the earlier discussion about rating user-created content, I finally posted my mad bomber manifestodebate piece on the NW forums about the (many) problems with it along with some possible solutions. If anyone has an interest in this topic (unlikely) or is really bored (more likely), check it out here (http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?82731-Getting-good-content-to-players-in-the-Foundry-challenges-and-solutions-(long))

url=http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?82881-Changes-coming-to-the-Control-Wizard!&p=1237861#post1237861]Control Wizard changes coming: [/url]

I read your, um, lengthy  :oh_i_see: posts and i think your points are quite solid. The creation stuff is really my only interest in this game, so i will be very interested to see how your points are addressed, as well as the general "ingredients" of the toolset itself to see what different mission types, reward levels, etc can actually be created well.  Having categories for "story heavy" vs "farm" may not matter much if the story type has inferior tools to work with....
Hopefully some of the folks here are int he foundry beta and get give us the reality of it soon.

Yeah.. there's still time until release. I still believe those problems MAY be fixed, but my cynical side tells me they won't. After all, it's putting effort/resources on a problem that doesn't directly affect Cryptic's bottom line, considering that most of the playerbase is probably going to be content just playing the 20 top-rated stories + the weekly pick anyway. The authors... pff, who cares about those guys making content in our game for free, anyway?! I hope to be proven wrong, though.

As for the beta, AFAIK they only let in a really small sample of people in so far -- some NWN1-2 vets, some STO Foundry vets, and some of the more vocal community members (like the NOCS folks). Maybe there'll be another invite wave later?

I still haven't had time to read the wall o'text, but it seems to me that they need two things I've seen in other search systems. You probably either discussed these, or discussed why they wouldn't work.

Tagging: I want to search for a Story or Puzzle based mission in an Urban setting involving Halflings that's suited for Rogues. I should be able to flag or checkboxes or search for those boldfaced terms.

Reviewer weighting: The greater the proportion of "extreme" reviews (1 and 5 star) that a reviewer hands out, the less their reviews count for in the average.

Yep, both of those are included... imo tagging is the most crucial one (there should both be author-specified and automatically-generated tags).

I also suggested reviewer weighting, though I figured it'd be an Amazon-esque system -- all of your reviews are public, and there is a "x out of y people found this helpful. Did you find this helpful? y/n" box next to each of them. This 'helpfulness' rating both adjusts the weight of  the review, and the weight of ALL your reviews. Of course there needs to be a way to deal with alt accounts used to pad votes and downvote good reviews / upvote bad reviews, since it's a f2p game...

More beta keys available from MMORPG.com for this weekend's beta.  Only about 7k left so get them fast if you're interested.

http://www.mmorpg.com/giveaways.cfm/offer/428/Neverwinter-Beta-Weekend-3-Key-Giveaway.html

So I've been writing this post as I tool around with this on a Rogue, about five hours in at this point. Some impressions as I came across them:

Character creation is nice, if a lot more limited compared to what I'm used to from other Cryptic games. The class setup is a little weird though. Are there going to be more D&D classes like Bard and Ranger, or are we going to be stuck with 1-2 variations of the generic Fighter, Mage, Cleric, and Rogue? The website seems to have no info at all about this. The stat "rolling" feels largely superfluous and pointless, as it's obviously just cycling through a list of stat matrices. Speaking of superfluous and pointless, the background/deity selections are kind of head-scratcers. I'm not even sure if it's possible for other players to see what you picked.

The UI feels a bit awkward for some reason; I can't quite put my finger on why though. Being stuck in STO's "shooter mode" camera is interesting, as is the lack of any sort of tab targeting.

Mmmmboy, gotta love that Z-tier Cryptic voice acting. Three hours in: I still have yet to be arsed to read a single bit of quest text.

I'm a Rogue that can't stealth until level 10? And then for only five seconds at a time? That's kind of weird. Being limited to daggers and forced into dual-wielding is also a big letdown.

Combat is fun. Really  fun. A lot more fun than I was expecting. Attacking is responsive, and the ability animations are pretty slick. You feel powerful from the get-go at level 1, and you just feel even stronger as you level, which is something a lot of MMOs these days don't seem to have.

Cryptic apparently still doesn't understand this whole "level design" thing, since the game has thus far operated solely on the old Champions/STO model of "here's a long twisty hallway full of enemies" that was boring then and is still boring now. I sincerely hope that this is something that lessens as you level up.

Wowee, that's a lot of stuff on that cash shop. And in the surprise of the year, it's all pretty expensive. I can only imagine how terrible the grind to get Astral Diamonds will be, since since you need them to buy essentially everything that's not the most basic of items.

Hm. No "dressing room" window for new equipment. There's a "fashion" tab, but it seems to just be for social clothing; you can't even see your weapons with it on. There appears to be a WoW-style transmogrify system for changing the look of normal adventuring gear, but shock of shocks, it uses astral diamonds to do so.

I've got a crafting inventory full of crafting stuff, and I have no idea what to do with any of it. From what I've been seeing and have been told, it's something you can't even begin doing until level 20, not that there's been anywhere in game to learn this. Documentation in general has never been one of Cryptic's strong suits, and it's just as bad here as in their other games.


All in all? It's okay. The combat is excellent and the Foundry stuff has a ton of potential. Everything else it pretty average Cryptic: shitty documentation, bargain-basement writing and voice acting, and world building with the depth of a petri dish. The flat-out worst thing? Being stuck with two character slots until you shell out $5. That flat-out murders much of the game's replayability.

$5 kills the game? Forget the Starbucks reference. People will gladly pay that for an extra rocket in Coasterville. MMO players like to bitch they'd never pay fees for "what used to be standard". But they will.

I kinda wanted to see this game today at PAX, but not enough to stand on line :-)

There's drops for a few more classes, like Warlock, that have shown up in the beta weekends.  You're right that they're playing whatever is out there pretty close to the vest, though. 

There's a "Nature" dungeon scavenging skill which leads me to believe that Druids or at least Rangers will be in at some point. None of the classes I've seen have it as a base skill.

The voice acting is truly, truly horrid.  I've heard better dwarf voices with bad 'Scot' accents on Youtube videos by guys just trying to have a laugh.

The daggers and stealth thing I think is a 4ed thing.  I don't know enough about the rules to say for certain, though, but you couldn't sneak 100% of the time in D&D so I'm glad they haven't gone with the MMO "Stealth" model here.  No matter how much bitching I see from kids who've come to understand "Rogues = invisible pwn machines" over the last 13  years.

I don't mind the non-constant stealth (even though nearly every D&D game in the past 15 years has used a stealth-until-you-fail-a-check model) as much as the weapon limitations.

They will have as many of the classes from 4E D&D that they can get people to pay to unlock, have no fear about that.

I got in the Foundry beta earlier this week. That means it's time to hold the devs' feet to the fire about the issues I described in the megapost (http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?82731-Getting-good-content-to-players-in-the-Foundry-challenges-and-solutions-(long)). Taking bets on how long it takes before I'm booted out! :why_so_serious:

(There's an odd half-NDA for the Foundry beta, since the content made by the people in it is actually pushed to the live servers, and people in the beta get a special 'Silverstar' title on the forums... so from one side it looks like Cryptic is actively advertising it. However, the stuff you'd expect to be under NDA in a closed test still is.)

4E was designed for games like this so I'm quite interested in seeing how it turns out.  Can't be arsed to join the beta though.  Thanks for the lengthy writeups, keep 'em coming. 

I'm not outraged at paying $5 for a character slot.  As long as the game lets me and my distant friends group and adventure in a fun, casual style. 

So I grabbed a key and have been messing around and unsurprisingly, this is not the game im looking for.  It's SO actiony and combat only oriented that i feel like im playing an arcade game that happens to have rpg trappings.  It strikes me almost like a parody of D&D - my two handed fighter launches corpses in spinning circle with his 6 foot long sword, from the moment he recovered from his shipwreck.  His first encounter power makes him spin like a literal top for like 7 seconds.  Im sure it only gets more ridiculous and over the top from there.  Fantasy superhero MMO?  Fight small group, progress down hallway, fight another small group, click glowy things as "interaction", follow glowing path...  Why do we even need a glowing path in a dungeon that literally has no branches or side exploration you could even try if you wanted?

I want to say it's a bad game but I think it's mainly just me that doesn't like what it's trying to do.  I knew going in it wasn't going to be what i had hoped for in a Neverwinter titled game with content creation.  I still want to play around with the foundry, and at least it's free to play but ugh, the game primarily just makes me feel ... old. :)

(and am i nuts or do the foundry mission search not actually tell you what level a mission is intended for?  I know you can specific in the search tool at the top, but it's no where in the mission descriptions.  Auto tuned encounters make that meaningless?)
 

Foundry missions scale to level, yeah. (btw, my foundry mission currently in development is nonlinear... for better or worse :grin:)

And I agree with ya about the gameplay - this is D&Diablo, not NWN3. Still has some promise, though...

It's not even D&Diablo. That might actually be somewhat fun.  This abomination is what happens when someone tries to rip off redo DDO for the facebook crowd. 

It probably doesn't help that I'm not the biggest fan of the 4th edition ruleset, and I've recently been replaying Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, and the real Neverwinter Nights.

