Neverwinter Impressions

(Editor’s Note: this is a contributing post from Wumpus, a long-time Kitty commenter. Wumpus has emerged from the dark labyrinths of Neverwinter to give us his veteran gamer impressions.)

WARNING: The following review was made while the game was still in open beta. This is not Jackie. This is wumpus, a guy crazy enough to like DDO and LOTRO. Reviewer may have strong opinions on D&D that haven’t been current since 1984. Objects in the Mirror Of Opposition may be closer than they appear.

Creating your character:

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Once you’ve created your account, downloaded and patched you need to create a character. This is where you first run into 4e (Fourth Edition D&D). You have a choice of 5 “classes” (technically 4 classes and 5 builds, “builds” are a name of official sub-classes in 4e). Classes/Builds (at time I tested them):

Greatsword Fighter: Name says it all. Oddly enough, he does less damage than a dagger wielding rogue (early in the game, at the time of this writing). Supposedly strong in attacking multiple foes, I got bored quickly.

Cleric: Has offensive spells (and presumably some buffs later) and alleged healing spells. Bring plenty of healing potions, because you can’t heal thyself (I’ve heard you can heal others if you have the video game skills to target them in time. I failed at this in DDO until I learned about the F2-F6 keys, so I didn’t try here). Forum chatter implies they still are aggroing everything in sight. Limited to about 5 spells available at any one time. Dumped and made a rogue.

Trickster Rogue: One hobbity ball of fury. Recommended if you want a more powerful character. Centers on single-target, although an important encounter (stunning) attack can hit more than one attacker if they are close together. Trapping abilities appear to be an afterthought. My hobbity ball of fury no longer feels overpowered at level 33.

Control Wizard: designed for crowd control (in solo cases can control at best one mob while you whittle down his hit points). Some attacking spells that almost all appear to target single mobs (regardless of what the text boxes say). Limited to about 5 spells available at any one time.

Guardian Fighter: Didn’t try. My thoughts on tanks are that they belong in groups only and forum chatter isn’t kind. If they can pry aggro from clerics, they can’t pry aggro from tank companions.

Eventually (level 30) you will also choose a paragon path. You have a bunch of “feats” that mildly alter certain minor abilities as well. I held off these completely for a long time (I figured why spend $10 if I was already overpowered), but eventually chose a few things.

Right here DDO and Neverwinter diverge. DDO follows the D&D 3.5 ruleset and allows more freeform classes (and if you don’t closely copy a known good build on your first few characters you will be doomed to playing a gimp).

Neverwinter plays a basic class clone that you really can’t screw up (although they will happily charge $6-10 to change things around). Neverwinter excels in other places like absolute gobs of content made professionally and by users (even if it all seems a bit repetitive).

Races:

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Looks like plenty of races (no gnomes, but does have tielings. Drow may or may not cost $200). Races don’t appear to change your stats much but do wonders for your appearance. Some quests appear to be tied to races: my halfling was looking for hobbit holes for my fellow halflings. Tielings in the same area got different quests.

On story:

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I’m probably not the one to review the story. I’ve caught myself clicking through the story line with no way to go back. As Jackie mentioned, there is no “Smiling Jack” or anybody else to show you around Neverwinter. Storytelling within quest chains is fairly helpful. It starts with the given quest and is told further in scrolls you pick up and enter text in your journal. This lets you dig as deep or as shallow as you please.

Combat:

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Looks like you will only have one bar, ever (maybe if you pay to win enough). D&D 4e strictly limits which powers you can use, and power slots slowly become unlocked by level. I wouldn’t hold my breath on another bar. Color me underwhelmed. Combat consists of a few things:

• Spam your “at wills” (the “I swing my sword power” in pen & paper).
• Use shift or double tap a direction key to dodge outside of an incoming attack (helpfully colored red in the HUD). This will likely hold most of you attention. You are rooted until your attack finishes, so don’t always count on being able to dodge. Dodging may well be your most important survival skill in Neverwinter.
• Your “encounters” cooldowns to babysit.
• Your health unless you add a healing companion (level 16). After that, you will only need to watch it during boss fights. If you need them, start spamming healing potions (don’t bother watching your health, just spam them as the cooldown ends (maybe regeneration would make more sense, but I doubt I’m sticking around long enough to find out).
• Your action points/dailies: I’m not sure they are safe to use outside of boss fights (if you need them, that’s when you will need them). This fills up an icon with orange until you can pull off one of your biggest powers. Then wait a long time to fill it up again.

Overall, combat feels more like a traditional MMO than some people claim. Movement is effectively one dimensional (dodge away). It appears two dimensional, and some quests can force it (at least one foundry quest loves cliff-side battles), but in general you just move back and forth while babysitting your cooldowns.

Claiming this MMO has anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons is quite a stretch. Jackie already had an entire post about how different 4e was, and this game appears to take plenty of liberties with that. After about a half an hour my wizard was tenth level with 700+ hit points. Somehow that shouldn’t be in any edition of D&D.

It doesn’t get much better when they stick to the rules. Get some levels on your wizard or cleric and expect to have a whole slew of spells to pick from. Try 2 “at wills” and 3 “encounters”. You might also get a couple of “dailies” but as the name implies you can only use one of them without doing a great deal of other stuff before you can choose between the two of them again.

I don’t think I’m blowing my NDA (Hasbro has stated as much) by saying that D&D Next (aka 5th edition) looks like D&D in a way that this simply doesn’t. I have a load of magic items that I can’t begin to figure out (all other editions have items with pluses and specific effects: apparently that unbalanced D&D and now every character has to be exactly the same).

Between the set “encounter 4 orcs” and the one buttonbar, there really isn’t much choice but to simply run through your sequence of encounter powers while spamming your at wills. This can make for a game that gets boring fast. Animation is limited. I find the overenthusiastic HUD destroying the “realism” and making the whole thing look like an arcade/console fighting game.

Quests And The Foundry:

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Quests often have a public zone (with mobs and quest objectives) and private instances inside dungeons. Dungeons consist of long indoor ribbons of a rail fencer/caster (but side rooms often can have goodies and nifty sights) with encounter after encounter of fixed enemy groups.

