Neverwinter MMO

[Lisnpuppy]

I wanted to like it....I really wanted to like it. I love that world.

 

It had a few good things. But yeah....I just couldn't get into it.

[Beriallord]

Woah, I guess I'm gonna pass on it then. Especially about what I heard about the mechanics. Yeah that definitely sounds broken. You can't have an effective MMORPG team when tanks can't even tank and healers can't even heal without getting all the aggro.

 

I read some replies on other forums about the game, and people are saying Warriors are underpowered, can't tank, can't DPS as good as the others. Clerics are able to tank better than warrior, and DPS better than warrior, etc.

 

But to be fair though, Clerics were always very good in NWN games, one of the best all-round classes actually.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Beriallord

[lonewolfkai]

Agreed, the mechanics are just in a broken state right now. It's an okay game and has potential, but it definately doesn't shine as brightly as GW2 does right now.

 

BUT, the game is still in beta, so hopefully, they'll fix the mechanic problems before official release.

Edited May 24, 2013 by lonewolf_kai

[Zewp]

All of you guys saying the game is broken; you did read that it's still in beta, right? There's still a lot of tweaking and balancing to be done.

 

I haven't had a problem tanking as a warrior yet and my Cleric stopped having issues with aggro after level 15, when you unlock Soothe, which reduces the aggro from your healing spells. If I had to complain about anything at this point, it's that playing a cleric feels a bit like a waste of time. I very rarely actually need to heal people in dungeons. In fact, if they're all carrying potions, I become more or less obsolete. The only healing spell I really use is my AoE heal, which damages enemies while healing players.

 

In fact, at this point I think the game so far has been way too easy. I'll have to check whether this is still the case at later levels, but right now it feels like I'm wasting my time with the cleric. I'm thinking of rerolling as either a wizard or a rogue. I was thinking of the GWF, but he looks a bit too much like a generic melee class.

[Vagrant0]

All of you guys saying the game is broken; you did read that it's still in beta, right? There's still a lot of tweaking and balancing to be done.

 

I haven't had a problem tanking as a warrior yet and my Cleric stopped having issues with aggro after level 15, when you unlock Soothe, which reduces the aggro from your healing spells. If I had to complain about anything at this point, it's that playing a cleric feels a bit like a waste of time. I very rarely actually need to heal people in dungeons. In fact, if they're all carrying potions, I become more or less obsolete. The only healing spell I really use is my AoE heal, which damages enemies while healing players.

 

In fact, at this point I think the game so far has been way too easy. I'll have to check whether this is still the case at later levels, but right now it feels like I'm wasting my time with the cleric. I'm thinking of rerolling as either a wizard or a rogue. I was thinking of the GWF, but he looks a bit too much like a generic melee class.

That's part of the problem... They're trying to do some sort of strange mix between D&D and your standard mmo with tank and spank mechanics.

 

In a D&D type setting, your clerics or warriors were your tanks, each one trying to hold a portion of the enemy force while you had rogues or wizards as your main damage dealers. This is why clerics would get plate armor and a big hammer. Any buffs or healing would come either before the fight, or at points where the cleric could debilitate an opponent to help change the tide of battle. Clerics wouldn't be main tanks, but would certainly work in a support tank role. Conversely druids would be primarily debuff, summons, and healing when necessary. Healing in these settings is mostly potion based or done between fights and rarely as a last resort in the middle of a fight since their spell pool is fairly small. Because of this, fights rarely last very long, ending up being mostly a matter of gearing, situational advantage, and initiative. It is also due to this that a viable party can be comprised of just about any combination of classes without being tied to a requirement of 1 warrior and 1 cleric in order to do anything.

 

In your standard mmo setting... Clerics or priests wear the lightest armors, have a staff, and generally only serve as a healing role with almost no offensive potential. This leaves them to be ultimately the member who everyone else is trying to keep alive so that the party can be constantly healed. Turning the entire fight into one where the tank is keeping the healer from being killed, the healer is keeping the tank alive with constant spells, and everyone else is busy killing off minions or trying to whittle down the boss. Because of this, even normal fights tend to last longer since one member is doing everything they can to reduce their amount of threat and damage dealers are busy shifting between opponents while trying not to get killed.