Keys gone.

I played this at PAX. They game me a lvl 27-ish rogue/thief and you get to run through this one missions/dungeon/quest thing solo. It was fun. I don't know what, if anything, it has to do with the Neverwinter Nights I played on my computer a bunch of years ago but that's okay. I considered it more of a hack'n'slash Diablo anyways.

The UI was pretty trash. It never got in the way made things difficult for me, but on the monitors they had running here in Boston it was all scrunched up in a weird bundle on the middlebottom of the screen. Why? Since it's an action RPG, I found myself wishing they had my health/stamina on my crosshairs, with something nearby telling me when my cooldowns were up.

I'm intrigued that people are liking the combat, to me it looked like a major weakness beyond that it just didn't fit with NWN/DnD at all. Hope to hear from more people who have enjoyed/played some of the other action combat games out currently (a compare and contrast to Vindictus or Tera would be interesting for example).

Well, I didn't like it as much as GW2 combat, if that counts. I think the biggest problem is that you can't use dodges to break out of the (clunky and sometimes overly long for a basic attack) animations and everything roots you, so even just choosing to LMB-attack an enemy who then immediately opens up with a "get out of this area" circle means that you'll probably be eating his telegraphed attack if you have any latency at all, no matter how hard you're pushing the dodge or move buttons.

The devs said that the rooting thing is deliberate, to make combat more weighty. I'm not convinced...

Played this beta weekend. Very MMO-lite but closer to WoW than Diablo really. Only got to level 11 or so on a couple of characters but the combat rarely involved groups of more than 5 mobs. THe UI seems OK, overall it felt quite polished for a beta.

The skills & spells are closer to Diablo's system than a full-on WoW clones, you choose a small number of abilities to use from a pool that grows as you level. Only having 3 of what they call Encounter Abilities felt a bit restricting, for instance as a Cleric I had to choose 3 out of AOE damage, self+other HoT, direct damage nuke and snare+damage. Really wanted all 4 since frequently all 3 of the ones I was using were on cooldown. Still, fast paced and very actiony combat system. Nothing whatsoever to do with D&D ofc.

Lot more fun with a friend than solo!

Kind of strange that any D&D module made could be played by both a level 1 and level 60 with no impact other than the toughness of the enemies for combat, but I guess the random loot will be level appropriate... :oh_i_see:
I will say after playing more this weekend, that i do retain some small hope that the building tools will improve the game for me at least.  Played several foundry missions that were pretty well done for this early state and i can see the potential IF they also release the lockdowns in the foundry too. Some missions the author included notes as to his plans for things that weren't quite working yet so i got to see some decent trap usage, more atmosphere affects and lighting, multi layered levels, and some decent plot sequencing affecting dialogue progression, item states and such.  One author noted you cant yet put fully function shops, or item finds, or special loot but explained his plans for them which would have improved his module.  I just dont know how much freedom authors truly will get when it comes to making actually unique items and enemies (not just naming and graphics but abilities and such), affecting the player's character in some way, or awarding exp/gold/stuff for completing a task.  Since the base game is just action combat with enemies exploding into random loot, my fear is cryptic will not let folks truly do that stuff other than cosmetically to maintain some pie in the sky "balance" goal.  If every fight, loot, exp reward is just auto scaled and randomized by your level, i doubt it will hold my interest for long.  Oh yeah, and if you cant turn off the "all items that are interactive sparkle" than you basically leave authors having to make a bunch of extra things interactive just to make you look for the ones that matter, which will make a simple investigation section look like a fairy princess explosion...  :grin:

It has nothing at all to do with it.  It's a Forgotten Realms setting and they chose Neverwinter because it's one of the more recognizable cities along the coast.  It's set 100 years in the future from what people consider "modern" Forgotten Realms.  (Unless 4th ed is placed there now. I gave up buying geek books I don't use so I haven't seen the FR manual for 4ed)   Mystra is dead, causing some sort of 'spellplague' and (hopefully) the usual cast of Heroes & Villains seem to be dead and buried.


If you like complex systems, give this a pass. It's simple and mindless but I find it fun. Things have gotten too complex for me to fuck with over the years. It's a nice hop-in and hop-out straight-forward beat-em-up.  It reminds me of old school arcade combat more than a modern RPG button-masher. There's no complex synergies or 'builds' or any of the nonsense that made GW1 unfulfilling to me because I couldn't put the time in to learn it.

You get 7 skills, with a cache of maybe 10-12 so you can swap-out a few in each category. That's it.  The most complex synergy I had was "shout to knock-back THEN charge for damage" on my 2hd warrior.

It's not aiming to be the next WoW, GW or even TSW.  It's a simple microtrans game put out by Perfect World.  Don't look for it to be any more complex than STO or Perfect World itself.  Maybe it'll scratch an itch, maybe not.  It fulfills my need without a sub, so I'm happy with it.

Ed:

Xilren - I'll save you the time and heartache. This is not the game you're looking for.  I doubt it's going to be that in any way.   Foundry is there for stories and alternate leveling missions, not loot.  It's less about "Balance" and more about, "If we let folks determine what loot is in them nobody's going to run anything but the monty hauls and then how will we make our money?"  It's called Neverwinter because the name is recognizable, not because it has any relation to the NWN game.   It's as connected to that as NWN was to the AOL game.

BTW, is this still a rumour?  :grin:

That's the gist of 4e Forgotten Realms in general. As far as I know, the Usual Suspects like Drizzt and Elminster are still around and kicking, but have largely been contrivanced out of the picture.

I don't think a lot of people really liked 4e FR that much, largely due to the weird hoops WotC had to jump through to get the world setting to conform to the new base rules, like the Spellplague explaining how spellcasters suddenly forgot 80% of their repertoire, and the somewhat tacked-on stuff involving the dragon dudes and the nu-tieflings.

Now that "Next" is coming out, people all of a sudden are liking 4e.   :oh_i_see:   Expect OSR 4e very soon.

Another fucking ruleset?  Didn't 4th ed just come out? 

Shit.. 2008?  Am I really that goddamn old that it seems like its brand new?

Fuck, I am.  The 3rd Ed books I bought are 13 years old now. 

 :geezer:

I'm not.  4E blows blows blows.  I've got the current 5E playtest and it's much better.

I ahve not played the 5E materials yet, but they do seem good.   A lot more like 3E than 4E.

I've playtested it a little, it is more 3rd than 4th.  But I'd still prefer to just play 3.5 I think, or Pathfinder.    If you imagine them iterating on 3rd, and pretend 4th never happened, it is closer to what 5th is.

Open Beta/ release announced. April 25th for Founders, 30th for the non-paying rabble.  If you haven't gotten a key and want to check it out that'll be the date you can do so.

Looks like there's another beta weekend (Apr 12-14)... this time only for suckersfounders who bought the $60 or $200 packs. Like me.  :why_so_serious:

Also, shameless plug: my first foundry quest should be available if anyone wants to take a look. Name is "March of the Destroyer", or you can find it by searching for @zaphtastic (don't ask). Feel free to put random f13 injokes on the ingame review form!

So, they doing anything about foundry mission sorting suggested in your megapost or they doing the same thing they did with CoH? I made like four arcs in CoH but the huge number of missions and the fact no one would ever see mine was a real discouragement to making more. I did enjoy the odd compliment or complaint I got through the 'leave a message'  function.

Yeah but who cares about beta weekend. Servers getting wiped so I'll check-out some of the new features, take a look at your foundry quest and that'll be it for me until early launch.  I hate replaying zones these days, which is killing my altaholisim.

I'll just say that I got in the Foundry alpha and rattled the cage a bit through all the channels I could find. Whether that'll have any effect... :nda:. I'll post my take on the whole mess after open beta starts and NDA drops (assuming the alpha NDA does drop eventually, that is).

edit re COH: your experience matches mine. I got lucky in that I won an official architect contest (they were holding one of them every year), and that got one of my arcs the coveted Dev's Choice status... which was crazy, it got like 620 plays in 2 years! But my other arcs didn't relaly get any plays except for ones I specifically solicited (friends, guildies, other authors, MA community, "MA arc club" where we played each others' arcs in a quid-pro-quo setup, etc). This was the fate of pretty much any arc not made in 2009.

Didn't try the Foundry mission but I like the changes to powers and the tradeskill system.

Early start is today, anyone in?

I'm in... they gave all of us Foundry beta testers the full 5-day headstart. If anyone else is playing, my handle is @zaphtastic

What are the restrictions on the free version?

I'll be in tonight.  Handle is @merusk


None. It's the first US game I know of PWI doing with no sub-base. You can get 'everything' (except stuff from the Zen store) in game - eventually. You just grind hard enough for Astral Diamonds (the in-game mega-currency, similar to Dilithium in STO.)

Really, the games biggest economic problem is 3 currencies. Zen, Astral Diamonds, Gold. The AH uses ADs, not gold, so just drop the gold currency altogether as it's useless.

I'm on the Dragon server.  Handle is @foshizzlle (yes I know its stupid :oh_i_see:).

Looks like they have an armory type thing.  It displays character information and even allows you to craft, use the AH and read/send mail while not in game. Nice.

https://gateway.playneverwinter.com/#/characterselect

Yep, they announced that in the last beta.