A word about 4e “encounters”. Encounter is a 4e keyword that describes a set battle between player[s] and a group of mobs (you can aggro more than one group if you are sufficiently foolish). This appears baked into 4e and exposed in the foundry: plunk down “gnoll group 4″ to include a specific array of mobs. You can expect to see the same encounter groups over and over, in basic sewer tunnel sequence (or crypt sequence, dungeon sequence, or sometimes large house sequence).

A basic idea of what the maps and encounters will be like can be had by examining the foundry. Players seem to be finding ways to make fancier maps, but so far you just get “encounter set #n” in “basic dungeon #m” over and over. I suspect that endgame may include a random dungeon generator. It should be pretty easy to add, and you’ll see why if you open up the foundry.

One thing that shouldn’t be forgotten with “yet another dungeon #23″ is that since they are easy enough for a player to lay down, there are a lot of them and you won’t be (supposedly you can, but I didn’t bother to find out how) repeating quests (certain ones are: you can kill #x of bandits for example, but not most of the other kill #x).

Some of the Foundry quests are at least as impressive as any recent DDO quest (although I wasn’t able to tell if they were using generic dungeon bases or not. Custom dungeon maps consist of placing prefabbed rooms one after another.

Presumably you could even construct a labyrinth, although that may get you banned since it sounds similar to already banned dungeon practices (missing encounters in missed parts of the labyrinth is cheating).

On setting:

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The setting is supposed to be Dungeons and Dragons, Neverwinter (a major city in the north of Faerun, the main continent in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting). The city is represented with fairly detailed static areas, and in a realistic style.

The first thing that happens is you wash ashore on a beach. It’s a cliché start for a cliché MMO, but DDO players will wonder if they found themselves in Korthos. After playing more I concluded that it must be a homage as there are no other hints of DDO influence.

Neverwinter might be correct for 4e. Hasbro purposely rocked the whole place with a cataclysm to get players to buy all new books. Some of those effects play out in quest chains (the spellplague one is obvious). As a sometime Baldur’s Gate player (I played AD&D before the Forgotten Realms ever started), I got a kick out of meeting a flaming fist mercenary and was trying to place Helm’s Hold when I got there.

It’s likely the most popular setting for D&D, and trying to build a MMO in Sigil (Planescape setting) would be non-trivial. I won’t question the accuracy of Neverwinter, but those who aren’t tied to 4e might question some of the changes.

To someone who’s never read Salvatore or Greenwood (I got all my angsty fantasy hero from Moorcock’s Elric series) this all looks like generic fantasy #2584, but it is important to remember that Gygax nearly shaped what “generic fantasy” looks like almost as much as J.R.R.Tolkien.

Beyond that, Greenwood and Salvatore have filled out the details of that generic world so much it leaks back to places like LOTRO (current D&D halflings live in wagons. Hobbits live in houses and holes. Greyhawk halflings live in houses and holes.

Somehow LOTRO has a whole bunch of wagons for hobbits to live in who never leave the shire and rarely go beyond the next pub (all main characters save Bilbo were weirdos even before going on adventures).

Game Currencies

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One thing that isn’t wildly overinflated is the in-game coinage. They’ve changed it (part of 4e?) so that 1 gold = 100 silver, 1 silver = 100 copper, and that 20th level character might wonder where they are going to scrape together 5 gold for a horse. It looks even less rich in gold than LOTRO. Note that Gary Gygax himself strongly recommended the “wildly inflated” gold system.

D&D (and more so in an MMO) may have loads of adventurers descending on dungeons and pulling out untold riches. This tends to wash out the economy with gold and bring about an inflation similar to a gold rush (an analogy pointed out in great detail by Mr. Gygax). Note, once I have bought both the horse (5 gp) and a spare companion or two(2 gp a pop), I have no idea what I will do with the gold anyway (healing potions aren’t that bad, class kits don’t seem to scale).

Real things need to be bought with zen (i.e. real money), astral diamonds, which are dribbled out as shinies for hitting your skinner bar, (see below), but I think you can’t have many without buying them with zen, and Lion Seals (earned unbelievably slowly and I suspect simply bought with cash if you ever plan on turning in enough green stamps).

I’m not kidding about the Lion Seals. You need a ton of them, and I have to make an effort to keep killing the local baddies just to get one seal per area. You need about three times the number of areas to get any one thing through Lion Seals, meaning either an horrendous grind or pay2win.

Lets put it this way: if you had a problem (like Jackie) with the pre-hobbit lottery box LOTRO, you don’t want to download this MMO. Pay2win is plastered all over this game and seeps into the core.

Fee Based Economy and KoboldKlicker:

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So this MMO is Free-to-Play with a Fee-Based Economy. Of course it’s free–just ignore that fee, and that one, and of course that one, and this other fee of course, and that one over there… The worst part of this fee based game (beyond mere aggravation) is to completely obscure the cost of this game.

All I can say is that if money is an object to you and you haven’t coughed up for the $160 sword of pwnage yet, you probably want a game you can figure out the cost. This one you can’t. If you don’t know, you will find yourself spending money. You could have bought much better games than this generic fantasy # 2584 MMO, and not spend nearly so much hitting the bar for your shiny (see below).

Fee based payment is more of an impression than a rigidly proveable assertion. It’s that just about any option seems to have a Zen cost to it (the store currency), and I’m not certain I will ever find out what services I will need, what I won’t, and what the total cost will be. It’s a slimy tactic in all the other industries in which I’ve seen it, and it’s a slimy tactic here.

I also have stayed away from the skinner box/Koboldklicker hijinks (except for the hourly prayers–they just seem too easy). I had thought that there were more a beta/new player training thing, but apparently that is how you rake in the astral diamonds (the more important non-cash currency in this game). Another slimy tactic, this one is borrowed from Zynga.

Pay2Win

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At the levels I have reached so far (30s, and getting bored with), I have no idea which fees are “tickets to play the game” and needed, which are pay2win (obviously the $160 items are), and which are sucker bets (I’m guessing the revival potions are at low levels, but might just be needed with tougher bosses). I think they know that they will lose players with clerics who can’t raise dead and expect to get paid beyond what those players would spend.

If a fee based economy was tolerable, the other great innovation they bring are Zynga-style skinner boxes: hourly prayer, daily skirmish, daily pvp, daily foundry, all to get your shinies. Note that my rogue has run out of the overpoweredness he started with.

