Until the second beta weekend for Cryptic's upcoming MMORPG Neverwinter, I think I'd forgotten that massively multiplayer roleplaying fantasy games could have actual, you know, roleplaying. You see stabs at it in other MMOs such as Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft, of course, but in those cases roleplaying usually involve imposing your imagination on existing settings designed around developers' unrelated plans for quest progression and leveling.
Not so in Neverwinter. Much like Cryptic's successful reworking of Star Trek Online, Neverwinter features a "Foundry" in which players can design their own dungeons and unfurl their own stories for other players to enjoy, edging closer to Dungeons & Dragons' free-wheeling imaginative roots. It doesn't permit the staggering degree of world-creating freedom of the 1990s Neverwinter Nights MMO, but at heart this is a modern D&D MMO for those of us who spent long nights around the dinner table listening to dungeon masters concoct new worlds for us with dice, pen, and paper.
In their best moments, Foundry creations even deliver the illusion of choice.
I spent much of the weekend in these player-made instances, jumping in whenever I pleased thanks to the way they smartly scale depending on a character's level. In essence, they're fan fiction brought to life, and something about the rough edges resulting from bizarre cultural references and typo-riddled flavor text granted them an intensity missing from the carefully structured plots of developer-packaged RPGs. Some were better than others. Player Izatar's Witch Hammer Chronicles was one of the better ones, where I found myself transported to Malebolge--Dante's eighth circle of hell--after sitting down at an ill-fated card game in a bustling tavern. With the aid of the knight Roland and a friend, I popped off magic missiles at imps and house-sized demons until I nabbed the Malleus Maleficarum (here, a literal hammer rather than a dour 15th century treatise). It dragged on a bit too long and ended too abruptly, but its freedom from Neverwinter's overarching narrative infused it with a thrilling unpredictability.
Even from the small sampling available from the alpha testers, I could have spent hours with the Foundry content alone. Player chili1179 brought his years-old pen-and-paper scenario Dungeons of Dread to life in one, bidding me to hack and slash my way through a succession simple puzzles and claustrophobic underground dungeon passageways. Others weren't quite so ambitious. Rsnyder's "Doom Tomb" starts out with the silly line "You shall meet your doom and find your tomb! Bwahahaha!" and then proceeds to swarm you with zombies. Bar Fight was almost exactly what it sounds like: an arena-style instance in which I fought off several opponents one by one while the patrons of the crowded bar cheered around me. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that Neverwinter's best chance for success lies in these player-made creations, as such versatility ensures an almost constant stream of new, largely unpredictable fantasy-based content.
And to think, I was fighting petty thieves but moments before.
That's not to say the content beyond the Foundry lacks some of the same appeal, but its charms come saddled with qualifications. The character models aren’t very good -- I didn't make a dwarf, for instance, because I couldn't get the beard right despite the considerable options available -- but the world itself sometimes elicits awe, even if the visuals look dated. The city of Neverwinter feels alive, and a smart use of spacing makes the main hub feel larger than it is. It's also competent at handling the lore that D&D's Forgotten Realms campaign setting has amassed over the years, particularly after level 20 or so, although the main storyline suffers from shameless linearity.
Oddly, I felt most conflicted about the gameplay, which has an actiony vibe that supposedly springs from Neverwinter's reliance on the relaxed ruleset for Dungeons & Dragons' fourth edition. Its focus on mouse button combat in the style of Diablo is fun at first, but its limitations start to chafe after a dozen or so levels. On the one hand, I liked how my Control Wizard lobbed magic missiles at opponents with a reticule system reminiscent of Vindictus or TERA (despite some rough animations); on the other hand, a noticeable lack of challenge meant that I sometimes felt as though I were forcing myself to cast something else for the sake of variety. Leveling to level 30 didn’t help much, as many of the new spells I received were merely more powerful versions of what I had before, rendering my playstyle scarcely different from that of every other Control Wizard I encountered.
Magic Missile's never looked so good.
To be fair, the first 15 levels had me dodging attacks and wreaking havoc with my beastly area-of-effect daily spell, but when I earned a tanky NPC companion at level 16, I found myself free to lob missiles from one spot with comparative abandon. He's a real bummer of a fellow, too. At least SWTOR's similar companions had stories that brought them to life when they weren’t playing fetch bot or standing motionless on your ship; this guy seems about as human as the hunter pets you find in WoW.
But much of my disappointment with Neverwinter's combat springs from its undeniable ease in the segment of the beta I played. I’m told it gets more difficult, but all the way up until I earned my first companion, I was routinely taking on six or more of the rapidly respawning enemies despite my class' supposed squishiness, sometimes not even bothering to teleport away. Neverwinter sounds hardcore because the health doesn't regenerate automatically, but the catch is that health potions with laughably short recharge timers drop like rain early on, thereby removing any real threat of defeat. I wish I could say this was only true of the outside world, but I felt the same way about the skirmishes and dungeons I visited.
Neverwinter's kind of a lobby game, but with a wide range of content available from a single menu.
Skirmishes like Orc Assault offer group-based, bite-sized instanced fun that will be familiar to players of Lord of the Rings Online's own skirmishes or World of Warcraft's scenarios, but they seem more concerned with impressive visuals than actual feats of skill. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the decaying libraries of the Cloak Tower dungeon, for instance, but I hated the way the boss mechanics required little more than easy dodges and the slaughter of weak adds. Most damning of all, the three groups I went in with never really spoke to each other throughout the whole instance, which speaks to a lack of challenge and excessive simplicity. I'd expect this kind of reticence in months-old dungeon content in World of Warcraft where everyone knows precisely where to stand and when to interrupt abilities, but in a new game with new players, it points to problems once the initial novelty fades.
But whatever my concerns with the core game, I can’t deny that I found myself trawling the Foundry index for my hourly doses of excitement. As a longtime fan of fantasy settings, I couldn't get enough of them. Even now, with the servers down until the next beta weekend, I miss them--particularly the episodic ones. I find myself caring more about what happens next in player Zebular's lore-drenched tale of Drow assassins and spiders in Dweomerkeepers more than following Cryptic's own storyline, and the next time a beta weekend rolls around on March 22, I'd like to take a stab at designing one myself if they've opened the Foundry creation tools to regular beta testers. This, I suspect, is why most players will play Neverwinter, as its dungeons and combat currently seem ill-suited to outlast a rush of enthusiasm after launch. But even in their beta form, the Foundry dungeons work so well that Cryptic may have little reason to worry, and as with Star Trek Online, it may find that they've given players the tools to make one of the most memorable fantasy games in a genre where swords and sorcery have long lost much of their novelty.
IGN has just begun a Prime promotion for Neverwinter. If you want to learn more about how you can get into the next beta weekend, check out our landing page.
Source : ign[dot]com
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