Apparently since I didn't spend $200 I don't get to play until Saturday. Ah well.

Who... who in hell really spent 200?!  :ye_gods:

To play as Drizz't.  Also, some guy spent enough ON TOP OF the premium Founders Pack to craft his way to 60 already.

That must have been expensive as fuck. :ye_gods:  There's already more than a few poop sockers that are now 60.  I'm only at 22 so far I thought I was pushing it, at least for me.

So wait, only the 200$ people could enter before today? Ginaz, I am looking at you...

Power leveling in a Cryptic game seems like an odd choice.  Their leveling content is usually not bad in my experience, but it is usually not particularly repeatable, and the end game is usually limited at launch.  Crash through it all during headstart without really bothering to enjoy what good stuff is there and I can see a whole of lot upset people who spent 100s on the game feeling like they've got nothing to do after the first two weeks.

I didn't play $200 and I could play before then, since they let all Foundry beta players in for the 5-day headstart (probably so we could make sure our quests were working OK for launch). I think they also gave alpha players the 5-day headstart, but I'm not sure.

If they rush through and get to 60 in the 1st day or two and then start bitching about having nothing to do, they can go and fuck themselves.  MMOs would be a better place if those type of people never played.

I did.  Just like when I bought TSW lifetime, I won a few hundred dollars at the casino a couple months ago around the same time I started to get interested in this game.  I don't drink, smoke, use drugs and rarely gamble so I spend my money on stuff I like.  And in case you haven't guessed,  I'm not married and have no children, either.

The 60 dollar people went in today also.

so...this thing any good?

(BALEETED)

From the outside looking in and from playing it and watching it played during beta. Not even close. Its horribly generic and nothing special in the combat department and the character creation is quite lackluster. Feels like a shitty cash grab with nothing actually to do with the NWN name.

Good enough for me, thanks for saving me some $$

For what it's worth, I thought NWO's combat was very very good; better than TERA's by a long shot.

Everything else, however, is pretty shit.

This, with the note that the Foundry is actually pretty darn impressive. It's basically near-NWN levels of modding in a MMO (minus scripting and custom assets, of course). Too bad it's sorta wasted on an otherwise-unimpressive f2p ARPG.

It's F2P. You don't have to spend anything to test it out in a few days time.

Yeah, just download it and give it a try on Tuesday.   I enjoy it but I'm not looking for some deep hour-sucking diversion anymore.  MMOs enjoy being 'complex' just to suck time and I'm done with that.

I agree.  And they end up being not that complex anyway, just fucking annoying.

God we're old.

Can you elaborate on that?

It's more of a "gut feeling" thing I guess. I really didn't like how TERA's melee combat worked, which was basically a sheet of hotkeys with click-to-attack. I didn't like having to constantly juggle a dozen abilities while also having to engage in split-second dodging maneuvers. I liked NWO's smaller active skillset and MOBA-style key setup a lot.

I dunno, it just flowed better for me.

How "obtrusive" is the cash shop stuff?  Like, is there an advertisement on basically every aspect of the interface?

From what I recall, it's no Turbine game, but it definitely doesn't let you forget it's there.

About half the vendors in the game only accept dilithium questionite astral diamonds, though. I think there are some who only accept Zen, but I can't remember.

Its not as obtrusive as, say, SWTOR with the cartel coin thing prominently displayed in front of you at all times but there are buttons in the UI that take you directly to the cash shop.  You can buy astral diamonds for zen (RL cash bought currency ie cartel coins) and vice versa, similar to what GW2 has in place.

I find it more intrusive than STO, but less so than LotRO if you're not a subber/lifer. My primary annoyance is that more than half the vendors trade in alternate currencies - astral diamonds, trade bars, symbols, etc.

You remember how ugly LotRO's currency system got after a few years? Two or three currencies added for every zone, plus at least one currency for each festival? They're launching with that level of mess.

Yeah, the currency system can be confusing.  Gold is pretty much useless it seems.

Currencies:
* Gold - good for buying "Kits" that you can use to loot off-class Crafting nodes and Crafting basics as well as some white-quality gear, companions and mounts.
* Astral Diamonds - Exclusive Auction House Currency, also good for some minor armors, Enchants, Companion Runestones, ID scrolls, & Teleport scrolls
* Seals - Different types for each gear tier, Lion, Pegasus and I don't know what's after that.  Basically it's the Valor tokens of old WoW
* Trade Bars - Only recently saw these, look like it's good for Purple gear at max level
* Zen - PWI's usual cash shop surrogate currency.

It's overly cumbersome, to be sure.  All you really NEED to worry about are AD and Zen, though.   Right now I'd invest in $50 worth of Zen, sell 1-2,000 of it for AD and use the rest to expand your bank and buy some tradeskill boosters.   Zen is converting into AD at 1 for 500 right now as Founders look for something to spend their AD on and for whatever reason don't seem to want to put more cash in for the zen store stuff.  That's the max the store will let you sell it for so it's bound to go down, letting you convert that 1mil AD in to zen for 200-300 diamonds.  Congrats, you profited.

Just don't fall for the key trap, same as in STO.

Is there animation canceling and proper dodging? Because if there is i might play this.

Basically i really want to play a game which plays like League of Legends except is a long play RPG, really hard to find though.

Dear Neverwinter,

Thanks for sending me in-game mails telling me about new things I can do as I level up.

Please stop spamming the same messages to my real-world email as well.

Love,
Me

As an aside you can shrink and move SWTOR's store thing with ui customization to the point of making it essentially invisible.

Yeah, but you still get the "IF YOU WERE A SUBBER, YOU WOULD GET REST XP HERE, BUT YOU AREN'T A SUBBER, SO YOU'RE NOT GETTING ANYTHING. HA HA HA" type messages on your screen all the time...

Ah well, I don't see that stuff.  :grin:

It's fairly horrendous.

I think I saw a bit of it with the SWTOR expansion's early release. For whatever reason my preorder didn't process in time, so I had constant "CONGRATS ON LEVELING! YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY THE EXPANSION!" messages living under my chat window for the weekend.

For Neverwinter, it's just currency litter all over the place for no reason. Combined with how much I loathe the Zen store functionality (buy Zen, then move Zen to a game, then use it in that game. Wait, why isn't it just a fucking wallet and I can spend my Zen in whatever game I want without having to move it to that game? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MAKING A USABLE INTERFACE?!

Ahh, is it something like the Secret World combat then? (i.e. few selectable abilities at the time and a less strict "dodge" system based on positioning outside of aoe attacks)

I suppose I should just download it and find out myself, but trying to find excuse to skip registration on yet another company web site :why_so_serious:

Thanks for this, you saved me a download. I loved TERA's melee, and hate MOBAs and limited skill selections.

I watched a video of the game and it didn't look bad, but the currency thing is :uhrr:.

This F2P thing sucks. I kinda like the base game for the box purchase, cash shop for dressup/grind-skipping/major content model if this is where we have to go.

They don't let you transfer currencies around between games so you can't grind a bazillion whotsits in game "A" then sell them off for a ton of zen and transfer it to game "B" cutting them out of the market.  It keeps Zen from sloshing around accruing under one game's umbrella and then breaking the bank of a new game while ensuring PWI always has a market for it.

The expression only themselves to blame comes to mind.
Ppl who do this in MMO's should get an ingame email on hitting max level saying congrats on being a moron.

I've made a total of 5 characters so far (5 slots) and got them to at least 11 so they can all do the invocation at the alter in Protectors Enclave every hour.  Made about 15k in the past day or so just by doing this and one of my characters even gained a level from the xp he gained. :awesome_for_real:  I log out my all alts at the alter to make it easier to get the astral diamonds.  If I get ambitious I might even do the dailys on each of them for the 1000 ADs for every one I complete.  My main character has already made over 75k ADs just from invoking and the dailys.

I'm at 450k from selling useless greens and 4lockboxes on the AH.

Just sayin.

Open beta has started. And the login system has failed. The launcher just shows a white box and nobody can actually log in.

How many times do we have to go round this loop before someone works out how to massively scale up capacity for the launch periods of MMOs?

I'm looking forward to the MMO that'll give all the people who tried to log in on day 1 a pair of actual in-game clown shoes as a gift.

About the only valid programming/testing reason to have an open beta anymore is to see if your systems can handle the load.  You can't yell at them for being unable to handle that many connections in beta, wait for launch day when it will inevitably happen again.

Open beta? I was under the mistaken assumption that the game had released today. Bummer.

If you release you get complaints that there's only x amount of content and your game sucks.  "Beta" means your fans can fling that back against any attacks from that and a few other fronts.

MWO still lists itself in "open beta" and World of Tanks did for a good long while as well.

Open Beta is release in truth now, not just because us cranky old people said it was shaping-up that way.

Yeah, it's "open beta" to buy themselves a couple months of leeway with the average MMO tourist with how half-assed most of the game is.

Except for f2p games open beta is launch day. No wipes now remember?

A couple of months is still a couple of months.
The tourists will be gone in 2 months max no matter what they call it and I'm sure they are aware of that.

In news that should surprise nobody considering their login servers were down for hours, the game is pretty much unplayably laggy.

Heard in general chat. I guess not playing didnt occur to him.

