Neverwinter Nights Online. (Cryptic Studios)

[Hawkbit]

I don't think so, because so very little has been shown of it.

It's been on my watchlist, but I'm not buying it until I can see it in action.

[Cadaverine]

I thought someone made mention of it in one of the steam threads about Baldur's Gate or something, but I could just be losing my mind.

Edit:  I knew it was real!

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24709.0

[Goumindong]

Why was there never a 4E computer RPG? I still play ToEE occasionally. What a great 3ed implementation.

Because Wizards was determined to see 4e fail. And for some reason never shopped the 4e system to someone who would do anything with it. Probably because fools complained it was too "MMO".

Which is a real shame because it was a damn fine tactical engine. Much better than 3e or 5e especially for designed and set piece encounters. The large number of forced movement effects made battles dynamic and structurally interesting in ways that 3e or 5e will never be.

[Tannhauser]

Wizards put out more material for 4e in a year than they have for 5e, so how were they determined to fail 4e?  It was a bold new design for DND, to appeal to gamers and companies looking to make DND liscensed computer games.  But it tanked the brand.  Gamers didn't like it, it 'wasn't DND'.  They stayed or went Pathfinder, which sucked all the oxygen from Wizards.  4e was such a kludge design that they brought out the 'Essentials' line, they tried to streamline the system.  To no avail.

That's why they brought out 5e; to go back to the DND feel.  I went to GenCon two years ago for the release of 5e.  Sad to see the Pathfinder hall with 5x the gamers than the DND area. 

I'm glad you like 4e; there's some things in it that I like too, but it crippled the brand.

[Malakili]

They painted themselves into a corner with it.  4th edition brought us full circle - all those PC RPGs were a digital conversion of rules meant for pencil and paper, and then Wizards went and essentially made their pencil and paper game based on how PC RPGs had shaken out, which was a totally bizarre choice.  It's a pencil and paper game, make it good for pencil and paper, not good for computers. Pathfinder is straight up better than anything Wizards has released since 3.5, so why wouldn't people be playing it?

[Goumindong]

Wizards put out more material for 4e in a year than they have for 5e, so how were they determined to fail 4e?  It was a bold new design for DND, to appeal to gamers and companies looking to make DND liscensed computer games.  But it tanked the brand.  Gamers didn't like it, it 'wasn't DND'.  They stayed or went Pathfinder, which sucked all the oxygen from Wizards.  4e was such a kludge design that they brought out the 'Essentials' line, they tried to streamline the system.  To no avail.

That's why they brought out 5e; to go back to the DND feel.  I went to GenCon two years ago for the release of 5e.  Sad to see the Pathfinder hall with 5x the gamers than the DND area.  

I'm glad you like 4e; there's some things in it that I like too, but it crippled the brand.

4th edition sold really well actually. Better than third (which sold better than second and so on and so forth). It just didn't sell so much more that WoTC wanted to continue supporting it. Internally they sold 4e as the new Mecca of RPG's that they could use to excise the SRD mistake of 3e and bring adventure creation and its associated revenues back in house*. That didn't happen. Because adventure companies weren't going to roll over and die. And because they didn't actually produce the content they claimed they were going to.

Essentials was a mistake but not because they had to streamline the system(its actually less complicated than 5th) but because, more or less, it ended the adventure support for the system, broke the "no intermediate system" promise and didn't actually fix the problems of 4e. I.E. Instead of fixing the errors in the system they listened to grognards and made it worse, alienating everyone.

Most importantly was the lack of digital presence and the broken promises regarding it. Its the same problem they're having with 5th edition with the exception that in 4th they said they were going to provide those tools. They released the book and then they're unwilling to support the way people actually play RPGs now (which is to say partially digital and within easy reach of reference materials) or to expand the ability to play DnD with good online tools. Additionally the decision to in house everything wrecked their ability to produce adventures, which is necessary for a game like DnD to continue operating.

So in a way its true that 4e brought about pathfinder, but its not because 4e failed as a system (or even through sales numbers) its because no one else could support it and these companies which had previously been writing all the content that sustained third edition stopped producing content for DnD. That was an explicit business decision of WotC to not license adventure creation to third party companies.