 

The problem is that they have clerics and other classes designed somewhat close to the D&D setting, but the rest of the game is like a standard mmo. Unfortunately, since most players are familiar with the standard mmo, even though the game is still in beta, things will be likely tweaked more in line with standard mmo playstyle. So I wouldn't expect much to actually happen towards breaking away from the WoW mold.

[frakle]

 

I've played it, and honestly I was really excited for it but I find in extremely stale. Everything is just "Go here and kill 10 orcs" or "Go there and collect 5 boxes of stolen food". The Foundry is cool but what you can do really amounts to "Kill 5 bandits" and then "Destroy the orc warlord" or something. It's just really boring to me, honestly.

 

No offence, but that's not true at all. Those types of quests exist, but they don't make up the entire game. The majority of quests involve dungeon-crawling, where you make your way through a dungeon while following a storyline. Like the one where you have to go looking for a dead guardsman and end up finding a necromancer in the sewers, who you then have to follow and kill. Or the escort mission where you have to escort a spell-scarred women while trying to stop her from getting scared and turning into a monster every time she sees enemies.

But it is true. And your "dungeon crawl storylines" are nice, I suppose, but ultimately a cover for the same old "Kill x of y". The spell scarred woman quest? Neat, except nothing ever attacks her, and there's a bunch of STATIC, NONMOVING enemies in between her and the tower you have to get to.

[Zewp]

But it is true. And your "dungeon crawl storylines" are nice, I suppose, but ultimately a cover for the same old "Kill x of y". The spell scarred woman quest? Neat, except nothing ever attacks her, and there's a bunch of STATIC, NONMOVING enemies in between her and the tower you have to get to.

 

Then I guess you don't play any RPGs, huh? Because you just described every RPG, ever. Skyrim? Dungeons come down to you moving through a linear path filled with enemies waiting for you to come along and kill them. Baldur's Gate? Paths filled with enemies waiting for you to come along so you can kill them. Neverwinter nights? Same thing. Dragon Age Origins? Same thing. KotoR? Same thing. The Diablo series? Same thing. You'd also be pretty hard pressed to find a quest in those games that doesn't somehow involve killing something or collecting an item.

 

The difference between Neverwinter and other MMOs is that in most other MMOs, like WoW, you've got certain areas filled with a certain type of enemy. Then you head over to a quest-giver, he tells you to kill x amount of y, you go to the area, kill those enemies and then come back to hand the quest in. In Neverwinter most quests actually involve dungeon crawling, where you follow a quest through a dungeon while the quests story keeps changing as you progress.

 

And bollocks to STATIC UNMOVING enemies. If you'd spend 10 seconds in the foundry, you'd see that the game includes options for making enemies only spawn when certain trigger conditions are met, you can have them patrol areas, etc.

[Vagrant0]

 

But it is true. And your "dungeon crawl storylines" are nice, I suppose, but ultimately a cover for the same old "Kill x of y". The spell scarred woman quest? Neat, except nothing ever attacks her, and there's a bunch of STATIC, NONMOVING enemies in between her and the tower you have to get to.

 

Then I guess you don't play any RPGs, huh? Because you just described every RPG, ever. Skyrim? Dungeons come down to you moving through a linear path filled with enemies waiting for you to come along and kill them. Baldur's Gate? Paths filled with enemies waiting for you to come along so you can kill them. Neverwinter nights? Same thing. Dragon Age Origins? Same thing. KotoR? Same thing. The Diablo series? Same thing. You'd also be pretty hard pressed to find a quest in those games that doesn't somehow involve killing something or collecting an item.

 

The difference between Neverwinter and other MMOs is that in most other MMOs, like WoW, you've got certain areas filled with a certain type of enemy. Then you head over to a quest-giver, he tells you to kill x amount of y, you go to the area, kill those enemies and then come back to hand the quest in. In Neverwinter most quests actually involve dungeon crawling, where you follow a quest through a dungeon while the quests story keeps changing as you progress.