So is the game half-assed then? I didn't read much about it. I watched a couple of videos. It looks like there are just a small number of race/class combinations available?

They pissed me off already. This morning I created an account with the display name of numtini. Now they tell me I have to link that account to my account and when I go to do so, it tells me my display name (numtini) is taken. This has to be some strange vestige of an old Cryptic beta account, but fucked if I know how to fix it--none of my other email addresses work on the Perfectworld site.

European launch is plagued with login and patcher issues. Eventually going to the forum gets you a solution to start the game, but I swear I haven't seen this much lag in a game since my attempt to play Lineage 2 beta on a Korean server sometimes in 2002. Looking forward to try it, but it's just not possible at the moment.

EDIT: There's no European servers or client and I was being dumb. I wonder if the terrible lag I am having is just for those connecting from Europe, or is it hitting everybody.

I installed and poked around a little but haven't actually played yet.  I looks like Dwarf, Human, Halfling, Elf, Tiefling, Half-Elf are available for races.  For classes they had Cleric, Control Wizard, Protection Fighter (or something), Berserker Fighter (or something), Rogue and I think some kind of more offensive oriented mage.  I don't remember all the names of the classes obviously.   I think there are 5 or 6.  If I had to guess they will fill out classes and races as things for their "Zen Store" (RMT).

I only had two character slots for free though, so that kind of sucks.  

I plan on actually playing some tonight, I'll write up my impressions of the gameplay.  I anticipate the game being fairly unremarkable and not having any long term appeal, but I enjoyed a bit of Champions, and Star Trek Online isn't the worst but neither captured my interest long term.  I expect something similar out of this - if I can get a bit of fun out of this without any monetary investment, that'll be good enough for me.

I firmly believe that the design docs for the Cryptic+PWE account management tools consist of a pixelated trollface.jpg and nothing else.

Let me just say there's a reason my NW handle is @zaphtastic instead of @zaphir (like it is in every other game, including Champs). There's no way to change it either  :why_so_serious:

Looks like I missed something and there's no servers other than the NA ones. I am on Mindflayer, is anyone else there and having lag issues or is it just me for connecting from another continent?

Apparently their load balancing is broken, so it's causing crippling lag and rubberbanding in a lot of instances. The servers went down about 15 minutes ago, presumably to fix it.

And upon looking at their forums (to find out when the servers will be back up; naturally there's no info about that), I was entirely unsurprised to see a lot of "IT'S BETA, GIVE IT TIME" with a bunch of snarky links to the Wikipedia article on "Beta".

Just because they call it beta doesn't mean that it is.  It's a live and launched game.  Period.

Probably a smart move to call the first couple of days of launch "beta".

I played around with this and it seems to be very simple in the sense that it's all about getting quests and going into instances. No emergent gameplay, very little scope for exploration that I could see in my brief playthrough.

But there were some nice elements. Some of the spells have interesting graphic effects. My control mage had a freezing ray which caused damage and also coated an opponent with ice, starting with their feet, slowing down their movement. The ice becomes thicker and rises up their body if you keep the ray on them, until eventually they are frozen solid and can't move at all for a second or two.

Some of your opponents telegraph their moves, either through circles on the ground telling you were to avoid or sometimes simply through their animations, such as a long swing with a giant sword, giving you a chance to get out the way.

While gameplay wasn't complex, it seemed fairly slick. The game has high production values. Personally I did think the voice acting was terrible but that's probably just a personal preference.

All you snarky ppl bitching about them calling this Beta, where the fuck have you been the last 4 years. This has been standard practice in F2P games since like forever. Alods and Rune of Magic both did this and they launched years ago so it's not like this is some new and surprising thing unless you've been living under a rock.

I assume it is not a coincidence that it starts exactly as dungeons and dragons online did.

And Tera and a dozen other games.

Haha, my queue position starter at 5k went down to 4k in like ten minutes then it shot up to 10k. 

People who paid $200 for the Hero pack get to jump the queue and it's after 5pm EST and CST so they're home from work.  Your number will creep higher as, MTN and PST folks also get home.


It's an enjoyable diversion as it's F2P. Don't go looking for the sub experience as you all are so eager to compare it to.

No, it's a bug.  Restarting the queue gets you back to around 5k, then it shoots up again after a minute.

Yea, logged in, was at 7k, went down 6.something k and then shot up to 31k.  Looks like this one will have to wait until later in the week.

The 31k is a visual bug. Eventually you keep moving in the real queue.

You know, in a game with no box price and no sub I think it's silly to QQ about things like lag. You're not exactly out money. That said, I haven't downloaded it yet because I don't want to mess with the lag.

Perhaps the game has actually 3 separate queues and is moving players between them :grin:

The lag problem is fixed now. It was just unplayable before, my character was swigning with a sword but the animation started two seconds after my input and the weapon actually appeared in its hands about 4 seconds after that,

For anyone who is interested in messing around with The Foundry, you can access it from the character select page and load into it and mess around even without waiting for a queue.  I did it for a bit.  As someone who did a LOT with the NWN toolset, this is very very limited, but it might be possible to do a fair amount too once I get the hang of it.  The dialog tree stuff actually looks fairly robust, so it might be possible to do some interest non-combat stuff.

IIRC, Perfect World is the one that has problems if you used a gmail account with periods in it. The site only works if you strip the periods out and try it.

When trying to get my STO account working again a while back I had to fight with their damned site for hours to get the thing working again.

I never could get access to my old STO account even after half a dozen emails to their support.

Yes, the toolset is very powerful. But, like I said, don't expect your creations to actually get played if the ingame browser and rating system stay as they are right now.

I played your Foundry mission and subscribed to...you...or however its done.  I liked it.  Only complaint would be that there was a lot of "dead space".  Lots of walking before getting to the action.

Hey, I tried twice, over the course of 5 mins or so, then just put it aside. Like I said, been round this loop before, I'm not going to sit looking at a broken MMO login screen, those days are past.

I was expecting better from Cryptic/PWE though - they have also been round this loop often enough to prepare better. What was particularly egregious of them was to allow it to take down their other games too. I don't play STO any more but I know people who do and the STO systems should have been insulated from this IMO.

8400 queue at 6:49am Eastern? That's interesting. Either it's a wild success or a massive server collapse.

It's F2P. 8400 this morning, 72k last night. Either way, it's not a wild success if your players aren't your customers.

They have STO and NW linked in to the same e-mail and chat system.  If you're in a custom channel in STO you'll see it in NW.  Your PW acct gets all the same in-game e-mails, too. I know this because I had a bug where I saw all my STO fleet emails in NW but now I can't.   I assume Perfect World and the others are linked-in to it as well.   

I expect they calculated the need for new capacity and increased by that amount, understanding that launch would cause problems that would smooth out.  Businesses aren't engineers and hate spending for worst-case-scenarios that are outliers unless required by law or losses.   TLDR: Cost: Benefit said "this is fine."

Yeah, I was able to send a tell to Risthara over in STO.  He was already in my friends list.

Shame he couldn't beam over and craft me up a set of starships.

What level do you need to join PvP battlegrounds? Is there any kind of boost, or tiers, or how does it work?

I would not mind a good Dungeon crawler to play with friends, is this that?

To anyone who said this combat is better than Tera's:  :why_so_serious:

I don't mind personal taste, but have you tried dodging mobs normal attacks by just moving away? Looks like their invisible weapons have a pretty loooong range. Not sure when you get a defensive action/dodgeroll of any kind, but outside of that combat seems pretty static since moving around doesn't serve any purpose, exactly like in all the other old MMORPG.

I think it's 10. I didn't pay much attention to it when I got the "hey you can PVP now" quest as DIKU PVP has always been terrible and stupid with one class overpowering others until gear/ nerfs/ whatever change it.  This is the same.



Maybe.  If you're looking for something with meat on it or DIABLO levels of loot and such, no.  It's an entertaining diversion that you don't have to think too hard about.  It's the popcorn of MMOs.


Then your lag is screwing you.  I get out of the way of the Red-Wind up attacks and other big-animation hits all the time with no damage by walking if my dodge stamina is out.  It just means I can't cast then dodge and I have to stop clicking so I can move.

Dodge abilities are granted from level one and use Shift+Direction.  Clerics Slide, Weapon Fighters Run, Mages Port and Rogues Poof, I think. I haven't played one.  Guardian fighters, being the only full-protection class, don't get a dodge but raise their shield instead.

No, I am talking about normal attacks, or what I would call the mobs' auto-attack. Looks like I can't avoid it, no matter how far away I get from them between animations. Telegraphed attacks work fine and are quite precise when it comes to dodging, but normal combat seems stiff as everything else we are used to. Anyway, maybe it's lag. I'll test some more.

Yes

Is there a character calculator for this yet? If respeccing is gonna cost me money i rather plan ahead.

I kind of ignored this. Anyone have the run down on the classes and which ones suck and which ones are good?

I heard rogues rock and great weapon fighters blow, but who knows.  I am sure clerics and tanks and cc are all great.

Tried this. Combat is okay? I haven't played Guild Wars 2 or Tera so I could compare. The 200 different currency thing is stupid as hell and kinda confusing really.