The exact same thing happened when they moved from 2/advanced to 3. People like you lost their shit, said it wasn't DnD etc etc etc. The difference was that with 3 they supported the system with the SRD, they encouraged people to create and share and play it. They made the game about as easy to pick up and play as was possible at the time. They supported the game with flagship CRPG's like they had done for 2e. They benefited from the adventure creation companies like Paizo which popped up specifically to produce content for 3rd ed. None of that happened with 4e. They lagged behind in digital tools. They refused to sell PDF's. They did not create enough adventures. And they did not live up to the promise of the subscription service(plus if you weren't on it there were basically no adventures).

4th is good for pen and paper (better than 5e actually though 5e is a lot better than 3.5, and in some ways has advantages over 4) though largely this is in prep burden. Pathfinder is shit. Like really objectively shit. Its all the bad things about 3.5 turned up to 11. Though they do have a good thing going; the game is so hard to design and prep for that you more or less have to buy the adventure books.

*As far as i can tell the pitch for 4e was that it could become a 50m product/service. Which is hilarious when you think about it since 3e sold maybe 300k books over its lifetime and would be a 30m product if they went for 100 dollars apiece. So the pitch was basically "do all of 3.5's business but each year". A lot of the Gleemax investment (which tanked) was likely being assigned to the DnD division.  Some evidence: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?315975-WotC-DDI-4E-and-Hasbro-Some-History Also discussions in earnings reports on how Gleemax was assigned to the niche and hobby games.

So yea, you want to know why 4e failed? It was because they didn't support it. And because they tried to take market share away from other content producers instead of using them. And because they did a lot of extraneous investments that didn't work out. Not because the system failed, or even had poor adoption figures relative to prior efforts.

I mean, seriously. If you actually play 4e its a damned good system.

Edit: Its also worth noting that the claims of 5e doing super well are from sales figures over 4e's last quarter. (7% growth!). Which is not particularly powerful evidence given how RPG books sell.

[Malakili]

 

I guess I'm the asshole then. I've played DnD since 2nd edition, almost 100% of the time with regular groups with DMs making up their own adventures, usually but not always based on existing campaign settings.  In this kind of free form environment, 4th edition was INCREDIBLY limiting compared to 3 or 3.5.  Yeah, there are problems with 3 and 3.5, but 4th struck each group I've played with as a huge step in the wrong direction - at least for the way that we play.  Heck, I was playing a Pathfinder when the book was still in beta back in, I guess it must have been late 2008 or 2009 and although I owned the 4th books and was willing to DM a 4th campaign, no one in my group wanted to touch the thing with a 10 ft pole.  So I guess your failed to support it theory might be true, but I know in real life literally zero, zip, nadda people who think 4th edition was a good system or an improvement over 3.5.  Frankly, I'm one of the people they lost with 4th, even though 5th is substantially better.  Fact of the matter is that the people who 5th edition is aimed at taking back have already decided Pathfinder suits them just fine.  I played 4th edition a handful of times after an initial bit of hype got us to try it out, never caught on.

Edit to add: Had they actually delivered on the digital tools/table top, then they might have at least been serving a particular audience and gotten 4th to catch on that way, but with the advent of things like Roll 20 even that seems like a reach.

[Tannhauser]

'People like me didn't lose their shit' going to 3e, I really embraced it and had a lot of fun with it.  Thanks for the strawman there.  I embraced 4e as well until going to GenCon and seeing how WOTC was presenting it as no role play, all roll play.  Then my group played it and we quickly tired of it.  We all liked the concept but actually playing it was clunky and not fun.  Once Pathfinder decided to stick with 3.5 4e was effectively dead. 

You can trot out all these excuses about 4e but you cannot deny 4e crippled the brand.  Everyone knows this, you are just upset that the vast, vast, vast majority of gamers dislike 4e and won't join you and your friends on The Island of Misfit Editions.

[koro]

I remember simple encounters at early levels in the 4e campaigns I played in taking hours to resolve. All the forced movement effects, the readily-applicable status effects, the laundry list of stuff and abilities and the made-for-minis-on-a-grid combat are are really cool when you're looking at the individual parts, but when you put all that shit together with nothing to automate it? It's a pain in the ass, and a couple of us were dreading leveling up because we knew new abilities and higher CR creatures meant more shit to keep track of on a round-by-round basis and encounters that would take even longer later on down the line. Some higher-level D&D sessions I've watched and listened to have born this out, and I remember one entire 4-hour session being needed to deal with a single encounter toward the end of a dungeon, and it didn't even get completely finished by the time they had to wrap it up.