Well, actually the way that Skyrim, but really more Baulders Gate differs from almost every MMORPG setting, primarily, is that those quests you do have some meaningful impact on the world around you. You go into that dungeon to kill something, and it tends to stay dead with whatever premise that led you to go inside to have some sort of conclusion and progress; in an mmo, this doesn't exist. In an mmo, you go into the dungeon, kill the boss, loot, then can go right back in again to kill them again facing the same opponents you did last time, in the same spot, with the same exact traps. in an mmo, even if there is a quest related to that dungeon, the quest doesn't actually affect anything other than giving you experience, faction, and possibly some loot. The dungeon will still be there, the NPC will still be in the same spot, and some other player will be along to do the very same thing that you just did. This is why most mmo's just simply fail from the standpoint of making a character feel special; in a universe where everyone is a hero, nobody is. That is really the problem with how most mmo type quests are... It's just a theme park, only that instead of having much variation, you're killing the same exact kind of enemy several dozen times only to complete it so that you can kill a slightly harder enemy that looks and behaves the same, but just has a palette swap or different texture.

 

This method of a quest system really didn't come into standard practice till WoW and all the WoW-clones came along though. Ultima Online, and Everquest (atleast before expansions) were predecessors to WoW, but used a more narrative style of questing where plot points would slowly be unraveled with most quests being related to sharing the story of the world to the player, helping the player gain new skills, producing new equipment for the player, or just giving them money or experience to fund their explorations. Rather than having someone with a giant exclamation mark over their head tell you to enter that stronghold of frog things, you would have an NPC that you would have to greet, know the words they wanted to hear (obtained from some other quest or by listening to them as they interacted with some other npc), who would just tell you what materials they required to make something for you. Although the result of a shiny new piece of equipment would be the same, the later part is much more engaging to a player without the burden of some heroic cause. The downside however, is that the later system is much harder for your standard player to stumble across on their own, usually requires much more effort on the part of the player, so doesn't play well with those who feel entitled to instant gratification and an easy path to end-game where they then spend months collecting tokens by clearing the same dungeon hundreds of times.

[JimboUK]

I haven't played it personally, as Guild Wars 2 is filling my need for MMOs for the foreseeable future. I have no doubt that it's a good game if it's made by Perfect World, since they haven't made a bad F2P game yet. However, I can't see myself playing it because to me the draw of NWN and the entire DnD franchise are the characters. There are no worthwhile characters in MMOs. There are players, but that's no good unless people like to role play.

 

This is what has put me off MMOs in general, it's the characters that make an RPG for me, in MMOs characters are damn near nonexistent.

 

@Vagrant0 I thought Skyrim was a perfect example of an "RPG" that doesn't let you change the world, nothing you do makes any difference to anything or anyone. I honestly felt more like an observer than I did a participant. A good example is the Mass Effect series, decisions you make impact not only the game you're playing but if you keep the same character the sequels as well.

[Vagrant0]

@Vagrant0 I thought Skyrim was a perfect example of an "RPG" that doesn't let you change the world, nothing you do makes any difference to anything or anyone.

Yeah, Skyrim was a little weak on that regard compared to Morrowind or even Oblivion. But there are some things where what you do has an effect, particularly in and around the civil war events and the thieves guild... But yeah, mostly nothing of consequence. It's really one of those things that they kinda failed hard on but was more due to time constraints and trying to incorporate their sort of radiant quest system than anything. Afterall, you cannot have an open world and quests which allow drastic changes to that world without ending up making some of those quests impossible to complete or start after a point. ME, DA and NWN singleplayer games didn't have this problem since areas are closed off, the story is mostly linear, and it is expected for you to not be able to do everything in a single playthrough.

 

It's the sort of thing you can plot on a line:

On one end you have an open world but no way to change the environment of that world since it would prevent aspects of that open world from being possible.

On the other end you have a closed world with linear progression, so changes to the environment can be made anytime you want without ruining anything since the player can never backtrack.

 

The difference with a standard themepark MMO is that even if there's a somewhat linear storyline, you cannot actually have anything that affects the world in a meaningful way since the world has to be there for the next person in the same exact way as it was for you. Even one-time events have almost no impact on the world since any changes from that event would inherently require some adjustments to all the quests and areas that were affected by that event... Which is why Cataclysm had to be released as a whole new expansion where the end result of the event already happened, rather than a progressive change of the game world based on events and player involvement.

 

A sandbox MMO (like EvE) however doesn't have that limitation really. Most of the game content is established by players or can be changed at any point by the game's developers without the burden of breaking content or balance since content and balance are constantly in flux. The problem is that this sort of MMO can be harder to setup and get a large enough playerbase for in order to have enough content to keep players interested, as well as being inherently more risky since it isn't just another WoW clone.