The foundry is legit cool though; if they keep increasing its functionality/content I'll keep this installed. It'll never allow stuff as cool as NWN1 but nothing probably will ever again considering that the mod community seemed to ignore Dragon Age (unless I'm missing something, which I could be).

I rolled a Cleric for giggles. I realized they were nothing but piss-weak ranged casters with even worse heals. I immediately deleted it.

In the 20 or so years I've played D&D, I have never, ever, ever played a Cleric who did not at least occasionally hit something with a blunt instrument. Am disappoint.

4th edition clerics are sadly not the clerics of previous editions.

Er, you can play a smacky cleric just fine in 4e. I'm guessing they aren't in NWO yet?

Yeah they're not battle-clerics they're 'Dedicated Clerics.'  Which I guess means pure casters.

It's also not your old MMO paradigm, folks are responsible for their own life. You can't save them you can only mitigate damage and reduce the amount of times they have to pot.   Since everyone can use pots, they didn't turn you in to a 100% heal-bitch, which is nice.  You throw up your heal ward on mobs, toss out your AOE heal and maybe spam the ability that does damage and grants temp hit points.   

Group a few times and you'll notice that 'dps classes' don't far outstrip folks (other than clerics who are tossing out heal wards)  and tanks aren't 100% aggro on all mobs all the time.  It's going to cause a lot of bitching from people who expect WOW.

So anyone up for a BC guild? I think this one looks worth the effort
Maybe pick a server before everyone gets too far. Doesnt look like it costs any rmt to make a guild just 5 ppl in a group.
Also I think there's a lot of snap judgements being tossed around without much understanding of the way the game works. Gold is hardly useless for instance. With gold you can buy mounts and purchase companions. A lot of ill informed crap is being accepted as gospel here.

My 4E cleric smacks shit just fine. In fact, I feel better about smacking shit with her than her 3rd edition version. It was a better idea for her to be casting at the level she was at.

So far I find this game bland to the point of eye-bleeding. The foundry is the only thing that interests me a bit but so far I don't feel it'll be able to keep me awake. Giving it a few more chances, changing class, and all. We'll see.

Yeah, other than the Foundry (which was disabled when I played) I don't see how this game differs from DDO that also had one of its managing companies sold off. At least in that game I could be a useless Bard like I always hope to play as.

There was a moment of joy when I thought I found a floating brothel. It wasn't a brothel, just a tavern with unwanted children lurking about.

Wait what ?

Got in. Futzed around. Will do so a bit more, but we're excited about this? This is dull as dishwater and it's ass ugly, to boot.

Agree, this is feeling really uninspired. I'm playing it with a friend who seems to think it's the best thing since sliced bread but I'm not feeling it.

It's OK, it's very slick, it seems to be in excellent shape for a release day F2P MMO, but it's very clinical, derivative, predictable and committee-designed. Soulless in fact.

I'll stick with it (half-heartedly) for a while to keep my friend company but I'm hoping it gets more interesting later on.

A few of us enjoy it for what it is. A mindless and simple quest grinder built around an aged franchise we have fond memories of.  

The rest are just jawing about it because it's the only new game to discuss since GW2 failed to live up to expectations.

I'm not singing praises but I'm also not damning it just because it's not the greatest thing ever.  It's different and some will like it and some won't.  I couldn't stand DDO which I've seen held-up as a great game in comparison.  Tastes vary, imagine that.


No, if I want to join a guild I'll find one I know will be active and around.  I'm done with BC groups, I think.  I prefer actual social interaction in my MMOs and F13 groups always die off pretty quick or never have anyone in my time zone when they don't.

Gold is useless. I'm 30 now, I have almost 7 gold and no reason to spend it beyond crafting mats and resource kits which cost a few silver at most.  If I want another mount or companion I'll spend zen for it because of the way both work.  

Companions have a top level of 30, but only if they're purple.  Blues are 20 and Whites are 10 or 15.  Gold-bought companions are white.  You can raise their quality but it's some sort of ridiculous grind to do so.   Mounts are similar with a speed cap at quality levels and associated grind to up them.  

Since I already have a purple comp and mount from the Guardian pack, I'm safe from having to grind that way.  However, if I choose to get another of either - for which there is not really a compelling reason beyond vanity - it will totally be from the zen store and not the gold ones because at this point in life time > money as a commodity.  

Personally, I am not jawing yet even though I think it would be extremely easy to do it considering the overall product. But "different", really? Different how? I am asking because I could use some "different" in order to maintain interest (and I want to, otherwise I would have uninstalled already).

Played through you quest this morning with my lvl 6 control wizard.  I thought it was nicely done, and i especially liked when i intentionally explored away from the golden path there was stuff to see and do.  Nice use of various skills in the interaction dialogues and the triggered event after the "boss fight".  Even the little things like renaming the various mobs to make them consistent with the story theme is the kind of attention to detail which others are not exercising.

Without spoiling it for anyone else, were there 'better or diffent' outcomes from some of the choices below?  Just curious.

The gameplay actually feels quite a bit like Smite (The 3rd person MOBA from Hi-Res) if that gives anyone an idea.  At the end of the day though, the fact that this is a Dungeons and Dragons IP is my main interest.  I could see playing this for a month or two based on the decent combat mechanics and the fact that I'm a big D&D player.  If you have no investment in the IP, I think that this would lose a lot.

It's about as different as changing the order of how you put your socks on in the morning.

Just to clarify, is the cleric a gimped class or just not what you were looking for?

Thanks! Yeah, I've been thinking about the dead space myself. I did try to put a trap or weak enemy spawn in each hallway/room, but from a story standpoint it makes sense that most of the baddies are hanging out in the final room. Ultimately, when we get the option to use 'DM Notes' (basically raid warning text that pops up when the player reaches a point / uses an item / etc), I'll use that to spice things up a bit.

Thanks, yo!

1) Not tab-targeted
2) Not a mess of keybinds
3) People are responsible for their own healing
4) It's not using the EQ/ WoW/ AAA-MMO DIKU plan for content
5) Doesnt' require a sub or a box fee.
6) I'm currently amused by some of the systems
7) "Different" can also mean it's a new game system around the same old rule system. Which - hey -  it is!  I don't whine about shooters being "blow thousands of NPCs away" at their core, why do it for a DIKU?

While there may be other games *you* have played that fit some of those, they didn't catch my eye so I didn't play them.  TSW and GW2 looked boring to me from the get-go so I didn't try them.  Never will, most likely.

I've also *never* been one of those pining for a virtual world.  Ever.  I don't care. I have a world to live in, when I want to I live there.   If I want a virtual world I'll play Minecraft which is *the* virtual world right now.  I'm looking for a game. get in, play around, get out and no additional bullshit.  This has a lot of it.


Probably not what he was looking for.  I'm having no problems at 30 as a cleric.

I played a GWF in the little time I had last night to level 7. Kind of boring. For some reason I need some special effects.

I think I might have to roll a cleric.

It's the best game Cryptic has put out since splitting with CoH.  Not ground-breaking, but decent enough.

Tried this out last night and was somewhat entertained. However not being all that familar with modern day MMORPGs is there any room to get out and explore and find stuff that doesn't feel like its 'quest on rails?'...Mind you I was bitterly dissapointed I couldn't start in the Dalelands...I saw Myth Drannor pop up and almost lost it in nerdgasm..

How good is the Foundry compared to previous "make your own content" attempts?

I haven't tried the STO foundry yet, but compared to the COH Mission Architect, it has a lot of new features. You can hand-place mobs, set patrol paths, and customize them pretty heavily. You can do the same with NPCs (to simulate bar patrons moving around and stuff). There is a dialogue system with branching and skill check (basically class check) as well as quest item-driven conditions to hide/show dialogue options. There's a trigger system for spawning/removing objects (both enemies and parts of the scenery) after selecting a dialog option, reaching a certain point, killing an enemy group, etc. There's a way to implement quest items with descriptions (they take up actual backpack space though). There are teleporters, traps, instant-killing endless pits, and similar dungeon stuff... you can also use a pretty big library of objects to build a kobold sewer, a jumping puzzle in a cave, or a village. There are even FX like fading out the screen and such.

Like I said before, the Foundry is pretty good for a MMO content creation system. The biggest problem with it isn't the capabilities of the editor itself... but rather what happens when you take such a system and put it in a f2p MMO. I linked my mad bomber manifesto a few pages back, but the results are... not pretty, whether you're a player or an author.

Neat. I did one of the featured modules, and it was actually pretty cool. A bit of a talky-RP puzzle where you need to figure out which room in an inn belongs to an NPC you're looking for...rogues can just break into the rooms with varying results, you can steal liquor for a drunken rogue to figure it out, or do some sleuthing by talking up the inn patrons. Then it's pretty much following breadcrumbs through roaming packs of enemies until you find the NPC.

I was reasonably impressed. Hopefully they improve tilesets/cinematic capabilities. If someone could break down the more traditional NWN1 modules into bite-sized quest chains that would be pretty kickass. I'm not expecting Honor Among Thieves (which was entirely scripted by hand with no hack packs- and had NPCs with shedules, day/night transitions, a massively open ended plot, etc), but if someone could produce something like...Elegia Eternum minus the custom voice acting that would own pretty hard.

Eurofag servers or not ?  And, if not, where are the bulk of you hanging out ?