If I were to get serious, I should fix the gear, possibly pay for a respec, and likely find myself stuck in a skinner box pecking the bar for my shinies. This has been steadily infiltrating Turbine games (see Jacky’s rant on LOTRO and DDO seems to be going full steam). No thank you.

F2Pocalypse 2013

So let me get this straight. In the news in the last few days:

LotRO added a patch with Hobbit Presents, a new gambling-style lockbox that they spam daily at players. Why bother with giving lockboxes a chance to drop from a monster? Just shovel them at players and try to rake in the cash. And LotRO added a literal in-game store shopping mall in Bree.

SWTOR’s new patch supposedly adds nothing but store items.

And Rift today announced that it’s going Free To Play. But it will be fair with no tricks or traps–they promise. Bill Fisher says the stigma of F2P is going away, but if it is, then why do they have to make that promise in the first place?

This is probably the main reason that Hartsman left Trion. It’s because the man is a god of integrity, like I always said. He’s really cute too. Can I say that without being reverse-sexist? I’m not sure, but I did. This is the way of the kitty.

So. I said I’d never blog about LotRO again, but since I quit the game, I feel like I can make an exception to say that I hope it dies in a fire. I hope they pull the license. I hope it shuts down ASAP so I never have to hear about it again.

My elves have diminished, abandoning the world to the greed of men. And women, in this case.

I made my goodbye post. I updated my LotRO Interface page to say that I will no longer be supporting those 14k downloads. I’m leaving my LotRO boxing guide up on my blog. It’s top post today, I think from some press it got in the forums.

Boxing is kind of a rebellious activity. It’s also a way for players to get as much from F2P as possible without paying. It’s okay with me.

I’ve almost condemned Neverwinter also. I’m still on the fence. I was reading the 1500+ post F2P-complaint thread in the forums until the mods closed it down and ejected it with no explanation. I heard about the Orwellian world chat spam whenever someone wins the lottery. I heard about the high prices for basic things. The double-diamond earning weekends or whatever.

To be fair, I don’t just assume the whiners are right. Neverwinter might be the most smokin’ deal going in an MMO right now. Once you wade through all of the currency exchange rates and calculate out a monthly estimate of what you mind need–it might well be fair. (A degree in accounting or a genius IQ is useful for playing a F2P game.)

F2P is just not a game I want to play. I want immersion, not a meta shopping experience where I buy things for my characters like they are barbie dolls. F2P is a symptom of the sickness that is pervasive in American culture.

So the kitty is now left with WoW, Guild Wars 2, Skyrim, and Dragon Age 2. Guild Wars 2 is double-dipping, but it’s non-obtrusive. I haven’t really needed the store yet. The store will move forward, though. The corruption might be inevitable.

On a positive note, I’m working on a fun new comic strip titled “The Forsaken Inn Of Unplayable Races”. It’s a place where races go when they aren’t wanted in an MMO. It’s cute. I’ll have it posted soon. A new strip is needed in the yonder sidebar to replace the one about SWTOR.

More Reading:

TAGN on Rift F2P

Guild Wars 2 Writing And Immersion: Superb

I’ve played Guild Wars 2 for one week now, and I continue to be impressed every day. I’ve played my usual, same-old MMO for so long that I’d forgotten how real fun felt.

Today I went on a guided history tour in the human capital city (Divinity’s Reach.) I took the opportunity to get my “walk” hotkey set up and learned some things about Kryta political history.

I also realized that the Asian looks in the character creator are explained by Cantha, which was a GW1 expansion after I quit playing it. Kryta is a melting pot situation.

I really, really like the character naming setup in GW2. You’re allowed multiple names with spaces. So if “Robert” is taken, you can try “Sir Robert” or “Robert Ross” or “Sir Robert Of Beartown”. This scheme is a boon for roleplaying.

Maybe you want to be a monk, so you’ll want “Brother Robert” or something. The hard part is trying to determine whether the honorific “Sir” is even appropriate, or if it’s supposed to be “Ser”, or if you should be a “Chief Engineer” or “Mistress” depending on your race, or just skip the whole thing because it’s too pretentious and isn’t you.

I’m so impressed by the game writing. GW2 delivers a starting story that is personal, and reasons to defend that beseiged city, explained in a way that is believable. You get a feeling that things are at stake, at risk.

Other games I’ve posted about lately (i.e. Secret World and Neverwinter) failed to provide you with a friend in the game, a “Smiling Jack”, someone to make you feel welcome and give you a connection. Some of the GW2 races start you right off with selecting a friend or sibling that will play a part in your story.

Human characters also select a deity. Unlike Neverwinter, which (iirc from beta, it may be different or changed) only describes the deities and lets you pick one, the GW2 writing makes it personal through the writing.

For example: “Melandru … can be found in every harvest and every flower. She smiles upon those, like me, who have an affinity for animals. I am a follower of Melandru.” Personal. This works.

I’m not far into the personal story plots, but so far with two races, I’ve noticed a classic pattern of writing good fiction, as described and recommended by Jack Bickham et. al.:

• Hero has a goal.
• Hero fails to achieve goal, suffering a setback.
• Hero has to come up with another plan.
• Another setback; the stakes get higher and higher.

My new character, Shar Katzdottir, is a half-Norn, a bastard daughter of a Norn fortune-teller who spread her stockinged cards during hard times for a wealthy Elonian. Shar killed another client who made her mother disappear. She fled the city and lived in the Kryta wild for a time, learning intuitively the ways of her Norn heritage and communing with the cats as a Ranger.

When Shar dared return to the city out of loneliness, she lived on the streets until she befriended Quinn, who gave her a bed to sleep in. “This is her story” as the GW2 writing says. This is good writing with a brilliant economy of style. I’m looking forward to more.

In other news:

In other news, the CCP Eve Fanfest was last week, and they revealed some World of Darkness things. WoD News is the best source of info. Politics. Backstabbing. Fashion, and some sort of follower crafting system maybe like TOR. You’re a vampire queen. You don’t want to darn stockings or do embroidery.