Before the group fizzled out, we'd managed to houserule a lot of the combat stuff (particularly things movement-related) to something a lot faster, if a bit kludgier, but by that time we were pretty much not playing something recognizable as 4e anymore.

[Lantyssa]

Even Ingmar, Disciple and Prophet of 4e, eventually decided it was crap.

[Sophismata]

The classes in 4E felt too homogeneous, and characters had too many low-impact abilities, activatables and feats. Nothing mechanical the characters did (individually) felt really meaningful. That combined with the long TTK's made the game kind of generic and a tad boring for me and my friends.

Pathfinder is just 3.5E with all the system's problems magnified (huge class imbalance, nonsense narratives, and a million fucking times/day abilities). So, we've mostly stuck with 3.5E itself. 5E lacked the depth we wanted for character builds, although the basic things it does with the system math (bounded values) seems very nice.

[shiznitz]

I had really high hopes for the digital promises of 4E. I was burned out of the MMOG grind and many people I met in MMOG land were waiting to use virtual tabletops. Some workable versions were built by players  and I really enjoyed the 20 or so nights of 4E played this way.

[jgsugden]

4E was a great system - but not a great system for D&D.  It was best in an environment where you had few combats, but each combat was intended to be epic.  I use a modified version of the 4E system for a Cthulhu style game set in a world similar to the late 1800s.  It is a great fit.  The game was a mystery the PCs had to solve with role playing, and there were about 4 combats over the 20 hour game, each lasting about an hour and a half. 

However, I hated it for D&D.  I hated that a battle between a fifth level party and a bunch of non-minion goblins took 75 minutes and felt substantially the same as a battle with a similar number of orcs, gnolls or skeletons.  I hated that it was so repetitive with the same tricks over and over....  I gave it a try, and I stuck with it when it was the current edition, but I wish I had not done so. 

[Ghambit]

I had really high hopes for the digital promises of 4E. I was burned out of the MMOG grind and many people I met in MMOG land were waiting to use virtual tabletops. Some workable versions were built by players  and I really enjoyed the 20 or so nights of 4E played this way.

This was why 4E was designed the way it was.  I saw no problems with the system personally, if used in the way it was meant to be.  "Boardgamey" with virtual options.

[shiznitz]

However, I hated it for D&D.  I hated that a battle between a fifth level party and a bunch of non-minion goblins took 75 minutes and felt substantially the same as a battle with a similar number of orcs, gnolls or skeletons.  I hated that it was so repetitive with the same tricks over and over....  I gave it a try, and I stuck with it when it was the current edition, but I wish I had not done so. 

While what you describe is true, the fact that one only ever fought appropriately levelled monsters is a gamemaster decision, not a system decision. The system meant that a party never really outgrew any particular monster type because an orc could be level 3 or level 10. This was a good thing.

On the other hand, I do agree with you that fights after about level 5 became a bit grindy as status effects became quite common. In earlier versions of D&D, getting slowed/stunned/blinded was a fucking catastrophe. In 4E it was usually just a roadblock.

[Riggswolfe]

4e was a decent minis game and an awful RPG. Characters were just talent trees and ceased to be characters.

[Goumindong]

4E was a great system - but not a great system for D&D.  It was best in an environment where you had few combats, but each combat was intended to be epic.  I use a modified version of the 4E system for a Cthulhu style game set in a world similar to the late 1800s.  It is a great fit.  The game was a mystery the PCs had to solve with role playing, and there were about 4 combats over the 20 hour game, each lasting about an hour and a half. 

However, I hated it for D&D.  I hated that a battle between a fifth level party and a bunch of non-minion goblins took 75 minutes and felt substantially the same as a battle with a similar number of orcs, gnolls or skeletons.  I hated that it was so repetitive with the same tricks over and over....  I gave it a try, and I stuck with it when it was the current edition, but I wish I had not done so. 

The point of minions is that you can fight a lot of monsters without the game bogging down. That was a massive problem in 3.5*

*Specifically two problems 1) Encounter math was generated based on a single enemy 2) Adding lots of enemies resulting in boring slogs where no one was ever challenged because enemies couldn't hit you and were just bags of HP.