Neverwinter Open Beta

[Clark]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Millburn]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

[Jerin]

Originally Posted by Millburn [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

its all so....unnecessary


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

[Knuckle]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[EchoedTruth]

Originally Posted by Knuckle [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

[MrSparkle001]

Originally Posted by Knuckle [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

Don't expect them to treat Neverwinter any different.

[Jerin]

Originally Posted by MrSparkle001 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

[EchoedTruth]

Originally Posted by Noselacri [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Knuckle]

Originally Posted by EchoedTruth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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

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

[Jerin]

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

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

there is little difficulty in that game.

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

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


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