The names Edward and Bella were also announced to be banned. CCP has a modest team of 70 people on WoD now, and the release won’t be before 2015. This makes fang-banging kitties a little sad. For perspective, Blizzard’s new MMO, the “Titan” project, has 150 people on it now, per rumors.

We are expected to hear more about Blizzard’s Titan this year, which is slated to test in 2014, and possibly release. The best current situation sum-up I’ve seen is over at Titan Focus.

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

So I was looking for a new game, and Guild Wars 2 won the showdown by virtue of going on sale (again) for $40, plus offering a free trial key, which I picked up from Curse on Thursday.

A few keys might still be available. I don’t know. I thought about giving a heads-up on my blog, but the download was super-impressively fast, and then I was in the game playing.

GW2 is an amazing and beautiful game. It kind of reminds me of Aion but dialed up to 12. It’s a single purchase to play with no subscription fee, which did gave it an edge over SWTOR or Mists of Pandaria, other possibilities.

Guild Wars 2 also offers Spanish, which is another perk for me. This is enabled by a mix of voice and text that is very effective. When the mechanics of the story delivery are invisible, you’ve got it right. The Sylvari (the GW2 plant-based rendition of pointy-ears) turned out to be pretty cool.

Sylvari is the race for me, and I think Thief is the class. I’m still depressed over quitting my L65 Burglar in the other MMO I play, because the Burglar just doesn’t stack up to my Lore-Master for various reasons. Well, the GW2 Thief can swap daggers for dual-wield pistols in a heartbeat, so that’s an issue solved.

I’ve looked at countless videos and articles about this game, and lots of good things have been said. I don’t want to go crazy on all of the good things. I could write a long essay. For example, Angry Joe’s fun video review on this is memorable. He rates the game a 10/10 with a “badass seal of approval”, a game that belongs in your “liberry”.

The dynamic (public) quests and cooperative gameplay really are a big deal for MMO innovation, and a lot of fun. I’ve been revived a number of times by other players, and it’s a warm fuzzy for sure. On the other hand, I know that GW2 has issues with dungeons due to no holy trinity, and lack of a trinity means lack of group roles, so how deep can the cooperation hole go?

Also, what happened when I tried to /thank cooperative people for giving a poor thief a hand? Um. Nothing. Nada. In fact, the list of GW2 emotes is a little short at the moment.

Another trivial thing that shocked me was no lipstick. Ten minutes into creating my first character, I was alt-tabbing and searching Google in disbelief. Surely, I thought, there is a hidden color picker somewhere. Nope. Dolce & Gabbana have left the building.

So the only flaw of my character is her lips, which are an off-body color. Still eminently kissable. No need to panic.

Supposedly one of the GW2 writers is disappointed that a great majority of players are choosing Human, so players are widely missing the great stories he wrote for the other races. Well, it seems obvious that if the races are ugly, less people are going to play them.

Exhibit a: those poor Trolls in WoW, ever vying with Dwarf and Gnome for least played race in the game. I’ve tried a half dozen times to make a female Troll, but it’s never, ever going to happen. It’s going to be the same with the female Asura in GW2.

There is no good-looking female hair for Asura, while there are many more and better hair options for human and Sylvari women. Asura and Charr women also have NO breasts. Who wants to be a member of a race with no breasts? Maybe Asura are actually amphibians of some kind, but Charr are surely mammals, aren’t they?

This is admittedly kitty logic and not rocket scientist logic, but still valid.

Asura could have been properly cute, but instead they look like walking salamanders. And I don’t mean D&D salamanders, which are more attractive. Maybe they were going for a Harry Potter house-elf look. I don’t know.

So, the kitty conclusion is: here GW2, take my money, thanks for the free trial key. I love you. This is the game I want to play right now. The word on Neverwinter is two more classes in the works. I’ll be waiting on those instead of showing up at launch next week. That’s fine.

Syp (or maybe we are back to Justin Olivetti again per the current byline) interviewed Andy Valesquez this last week and did get an interesting explanation on why so few classes at launch in Neverwinter:

“We figured that if the classes we released were really good, people would stick around to see what comes later, as opposed to if we put out a bunch of classes that are whatever, then nobody will care when we say that class 10 is coming next month.”

Here’s hoping that works for them.

Elder Scrolls Video Leaked 4/14

A short time ago, a first twenty-minute video was leaked from the Elder Scrolls beta. Massively reported it (which seems like questionable ethics for Massively?). The video was immediately taken down, but it is also hosted on another gaming site here.

So, check it out if it’s still there. I did click this link to make sure it is working. The site looks a little slow.

A lot of people had negative things to say on Massively, but I really liked what I was seeing. It’s a very realistic, immersive game world. You can die from a couple wolves, unlike in Neverwinter, where can slaughter groups of enemies with no problem even at level two or three, a fact which I don’t like because it isn’t realistic.

I do not need to feel like a walking goddess at level two. One or two musty skeletons should be enough for a fresh-faced young halfling.

The sounds in the video are great. The music especially struck me as being classic, calm orchestra music which I prefer in an MMO. This is in stark contrast to Cryptic’s style in Neverwinter, where I actually turned off the music in the character creator, turned it on in the game, then turned it off again.

I did not hear a combat music track in TES:O beta, either, which is a relief. I always have the music off in that Tolkien MMO, even with the great Rohan soundtrack that I’ve never listened to, because I can’t stand the over-excited combat track that kicks in, as it has for the last five years.

The voice-overs also seem well done. I thought they had developed the minimal interface into something more MMO-like and less like the Skyrim interface that was much maligned. That doesn’t seem to be on display here. Surely they will at least be showing proper buff durations in TES:O, especially since PvP is in play.

Too bad someone felt the need to get their beta invite and immediately break the NDA (if that is what happened), but without any invitation extended to the kitties, we have as much sympathy as moon sugar in the wind. This is the way of the kitty.

In Cold Blood

I downloaded APB Reloaded yesterday. I couldn’t run it at launch due to system requirements. Now I can, and now it’s F2P. The character creator is amazing. The hairs are gorgeous. I love the character creation music too.

The NPCs in the tutorial area have more substance than any character I’ve met yet in Neverwinter. Imagine logging into this full-on PvP gang bang game and being confronted by a wall of character backstory text.

I was like, totally LMAO. Yanno.