(Apart from the belly area.)

I haven't see any Euro specific servers so I don't know if there are any and I'm playing on the Dragon server.

I dl'd it and make a character on a server that starts with an M.  It might be a W.  Anyway, does this game make your keyboard lighting go bonkers?  My lights are going off and on, mostly off, and so is the little square bit surrounding my laptop buttons.  Is that called something?  Well, this has never happened to me before.  Either it's the game doing it or the game buggered up my laptop lights!  It's almost just like Tera, this game, no?  The controls and all that.  Tera is prettier.  Let me know which server everyone is going to go Bat Country on... I'm only level 1 so far so re-rolling won't be a hardship.   :grin:

This. Compared to their other offerings this is far better.

Never mind.  Somehow, my clumsy self disabled all my computer shinies.  So far at level one, this game is great.  There are little sparklies showing where to go.  It reminds me of that game with the sign, "To Monsters".  Name slips my mind.

Horizons.

Mindflayer

I'm on Mindflayer.  Not that I talk or group with anyone, ever.

We are looking for two more people to get our private guild started.  We might be tempted to let someone we know stay and use it, too, if they're known individuals.  Mainly I want the extra bank space.

I'm on Dragon (the Foundry Alpha folks chose that server at headstart), but I don't actually PLAY my char much at all, so it probably doesn't matter too much. :awesome_for_real:

I'm on Dragon, too.

I can probably help with this once I get around to installing. Maybe I'll set it to download during practice tonight.

Not what I'm looking for. I play Clerics to bash skulls in heavy armor while healing my allies. Being a WoW Priest in chainmail is a no-go for me.

That's it!  The sign was my favourite bit of the game.  

So the NWN city lag kicked my ass.   :ye_gods:  I turned everything down low, which I shouldn't have to do, and it was still insanely stuttery.  It started making me sea sick so I took a Xanax and now I might take a nap.  Geez.  I need meds to play this game!

Just cause it touched me wrongly... this is nothing like DDO, right?  In any way?

I'm not minding this game.  It's rather inoffensive.

However, much like Swotor, it seems to be an always online Single Player game thus far.

Hmmm

Tried this last night with a buddy - rolled a Thief and him a big sword swinger. Didn't mind it at all. Price is right to have a new world to explore for a couple weeks.

That's not terrible, especially for free.

I'm on Mindflayer and can accommodate TS communications if needed. I haven't tried out the in game coms yet.

Its a vanilla game with some garden variety MMO stuff that's run by a company that did ok things in the past.

I'm not expecting great things from it, but I stopped expecting great things from MMOs last decade.

It is actually a whole lot like DDO.

I said not so.  For free, it is, in fact, rather awesome.

One thing I will say is :  Is this actually what tabletop D&D is like these days with the feats and powers and shit ?  Because while I'm enjoying it in an online game, the idea of tabletop being this turns my guts...

Wife will now try it out, so we are two.

It's basis is 4th ed D&D.  Back when that book was released the kick-around discussion had here was it looked like a good rule basis for a computer game but a horrible one for P&P.   Seemed to be the consensus during the beta discussions that cropped-up in Neverwinter, too. 

Apparently the upcoming 5th ed is more of a return to traditional D&D but using only additives instead of trying to explain THAC0 to people scared of negative numbers.

I played a 4e D&D campaign for a while. It took me a while to get over the fact that they'd turned it into a pen & paper WoW clone. Most of the non-combat skills were "streamlined" out, classes were overtly categorized as DPS/Tank/Heal/CC, and the combat mechanics were strongly focused on Daily, Encounter, and At-Will powers, tracked using cards... which, at least in our game, get arranged into ersatz hotbars on the table in front of us.

I grant that most of the flavor of a campaign comes from how the DM spins it, but whenever we went into combat it was hard to ignore.

I'm not usually a negative nancy about stuff like this, but I am pretty sure 5th edition is going to suck nut. Also, THAC0 was stupid and it was good they ditched it when they made 3rd edition.  :why_so_serious:

Everyone always makes the wrong comparison, IMO. If there's an MMO that 4e D&D is mechanically similar to, it is GW1.

I'm playing on Mindflayer, Vanja/Xanja Trask@cadaverine. 

Also, Zetor's Foundry adventure is well worth playing, if you haven't tried it already.

DnD 4e doesn't have any similar MMO's because there are no MMOs which have a focus on positioning and displacement abilities. There are also no sequentially turn based MMO's either so there is also that.

The move away from the retarded design of 3 into giving classes "roles" was ace because players ended up with roles anyway (If you think that DPS/Tank/Healer came from MMO's then well, you're dumb, it came from old PnP games) and solidifying them made choices easier while ensuring that "roles" were filled and not just by another wizard.

The action and ability economy was more or less perfect. The ability to expend all of your resources in a single fight in other editions makes designing encounters difficult for the GM both because you need to predict when the group has rested and whether or not they will rest at the end of the fight. At upper levels the game changing abilities that wizards had made. By enforcing that all players always had something to do this reduces the burden on the DM in designing encounters

DnD 4e, while imperfect*, is vastly superior to every other DnD system which has come before it (and likely 5 as well) in both its ability to provide fun combat and the ability to manage non-combat encounters

*Dwarfs are OP. Strictly speaking save vs being knocked over is way too strong, reducing the effect of pushes is even stronger, and then to top that all off you got an action economy boost from the minor action self heal and the best feats in the game. Fighters were clearly best defenders since they were the only defender with the ability to hamper enemy movement as a passive ability. Defenses and attack scale too disparately such that the old problem in 3e of "If i never hit player 1 i can still always hit player 2" comes back in and players need raw stat feats in order to stay competitive. Also there was all that shit they did to change it to be more like 3e after idiots complained it was too much like an MMO


I am currently downloading and will see if the game lets me play (it thinks I am behind an open proxy)

Pen and paper reached its apogee with Runequest 2.

THAC0 hasn't been part of D&D since the 90s.  I mean it isn't like they skipped from AD&D to 4th.  I guess my point is that 3rd wasn't so bad and I don't know why they felt like they needed something so drastically different in the first place.  5th reads to me like "Oops, we went too far with 4th, now to bring you 3.75."  Not that it is a bad thing.

I've played DDO but I don't remember how much I did or didn't like it.  I remember thinking it would be fun if you had a group and met once every week or so.  But that didn't happen because we're Bat Country and we're fickle.  I've never played D&D table game, but I do like this NWN... when it's performance doesn't drive me mad.

DDO was great for what it was. If anything, it was several years before it's time, and came out when people were still of the big world, big sub mindset. It was one of the most successful f2p transitions because it was a precursor to what modern mmo's are just now becoming.

Patcher can't update. Ah well.

Same here and the Neverwinter forums seem to be down, too.

Apparently STO is down also.  Maybe they forgot to pay for bandwidth :P

I have to say, this game is pretty good. People are saying it's buggy, but so far I have nothing but a positive experience.

It's still a MMO, with MMO trappings, but it's done well.  It's WAY more fun than warframe to me. The "honeymoon" period is, so far, better than guild wars 2.

I think the foundry (ability for people to create their own dungeons/adventures) is going to be where the juice is 6 months down the road. Assuming they can iron out/revamp the rating/searching.

I tried the first dungeon today, in a random pickup group (they launched with a working very good dungeon finder. See other mmo's it's not that fucking hard) I liked the dungeon. A good mix of trash and elite mobs so you didn't get bored with endless packs of 2 trash mobs 2 elites or some cliched design. Overall I'd rate their intro dungeon 4 stars. (1 off cause nothing was in the final chest.) Also I am loving skirmish modes. You join, get put in a group with 4 random ppl and kill waves of mobs for a while while the loot rains from the sky. What's not to like. Do it while a skirmish event is up and you either get an exp boost or a bunch of diamonds. The systems are a lot like the ones in Forsaken World which a friend forced me to play for a while so it's not too confusing but I like the combat system way better than typical perfect world stuff. The tab modifier is kind of unique and adds an interesting take where it works on a few classes. Not however on the control wizard where they obviously ran out of ideas and it merely gets you an extra spell slot. Tanking with the guardian warrior is fun with this system, imo, with just enough skill not to feel like a face roll.

The only outright bug I've seen was an official dungeon with a crafting node stuck behind one of the invisible walls they use to keep people away from problematic physics.

Since I didn't notice anyone else mention it, I also feel obliged to point out that queues went away on the second day of beta. Credit where it's due and whatnot.

EDIT: Of course, immediately after I post this, I find myself unable to connect to the login server.  :oh_i_see:

The short answer is that 3rd was that bad but we didn't see it because there wasn't much else that was better. 4th is leaps and bounds above it

Well see, now I've lost all respect for you as a person Goum.

It's all down to what you want from your experience at the table. 4e is the best tactical combat game out of all the editions, full stop, and it's by far the easiest to DM. What it doesn't have is rich, granular character creation/advancement and that's the sticking point for most people who I know.

The game may or may not be buggy. Their infrastructure sure as fuck is.

I can't log in to my account. I reset the password and then i can't use it right after resetting it. I am able to see what my account name is and check that through the site.

I can't even make a new account with another email and a new account name and everything.

