Neverwinter Nights Online. (Cryptic Studios)

[koro]

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.

[Venkman]

$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

[Merusk]

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.

[koro]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Zetor]

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. Taking bets on how long it takes before I'm booted out!

(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.)

[Tannhauser]

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. 

[Xilren's Twin]

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?)
 

[Zetor]

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

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

[Cadaverine]

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.

[Furiously]

Keys gone.

[ashrik]

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.

[Hoax]

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).

[Zetor]

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...

[apocrypha]

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!

[Xilren's Twin]

Foundry missions scale to level, yeah. (btw, my foundry mission currently in development is nonlinear... for better or worse )
And I agree with ya about the gameplay - this is D&Diablo, not NWN3. Still has some promise, though...

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...
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... 

[Merusk]

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.

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.

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).

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.

[UnSub]

BTW, is this still a rumour? 

[koro]

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.

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.

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.

[Ghambit]

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

[Merusk]

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. 

 

[Tannhauser]

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

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

[shiznitz]

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

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.

[Malakili]

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

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Zetor]

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

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!

[PalmTrees]

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.

[Merusk]

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

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!

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.

[Zetor]

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.

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... . 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.

[Merusk]

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

[Threash]

Early start is today, anyone in?

[Zetor]

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

[Threash]

What are the restrictions on the free version?

[Merusk]

I'll be in tonight.  Handle is @merusk

What are the restrictions on the free version?

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.

[Ginaz]

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