So. It looks like it might get boring quickly, but in the beginning it’s fun. Plus, I’m drop dead gorgeous, and I have a semi-automatic weapon, so what more could a girl want. APB Reloaded is like a MMO version of Saint’s Row.

I need to find a guide, though. I keep logging out because I don’t know what to do. Sometimes those floating exclamation points are useful. Also, compared to GTA the driving minimap is like WTF?

Yeah, I’m picking up the APB lingo already. Getting down with my homies.

Tumblr (the social blogging platform) is a lot easier. You just sign up, click buttons, and look at thousands of pictures. Sometimes you find some gems, like the image below. My APB character is named Queensnake, and she is also “cold-blooded“.

A New And Beautiful Torment

Some amazing and great RPG news happened this week. No, it wasn’t the announcement of Neverwinter’s open beta date, which is scheduled to be April 30th. This is also a great thing, but when I think of Neverwinter right now, I don’t really think of an RPG.

Contrast that to the coming Torment: Tides of Numenera RPG, which VG247 reported yesterday hit $4,028,412 in funding on Kickstarter, not including additional funding on Paypal and internal donations. This is supposedly a new Kickstarter record for funding.

This is fantastic, and proves a solid demand for a real RPG. Well. It either proves that, or it proves that discriminating RPG fans are starved for a good game. The only relief coming that is on the kitty radar is Dragon Age 3 in the fall. The jury is out on Elder Scrolls until we learn more about roleplaying elements. What are those? Just go to the Torment: Tides Kickstarter page and look at the laundry list.

Torment: Tides is of course the spiritual successor to the great RPG, Planescape: Torment (the image above). My favorite feature is one of the first in the stretch goals: choose PC gender, with gender having an impact on dialogues. That wasn’t available in the original game. Fantastic!

Look at the “cults”, too. I like the “Order of Flagellants”.

Those look like some strongly written factions, which were also a hallmark of the original Planescape: Torment. It’s amazing to me how professional “RPG” writers manage to fall short, and this is one of those areas.

Rich, well-written factions are an imperative component of world immersion, and every faction should have a nemesis or other political position, just like main characters themselves. You have to exaggerate these things, also. Look at the success of Game of Thrones.

Your decisions will impact the game world in Torment. You have companions, and if they are like the Planescape: Torment companions, they are going to be amazing. One listed is named “The Toy”. Your first companion in the original Planescape: Torment was a talking skull named Morte, and the next was a Tiefling named Anna.

I completed the original PS:T, one of the relatively small number of games (i.e. Max Payne I and II, and Mafia I and II) that I’ve completed as a male character. The stretch towards the ending was memorable.

The only questionable issue is that Torment:Tides Of Numenera will use a unique new fantasy setting and not the Planescape campaign from Dungeons & Dragons. I was skeptical of the Dragon Age setting when it first released, but it has slowly grown on me. Hopefully the Numenera setting will be rich with goodness and weirdness.

So, Neverwinter. Open beta in three weeks, and no character wipe, supposedly. I’m still on the fence about the game for all sorts of reasons. I’ll definitely play it, but I’d prefer to wait for more classes and races. And ideally hairstyles. Also, I chose the dog for a companion in beta, but I need to check out the human companions, who might be more interesting in their audibles.

Also, I wanted to design adventures in Neverwinter, but I don’t think the F2P aspect will work for me. I’ve already been through this as a UI designer for the Tolkein MMO, which went from an MMO I believed in to a F2P train wreck with lockboxes falling out of orc pockets and $5 charges to color your horse. Per color set.

Having to pay real money for the privilege of letting someone else profit off my efforts (in Neverwinter) would be completely unacceptable to me, and I don’t see how that won’t happen.

Also, the whole point of my writing and design efforts would be to compensate for what is missing in the first place. I’m not complaining, or anything. I just suspect that I’d rather be working on my own Flash game, which will be for me and not for Cryptic/Perfect World.

More Reading:

Escapist Magazine on Torment funding record.
Rock Paper Shotgun article.

Old D&D Dinosaur Looks At Fourth Edition (4E) D&D For Neverwinter

I’ve written a lot about Neverwinter Online lately after playing two weekends in the beta. A few nights ago after getting frustrated by the cleric in Neverwinter, I researched the topic online and found that the Cleric class is widely considered nerfed in 4E for various reasons.

I had been too lazy to spend hours studying 4E before playing Neverwinter. Clerics don’t raise dead now. Anyone with the heal skill can pay 500 gold and raise almost anyone from the dead by waving their hands around and pretending to be pious in something officially called a “Ritual”. Who knew?

“You bend over the body of your slain comrade, applying
sacramental unguents. Finally his eyes flutter open as he is
restored to life. Level: 8 Component Cost: 500 gp”

I don’t think I’m alone in being ignorant (and skeptical) about 4E D&D. A lot of players, and maybe the great majority, are going to be confused when entering Neverwinter and seeing this new version of D&D that looks nothing like what they are used to, much less in previous Neverwinter campaign games.

I almost wonder if Cryptic should call their game “Neverwinter 4E” or “Fourth Edition” to make it more clear where all of my beloved cleric and mage spells went. It’s also the fourth Neverwinter CRPG, I believe, so that works two ways.

In this post, I want to take my research further with a survey of the D&D 4E game manuals with notes-to-self from a complete 4E newbie. I do want to enjoy this game. It’s a must-play. I have played only up to 3E through the original Neverwinter and all expansions, and Neverwinter 2.

I also played the original D&D books briefly, then advanced D&D with pencil, paper, and friends. Those days were also the dawn of computer games. Speaking of 2E, I purchased the Baldur’s Gate:Enhanced Edition tonight for $19.99 on Steam.

I want to support Beamdog and Overhaul Games (they are looking for an entry-level graphic artist in Edmonton, by the way) for their work on BG1 and the coming BG2 re-release, and I really want to support the possibility of a Baldur’s Gate 3, but this is a topic for another post.

My first impression is that BG:EE is no joke hard. My level one party wiped three times to random encounters on the very first road we took, using the second-easiest game mode. Save games–hello old friends!