Complete balls, it's been like this for like the past 3 hours.

I just created an account fine while you were posting that, interesting. They're apparently undergoing extended maintenance right now, though, so that might be behind some of your issues.

Ya if you look in the top left corner of the patcher there's a little button that turns red when the servers are down. Sadly it reports your usename/password invalid when it can't confirm a login which is sloppy programming. So if the server status is red don't even bother trying to log in.

Funnily enough, the server status is red right now on the launcher, yet the game is working.

Yes but that is what roleplaying is for.

What server are we all on? Mindflayer?

I'm on Beholder. Don't know where everyone else was. I only picked it because it had slightly lower queues when they existed.

Some people like to see that reflected on their sheet, though. Although I found it easier to build special snowflakes that still functioned in 4E than in the other editions I've played. Still, it's all well and good to handwave and say, "Well, roleplaying" but I think that's a bit of a cop-out. The classes in 4E start to feel really, really samey, and I can see why that grates on some people.

However, the people who act like 4E is worse than Hitler need to relax. :P

I made my dude on Mindflayer. Game is rubberbanding like CRAZY with Sjofn downloading her copy, seems a lot more sensitive to network traffic than other MMOs I play.

I did the exact same thing today (minus trying to make a new account; I can't muster that much effort for some reason), so it's not just you. Wouldn't let me into the website. No idea what the client would have said since I just now realized that you can download it without being logged in.

Pretty much this.

I still don't think it's very D&D, but I'm old, so what do I know. 

Voice acting is, however, fucking woeful.  The Dwarf particularly fucked me off.  I wonder how you people react to actual Scottish people.

We love them and hug them and call them George.

We wonder why they're not shorter.

I had a hunch that was later confirmed in this thread. It says incorrect password when it can't authenticate at all. I did successfully reset my password - it just didn't work at all on the site.

If you put that user/pass into the game it works fine. This was after the emergency maintenance at least.

Apparently they had an "unexpected hardware failure" last night. I think some network gear failed, causing it to be down. I know the outage affected both STO and Champions as well.

The voice acting is beyond awful; it's so bad, it's wrapped back into funny/amusing.

By wondering why they're not talking so funny?

I don't react to Scottish people at all.  I try to hide in the shadows and stay perfectly still until the smell of something deep frying distracts them.  Then I run away. 

I do have to say, though.  Glasgow has some of the friendliest junkies I've ever met.

Did you see the recent report about Glasgow being pretty much the hive of scum and villiany of Europe ?  I was upset at that.  I've been to Naples.

This game is terrible.

First, accept that it has almost nothing to do with D&D, Forgotten Realms or 4E.  You will be awash in names that might sound familiar, but it is at best a casual resemblance.  

Do not bother playing around with 'rolling' your stats much.  It looks like what they are rolling is predetermined arrays.  Abandon your notion of what stats do, this is an mmo.  I started with 12 con and over 600 hp.  Your at will powers are the left and right spambuttons, encounter powers have a few seconds cooldown and you can use your daily powers once you kill enough stuff to charge your 'action point' meter.  It is all reflavored generic mmo invest point for 2% increase in whatever.  

Ok, enough ranting about the non D&D.  It is wretched without the window dressing.

I made a 'trickster' rogue.  The very first thing I notice is the controls are awful.  Sure, I can spin around with my mouse but you cannot click screen objects because mouse keys  are attacks.  In order to enable a mouse cursor (so you can hover it over all the strange new things on screen for tooltips) you have to hit alt, which takes you totally out of the action portion of the game.  What the fuck.  So I remap nearly everything, talk to some dude and start smashing skeletons.  Hey this is fine, but I do not feel like a rogue or thief or whatever you want to call it.  Call me melee dps?  The game holds your hand while they explain different varieties of powers and looting etc.  I see all this mention of stealth.  Hey, that might cheer me up!  I am a rogue, how do I stealth??  I want to stab something in the neck while stealthing!  Hmm, I cannot figure out how to stealth.  I see references to it in my powers.  I see upgrades to it in my talent trees.  I have bonuses to movement and damage when stealthed.  GIVE ME STEALTH!  Hitting buttons.. no stealth.  Looking in help, no help.  Looking online.  You get it early on in the game.  NOT HELPFUL.  

Fine, I will go do a mission.  Melee damage choo choo.  Throw some daggers.  Hmm, could I use a ranged weapon instead of slashing somethings face?  Will have to look for a crossbow later.  Nodes that require skills?  Where do I get skills?  What is a 'kit'?  Found a nature kit.  Not sure where it went in my inventory.  Is there a button that opens my equipment and inventory at the same time?  No dungeoneering?  I am a DWARF!  I do not remember picking skills?  Why do I not have the dungeoneering?  I see rogue loot piles.  Get me that sweet rogue loot!  An old shoe?  ...


I have to identify some stuff.  Why?  Ok, I have scrolls for that, but this seems silly.  Oh look, I get to spend an upgrade point now!  I want to upgrade my stealth!  Stealth upgraded!  Maybe now I can use it?  What is this strange locked button on the UI.  a special power?  Is that stealth?  It is tab button, HIT TAB BUTTON.  WHY YOU NO STEALTH??      


So, this game is pretty generic if you take away the names.  I wonder if mages have to buy identify scrolls or they get that convenience as part of making the classes different?  The controls are very awkward for me and I was not captivated by gameplay in the early stages.  I was able to upgrade a skill the game would not let me use.  Can you shut off STO notifications?  I really do not care who is logging in and out of a different game.  I did not see drow on the character creation page.  My local gaming group and I all agree, we want Firaxis to make a D&D game like X-COM.  You could make that mmo style easily enough with random teams or your own adventuring company etc.  Private servers, world servers, you name it.  Characters could walk around and interact, but the fighting would not be actiony.  This game is shit.

Dammit, I miss NWN  :heartbreak:

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Ability_Score_Rolling (http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Ability_Score_Rolling)

Yeah, scores are predetermined.  Uh, Good ?


Stealth you get at level 10.  Tab button.  Apparently.  It was the same in WoW.

ahhh thanks for info on Stealth. Still fucking ridicolous you don't get it till lvl 10.

I like the fact that you can upgrade your stats as you progess. Makes the non-random part of them palatable.

No, didn't see that report but I've lived in England and they say that all the time.  They seem to forget Hull is in England.

Typical Hull resident:

(http://i.imgur.com/wNMqmto.jpg)

The point being, if stats are predetermined, why is there a roll?  I can accept a design decision not to allow random rolling or point buy.  If you go the array route why not just show them to the player and let them pick?  The entire rolling process in this case is stupid.

I don't disagree.

Anyone who doesn't just roll until they get what they want on that table is an idiot.  Or, like me, someone who didn't know about the table before they hit OK.

 :uhrr:

A lot of those things you mentioned, Pezzle, like the alt button and mouse buttons being for combat, are the same way in Tera.  It took me a while to get used to it.  I was constantly attacking NPCs at first.  I'm very little still and I'm hoping somethings get more sensible like the identifying and theif-y stuff.  I'm addicted to thieves, too.  I rolled and rolled and never got a 20 in anything, so I had to settle for 19 +2 in dex for the thief and the same with the sorc.  I think.

It's still not as terrible as rift though. I'm usually quite insensitive to voice acting but Rift actually caused me pain.

For the 4E haters - mechanically this seems to have almost nothing to do with 4E or really any other form of D&D beyond at a cosmetic level, so you have nothing to fear on that front at least.

But... but... it has a 20-sided die in the center of the UI!  :grin:

BTW, for those who played my quest -- unfortunately the weird flickering / blackout thing in the U-shaped sewer rooms is a bug with the room itself, can't do anything about it. Will probably add 3-4 easy kobold groups into the more desolate areas for some more fightin'. I also appreciate the comments! As an aside, the foundry browser is pretty broken atm, and shows only like 30 quests... a good portion of which are just pure mob farms. Ah, COH MA flashbacks.

e: for Lantyssa

I expect most Americans mistake them for Irish people.

Those are leprechauns. 

This is surprisingly not shit.

The biggest issue I have with this game, aside from the janky running animations and the apparently state-mandated plunging necklines on EVERYTHING, is that there's no DM.  :heartbreak:

Yeah, the DM Client in the other NWN games was so revolutionary.  I am surprised no one else has tried to do an RPG with a toolset/DM Client like that of NWN 1 and 2.   

That being said, the game is overall better than expected.  I'm starting to think that the key to enjoying an MMO is not following it pre-release and therefore HAVING no expectation.

This'll get a bit better after Foundry authors get the ability to use DM notes (basically raid warning-style text in the middle of the screen) and tie it into the trigger system. It's on the dev shortlist, which means... buggerall, probably.

Oh you guys mean like the DM in DDO...  Yeah, that was nice also.

It was more of a narrator than a DM, but i did like it.

Yeah, I meant the narrating DM, like in DDO. He was the best.

That was Gary Gygax. Of course he was the best.

No, not the Gygax ones (he only did a few). Those were fine, but there was the Main DM who was the actual best.  :why_so_serious:

I approve of the state-mandated plunging necklines on everything, being a male chauvinist pig. I also noticed there is a bust meter on character creation.