Monsters

I quit playing pencil and paper D&D in 1986. According to Wikipedia, that was before 2E when supposedly “references to demons and devils, sexually suggestive artwork, and playable, evil-aligned character types – such as assassins and half-orcs – were removed.” (Wikipedia).

That statement conflicts with the fact that the first Manual of the Planes was published in 1987. Yes, we had lots of trafficking with demons and devils in those days, but I see that even the newer Monster Manual has no such qualms about demons.

Moreover, there was the Planescape setting published in 1994 that further elaborated on the cosmology put forth in Manual of the Planes. Today this manual looks wonderful, with lots of information on the Astral plane, the Feywild, planar travel, and Sigil, City of Doors, which featured in the great RPG Planescape Torment.

I frankly love planar adventures. I have been hoping that Rift (the MMO) would take advantage of its cosmology to take adventurers to other planes, but so far they have only hinted that it might come at some point.

As an old timer, I have one reservation about these reams of detailed information. Back in the day, the information was very sketchy, so there was lots of room for creativity. The Astral Plane was almost a total unknown prior to the Manual of the Planes. You could make things up and use your imagination.

These days you have to be a lore scholar to run a campaign. You need to study the canon. It’s a whole different ball game. It looks like a lot more work to be Game Master. If anyone is actually reading this, here is a quote from the Dungeon Master’s Guide that a lot of MMO and RPG writers should pay more attention to:

“In a campaign, the DMs work together to maintain some continuity from session to session and make sure that adventures advance the larger story.”

In the Neverwinter beta, the story seemed to go around in all directions. Save everyone. I’m not sure why this is suddenly my character’s goal in life. So. It’s a golden rule of writing long fiction (novels), and I believe MMOs too, that all subplots should relate to the main plot in some way.

Gear And Mounts

Reading the Adventurer’s Vault book, a compendium of arms of equipment, I was surprised to see “slots” featured prominently. That’s how old my D&D is. We never used to use the word “slots”.

“Masterwork” armor has become a big feature, which I like because it adds realism. I remember first seeing basic Masterwork armor drop in Icewind Dale in 2000. This has been expanded into lots of special names like “Stalkerhide” and “Rimefire” armor.

Neverwinter is offering a spider mount (video–welcome to advertising), which is actually an official listed mount in the Adventurer’s Vault book. I would have thought spider mounts to be an exclusive mount for Drow. Or something.

But no, go ahead and jump on that there spider, ye halflings, half-orcs, and everyone else who wants to hand over $200 before the game launches. I’m waiting for the plain brown Camel, personally.

The only other observation is that I found it strange that there is a price tag on everything, or even a bunch of tiered values depending on the level of the item in question. Apparently buying items, selling items, and accumulating enormous quantities of gold is important to D&D players these days, like in MMOs.

Gold accumulation was non-existent back in the day. It wasn’t relevant unless you wanted to build a castle with it. Magical items were very rare and were found off big bad guys, almost never purchased like they are today for astral diamonds or whatever currency in Neverwinter.

Characters in 4E

This is the big one, so it has to be sketchy. There are three players’ handbooks for 4E. PHB1 is the main release edition for 4E. PHB2 is an expansion players handbook including mostly primal classes. PHB3 is a second expansion PHB offering mostly psionic classes, and the Monk finally makes an appearance. Significant features include:

group role: 4E has introduced group roles, which are controller (wizard), leader (cleric or warlord), striker (rogue, ranger, warlock), and defender (fighter, paladin), which represent the classic four-member party of wizard, cleric, rogue, and fighter. These roles are meant to define which classes can stand in for each other.

These new role things seem a little pointless and overly video game-oriented to me. A good pen and paper D&D game should not really need these.

power types: D7D classes now have “at-will” powers, “encounter” powers, and “daily” powers. These work a little differently in Neverwinter the MMO, so there is no point in discussing in depth.

power Source: Every class also has a power source. Arcane (drawing on magic energy that permeates the cosmos), Divine (magic that comes from the gods), and Martial (sheer physical training and dedication.)

PHB1: I was curious to see that Dragonborn and Eladrin (Fey) are considered PHB1 races alongside dwarves, halflings, humans, tieflings. Whether these races will feature in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Neverwinter may be another story.

I was surprised that Eladrin were considered needed since we already have a variety of elves. I did not see any mention in the 4E PHB of sun-elf or moon-elf, etc., like in 3E., but apparently they still exist.

The 4E PHB1 classes are fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, cleric, wizard, warlock, and warlord. The Warlock and Warlord are apparently new to 4E. The Warlock looks a lot like the stereotypical World of Warcraft warlock who throws curses and summons demons. The Warlord sounds like a Rift Warlord soul combined with a battle/buffer cleric.

PHB2: The expansion player’s handbook offers five more races and eight more classes. These latter are more Fey oriented. For example, the druid, shaman, barbarian, and warden are grouped as classes that draw power from a “primal power source” having to do with the spirits of nature, which in turn relate to the Feywild (plane of existence).

The PHB2 offers a nice cosmological explanation for these powers, so if you play one of these classes in Neverwinter you might want to read the PHB2. (These classes are not currently in Neverwinter.)

The remaining three PHB2 classes are Invoker, Bard, and Sorcerer. The sorcerer can choose either Dragon magic or Wild magic. I am disappointed that the druid is a controller role and not a leader. On the other hand, a Bard is considered a leader, which is interesting.

The PHB2 expansion races are goliath, gnome, shifter, half-orcs, and devas. These are considered more rare races. Gnomes are apparently identified mainly with Fey. shifters are indeed lycanthropes, which are apparently playable races these days.

The PHB2 also describes “racial paragon paths” for all races in 4E, which apparently are how you are going to be a werewolf and a mage at the same time, for example, and get some more level-up based dragonborne powers.

PHB3: I won’t touch on these, since they are a medley of more exotic classes I’ve never heard of, except for the monk. Here is an overview of 4E character classes.

Neverwinter the MMO is simplified from these rules. For example, the PHB explicitly says every elf can use a longbow. That will not happen in Neverwinter. Also, Neverwinter makes no use of “alignment”, i.e. chaotic, lawful, good, or evil. I believe there are no dialog options for roleplaying your character that I have seen, either.

Starting up Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition tonight, I took the time to read every alignment description when making my character. The game warns the player that alignment will be important and have potential consequences depending on the dialog decisions you make. Lovely.

There are normally 4-5 options for each dialog, and they are not always obvious what alignment they are, like they would be in Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic, for example. I’m liking the game reboot so far.

It could be noted that Neverwinter does use the dice-rolling style of creating your character attributes, like in the old Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale 2E D&D games, which I actually like and appreciate.

Conclusion:

I remember having few problems picking up the 3E rules when I sat down to play Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights in 2002. 4E seems simplified, but not really less obtuse. I liked the old wizard/sorceror/bard classes being related by arcane magic and having spells divided by schools instead of each class being distinct now.

I also noticed that my level one wizard starting Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition tonight had over 20 spells to choose from. I feel sure my level twenty cleric in Neverwinter probably had less than that, including the Divinity shift that modified and empowered all of her spells for a short time.

Neverwinter does seem to following the 4E D&D rules much more closely than I would have expected, being totally unfamiliar with said rules. Now that I am more informed, I feel like I’ll be able to cope, although the cleric will still not be for me. I liked my old cleric too much.

This post just scratches the surface of 4E D&D. I just sat down for this evening to look at these things. I might add to it later, but I want to get back to some actual gaming. For more information, Google more or do we did back in the eighties: visit your local bookstore.

Asshats Have A Place In Gaming Culture

There is a lot I could say about the Neverwinter Beta (round two for me) this last weekend.

I got to L20. I got a companion (the dog) and enjoyed some outdoor scenery, which didn’t win any Kitty awards, but it was acceptable. It wasn’t “open world” as much as I expected.

Healing aggro was broken. All gear rewards I received were unusable due to one or two levels above me. Cleric self-heals were nerfed to such uselessness that I took them off my bar. I was not happy and quit playing halfway through Saturday.

Not because a class was nerfed in beta. I just began to realize that the Neverwinter store sells healing and resurrection, so clerics will be competing with the store.

For example, my cleric died a number of times due to the self-heal nerf. On the death screen, I had an option to buy a Cure Serious Wounds scroll from the store, but I could *not* cast a CSW to save my own life.

This is stupid. Also, to quote someone in the forums: “The only way to resurrect someone at this point is to pay real money for a rez scroll from the zen store, and I think that’s a HUGE mistake.” I also imagine clerics will now be potion-buyers, including, no doubt, premium store potions.

I.e. from another quote, which I found to be true: “The Cleric with no heals (now) uses far more pots than any other class.” I agree, and at the same time the DPS stayed low, and worse yet per another cleric forum thread, this situation will not be changed back. I used many healing potions from level 14 to 20, and made lots of repeated runs back to the healing circle to get healed up.

Between this and the gearing/time necessities of being a healer in the first place, which also typically involve store usage, and the inability to target except by facing, I no longer plan to play a cleric. I’m thinking to wait for more classes, like a paladin or druid, and wait for TESO at the same time. Of course, DDO players had to wait for years to get a Druid class, if I remember right.

A D&D cleric without a rez or raise dead, because those are store-only? Really?! F2P makes my head explode.

PAX East ended over the weekend, and news-wise it seemed to fall flat. Turbine didn’t have a booth at all. Blizzard had a big announcement that fizzled (a trading card game based on WoW). Chris at Levelcapped wrote a nice PAX mega-postup. The most interesting observations to me were how the people at PAX East were obnoxious. He says:

“People just seem to really prefer being angry, annoyed, and grumpy, and find it easier to give into the need to let anyone and everyone know about it. I cannot fathom how people claim to love gaming, yet feel that it’s more important to be negative, to be abusive to one another, and to treat one another and the hobby like absolute shit.“

I then noticed in his previous post that he has only just reached level cap with his second character ever. The mystery is solved. This is probably why he is still in a good mood. Not enough raiding or endgame PvP gear grinds. He also calls gaming a “hobby” and not a lifestyle.

Chris is obviously a dedicated gamer and great writer, but I wouldn’t dis people for douchebaggery when they are ten times more dedicated than you are. Hardcore and douchebaggery go hand in hand, and they are an important part of the scene. They go hand in hand with gaming.

In fact, I don’t like obnoxious, annoying people either in real life, but how can you argue that Fawkes (Will Wheaton) and the Axis Of Anarchy jerks in The Guild aren’t part of what makes gaming awesome and never boring?

First of all, this is nothing new. Before video games, there was chess, which has a history filled with jerks, egotists, racists, and general troglodytes. Certainly not all arrogant jerks are good players, and maybe these are the people to whom Chris is referring.

My point is just that as an average (expert-level in college) player, I would never bash a chess grandmaster because he is a jerk. If he smelled bad, I would never mention it.

Speaking of chess, there is another factor to consider: a lot of people see games as a competition, even MMOs. The goal is to win, even by cheating.

For example, to continue the chess analogy, in a college tournament in Florida, I had a winning chess position against an older guy, an average player. His side was in bad shape, and he had no move left except to lose. He offered a draw. I took it. Why?

I’m a Buddhist. Then and now, I don’t really care about winning. I did this all the time, even in tournaments. I drew a lot of winning positions. I really don’t like confrontation, and actually prefer cooperative games over games where you try to “beat” people.

So in chess if someone offered a draw when their position seemed lost, I considered it to be lame, undignified, dishonorable, and I lost respect for that person, but I typically went with it. I won, and I didn’t care about the official score.

So what did this guy do? When we signed each others’ scorecards, he wrote a comment insulting my intelligence, as if to say “sucker!” Who is the idiot? Maybe the idiot is the guy who cares about winning so much instead of playing with class, which is what a lot of game developers are doing with F2P and DLC these days.

What’s the moral of the story? Badass can be classy, but it can also be 100% pathetic. Which are you?

People these days like to bash and make fun of forum trolls, crybabies, playstyle snobs, and angry gamers, and I don’t like this trend. I support evil (excepting corporate evil ruining RPGs, which is another story). These people are a real and entertaining part of the gaming culture, and I love them. Even Francis.

A new MMO blogger came onto the Kitty radar today. If you’d like to see some more blogging about the Neverwinter Beta, plus some pics, the LvlingLife blog is worth a look. She apparently did not see what the cleric was like two weeks ago, so she will probably cope.