 :awesome_for_real:

I don't mind the bust meter, because the small side of the scale allows me to not have a back-breaking rack. In fact, I APPLAUD the bust slider. Also my fat hobbit actually looks kinda chubby, so that's nice.

Downloaded this overnight...will check it out tonight. Fairly sure I am going to hate it, but willing to at least give it a look.

This is 100% absolutely true.

My comments having played to 10 as a wizard.

Gameplay:

Good: Its actiony without being a click fest. Tactics and timing matter. They seem to have set the game up so that there are multiple methods of comboing abilities in practical and fun ways. Targeting is fluid and fun if a little bit hard to hit the guy you want sometimes.

Limited number of abilities and a good layout to use them. The translation of the daily/encounter/at-will system from 4e went very well and provide a lot of flexibility. 3-4(for wizard) skills with a cooldown, 2 skills you can always use, and 2 skills that you can trigger as you build up special meter.

Bad: There is no animation canceling. They put these nice big red circles on the ground so you can avoid big enemy attacks but if the enemy starts that at the same time you started a long animation you might not be able to get out. Let me cancel my animation and dodge away from the incoming AoE. Otherwise whether or not I avoid those has more to do with whether or not i got caught at the wrong time rather than anything of my doing. Let me stop attacking to move if i want to, or make the dodge abilities interrupt channels.

Kinda Bad: Enemies in some area respawn way to fast. When teleporting around to avoid melee attacks i often run into groups that I cleared moments before.

Also in this camp: DDO had an amazing system for traps. They were fun, engaging, visual and able to be avoided once triggered(or used against enemies). So far i haven't really seen anything like that which is kinda disappointing.

Character Progression:

Good: They got rid of the DnD stat methods. They are not nearly granular for an MMO. The change to % bonus abilities is very good. As a wizard you can max damage (Mix int/charisma with a 1-2 point advantage to int) or max control (max wisdom, int/cha secondary). I imagine there are similar things you can do as other classes.

Bad: Character creation rolling mechanics are dumb. Just give me point buy or let me choose and select an array. Inability to choose "dungeon" skill is kinda poor. Especially because it seems to mean that fighters find secret doors and rogues do not. Which is uhh weird. In 4e anyone could take up that mantle and the ability to do so really opened up party compositions. No longer was it "we need a rogue and a wizard" it was 'we need anyone with ritual casting and someone with the skill to disarm traps'. It should in this game too.

For dungeoneering/thievery/religion/arcana, you can use all those nodes and things through store-bought kits, at something like 1.2 silver a pop. You still need a rogue to disarm traps, but those are frequently avoidable.

Of course, Foundry stuff can kind of dick you over a lot easier, since creators can attach a specific class' ability to a dialogue check, which kits can't help with.

Played this for the first time today.  Doesn't suck!  Playing as a Guardian Fighter I like the timing of blocks, shield bashes etc.  Only level 8, but things are humming along with decent loot, rewards, coin, story and action.  Going to try the first group skirmish, see how that goes.

I love love love that every now and then there is a goodie hidden or a crazy npc hanging out off the quest path.  It gives the illusion the quest isn't on rails. 

As for negatives, too early to tell, but I'll echo the inability to cancel animations.  Sure I'll think of more.  Maybe mob density/respawn.

Played a fun game for four hours for free.  That's good entertainment value.  I'll be watching their progress closely, hopefully they don't go in a direction I can't follow (GW2).

Well so far I like this game better than Rift, which I paid fifty bucks for, so that's something.

This is pretty fun. Doesn't have the build depth of DDO or the rare platforming/puzzle parts that made DDO feel so unlike every other stale MMO, but it's pretty and the combat is fun.

I noticed just now you have to have at least a lvl 15 character before you can access the Foundry.  Is that a recent change?

Already kind of bored by level 5. Glad I didn't pay anything.

My first impression can be summed up as: DDO did this same game better, years ago.

I feel like this game will work better because it has abandoned the D20. You no longer have to min/max your character to obscene amounts to be competitive and you don't have as much of a "gear check" because gear while having a large effect doesn't have nearly as large as it did in DDO. As far as i can tell the rough maximum difference that stats will end up making is like 300%. In DDO the difference was upwards of 40000% [Max 1900% from to-hit plus bonus damage/tank]

If you took the stats behind this and made DDO it would be a really amazing game.

It's always been that way. The only way to bypass that limitation was to buy the $200 pack [lol].

I played DDO twice over the years.  Couldn't make it past the 1 hour mark before I uninstalled each time.  Neverwinter is a better game, imo.

I played to level 13 just now. It's pretty fun but every new element of the game seems to have like a dozen currencies or some shit tied to it.

So far there is:
Zen
Astral Diamonds
Gold
Trade Bars
Celestial Coins
Astral Coins (or whatever the other deity coins are)
Wow Style Seals

And all of these of varying usefulness and interchangability.

Also the game is pretty shameless with trying to lead you by the balls to the cash shop. Right now there's a special purple lockbox that can have a mount or other various high-powered goodies in it. It can drop for anyone because I happened to get two of them. The catch is you need to buy a key with Zen (the direct $ currency). Yeah no thanks, so I throw away the lockboxes. I find 2 more. Repeat.

The Foundry/skirmish thing is pretty cool however.

I thought I'd already seen this in a couple of them. The Hidden Blade and it's sequel  The Lanaar Legacy both use on screen text to tell you what is happening.

I just did those, and I don't recall that. But maybe I was too busy reading all the books and such.

The Lanaar Legacy is the best thing I've seen in the game thus far, either official or Foundry. Creeped me out and wound me up.

EDIT: "Two busy?" Log off, Stormwaltz, you're drunk...

Yeah, my quest has it too. There are two ways to kludge it: by having a "go to x" story objective that'll pop up text on the screen when you reach the marker (this is only usable for really linear maps), and using some trickery with 'fail states' of an interactable object that pops up red text on the screen.

These two are really, really restrictive, though. The DM notes system would allow such text to pop up from any marker / encounter / item / NPC / etc, which is a lot more powerful.

If this is true then why did DDO bore me to tears when I tried it and this game has it's hooks in me already?

Yeah, i was really impressed with the hidden blade also.  I just did that today.  It did have popup text in a few places, but you might have missed it, it usually announced the surprise attacks as you touched stuff.  I haven't done the follow up yet, but will tomorrow for the daily probably.

I didn't think you could throw away the lock boxes?  You don't really want to anyway as they can sell for a few hundred AD.  And yeah, there are way too many types of currency and they do push you to the cash shop a bit too hard for my liking but I haven't really come across anything yet that would require real cash purchases.

Just had my first death.

At level 29.

From falling into a 6-foot deep hole.  :oh_i_see:

Did it crash the servers ?  Because they're down.

That was a hard fall.
 :awesome_for_real:

Yep, that was a dramatic crash.

Fortunately, I had just gone back to a camp.

EDIT: It killed ALL the Cryptic login servers. STO is down too.

Reminds me of the server crashing yesterday ~1-2 seconds after my guildie got his first PVP kill. Cue the usual jokes about PKing the server, etc.  :awesome_for_real:

What's the deal with the AH ?  Seems to be all in Astral ?

Yes. It is.

How does it work for Foundry quests' rewards? Meaning, if I create a quest/module, how do the loot tables and the rewards work? I know it sounds dumb, but can I set up immense rewards, or bosses dropping insane loot? Assuming I can't, how do the limitations work?

EDIT: This game completely messes up my Alienware keyboard colour configuration. It makes everything blink and change constantly during gameplay, which is beyond disturbing, and when I stop playing it doesn't revert back to default and leaves it the way it was when I quit the game. Signe was having something similar? It's annoying, feels invasive as a virus.

Rewards are set by loot drop tables for the mobs you place and the end reward is determined by iirc the average completion time. You can't make a loot run

Yes!  That's what I was asking about before!  My laptop goes insane, mostly in red, with this game.  I'm glad I'm not using an Alienware mouse and headset.  I'm afraid they'd control my hand and argue with the other voices in my head.

Also, I was about to give up with this game because of how crowded the towns are, but then I remembered... TURN OFF OTHER PLAYER'S NAMES!!!  100% better!  Completely playable and even the stuttering has almost disappeared.

One thing that struck me about this game is that the town looks really nice (the first one you come to - that's the only one I've seen). Lots of levels (as in, higher bits and lower bits) and a sense that you are in a big bustling city, yet really you're led around a fairly small area and can't get lost. It's cleverly designed and it looks beautiful. Most MMOs do a horrible job with towns and cities.

I'm liking it so far and I'm just a weak squishy cleric. Got to the first skirmish and that was good. Looking forward to dungeons and such. It's definitely above the usual level for Cryptic. I really didn't pay any attention because it was them. I suppose I should go buy some gold or whatever the thigns are.

There's a chat channel named F13 but I didn't recognise any of the people in it so I guess it's not ours.  Bat Country isn't taken, though. 

Yeah the Alienware lights thing is a known issue, but intentional...  Dev quotes below

Great Weapon Fighter is a beast

What a huge difference having a companion or two makes.

I'm enjoying group play a lot.  Which is saying something when it comes to playing an MMO with strangers. 

What would you say is making group play more enjoyable for you here than in other recent MMOs?

Currency is freaking me out, man.