Neverwinter Beta: First Impressions

A caveat and apology: I’ve only played about seven hours or so at this point (updated), but I wanted to get my first impressions down while they are in my head. I have other things to do this weekend.

Overall, I’m really impressed by Neverwinter, and I’m having fun. Here are my impressions, which I wrote down as I played through the game with Oddra Undermoon, my freaky Halfling cleric a la Christina Ricci.

Functionality:

I was impressed by the security ID check via email right off the top. It’s good to see Rift’s system becoming a standard. You also get a 5-minute? logout forewarning if you go idle too long while fixing dinner, which I liked. And thanks to Cryptic’s hidden @(handle) way of identifying a character, you don’t have to worry about your name choices being taken.

Rooting during combat is annoying and frustrating at first, and a lot of people have complained about it, but it’s still good. Rooting for skills helps keep the twitchy, red-circle frogging aspect at a manageable level for us old folks.

Healing looks like it will be a game for first-person shooter players. Having to manually aim to target your heals on party members while they are fighting seems really hard. I noticed a call in a forum thread for a “target lock system similar to Tera’s”. I guess it should be appreciated that the game has a real healer class in the first place, but there currently are some concerns.

The player-made dungeons were up and running, but I didn’t try them. I didn’t see how to tell what level something is for. I also wanted a rating system broken down into genre categories like action, story, lore, romance (which is what I’d like to write), and so on, instead of just a star rating. I’m probably missing some things.

The deed/achievement/lore book is really beautiful and intriguing. I noticed a lot of achievements for being a Foundry creator, as well as exploring and supporting Foundry content. Super cool!

I expected to hate the glowy trail, but it wasn’t all that horrible. They say you can turn it off, but you can’t due to the quest writing. It’s the same in LotRO. The writers don’t want to make the players read too much, so they assume you’re using the trail at the expense of realism and developing setting through descriptive writing.

“Where are those bears?” “Oh, they are down the hill next to the old well. My wife used to pick strawberries down there, but the bears are too dangerous these days.”

I do like the halo effect when you have an NPC targeted, because it is very reminiscent of the visual style of the original Neverwinter. In fact, the whole interface and style is sort of old school and appealing, a feature that I’ve commented on in a previous post.

The music was like Champions: a little too much energy non-stop for me. I took my headphones off a half-hour into the character creation. I turned the music off completely after about an hour into the game. Overall the sound effects are excellent.

I really liked how enemies are alerted to your presence when you enter a room, or not, if you they have their backs to you. I didn’t notice a cover effect, however. Enemies would have positions of partial cover, but it didn’t seem to do anything for them. Maybe it’s a feature not yet implemented.

Lore, Story, and Writing:

Not enough of it. If I didn’t know Neverwinter and the story, I’d be a little lost. The dialogues need more “oh, you’re new here aren’t you, well you see…”

I also really hope the game will launch with some real opening cinematics instead of an obtuse slideshow that doesn’t accomplish any emotional evocation.

No “Smiling Jack”. Your character has no friend that lives, and there are no likeable, beloved NPCs at the start to make you feel welcome. This is a writing failure. You do get a party in your honor, but to me the scene was a bit flat and hard to believe. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to how incredibly heroic I’d just been while soloing the doom of Neverwinter at level two.

Only three of eleven of the selectable divines to worship are goddesses, and none of them are evil. I could not worship Shar or Loviatar, i.e. and therefore play an evil cleric as I mentioned I wanted to do in a previous post. I wanted to side with the rebels to overthrow the Neverwinter rulership, actually. I wanted to negotiate instead of kill them, but the main quest allowed only one path up to the point I played. I liked later that evocation of the gods would play a daily role though, at least for a cleric, as an incentive system to log in. This reward system for logging in at least every 24 hours is interesting.

The character backgrounds are nice. You get a map of Faerun, and you can click a city to hail from, with a story. You can also enter a backstory right at character creation, which is unusual and a thoughtful, welcome addition by Cryptic.

I also noticed the Henchman system in my character progress panel. This system, which I’d forget about, should offer a nice roleplay aspect. A henchman also helps you in some main quests. I’m really hopeful the same quest design can be used via the Foundry, because it would be perfect for the little campaign I wanted to maybe create.

Looks:

The game environments look beautiful on max settings. The lighting is particularly nice in spots, as in the above screenshot clip. Monster lairs look a bit lived-in with more gritty detail than one would expect from an average MMO.

The player characters are sketchier. The creation is robust at the outset with 7 races supposedly available at launch, and lots of sliders, including fingernail length, breasts, and heels. I would have liked a lot more color tones, which seem unnecessarily limited.

I wanted my Tiefling to have grey-ish skin like my old horned (evil) cleric in Neverwinter Nights. I also wanted more horn and tail options.

The scraggly hair is my biggest complaint. I only found two female hairs across all races that I liked enough to use. I had some trouble making a good-looking elf, then abandoned my elf within ten minutes due to the jerky animations and figure.

I liked my halfling the best for looks and animations, and solely for those things I will likely play one, unless the character creation improves (it never does from beta to launch, in my middling experience).

Animations:

In addition to stiff animations, another thing I noticed were stiff facial expressions. There were no smiles to be seen in the character creation–all tight-lipped Al Gore situations. I noticed the resting/standing still animations are similarly minimal, compared to LotRO’s more natural-looking, albeit repetitive, resting poses.

I think animations and character creation will be a big ongoing source of complaints and requests for improvement. These things just can’t be shortcut, but still they do it. I also wished my makeup was separate from my tattoos instead of locked as either/or.

Emotes were awkward due to the targeting scheme. I would try to emote to someone, and they would move, and it would screw up. Forget about emoting as you run past someone. Cheer emote didn’t work when I tried to congratulate someone. Dance emotes didn’t seem to be working. It was difficult to sit in a chair in a tavern, although I could kick the chairs around.

Conclusion:

This was just a first impression of Neverwinter. I did like it, in general. If it were a subscription game, I’d be planning to buy and play it at launch after only this one night of beta. I’d even be calling this a must-try MMO for any fan of the fantasy MMO genre. I wish it were a subscription game and not F2P. It’s like a paradise veiling a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Yes, it’s a F2P game though with all that entails, including in-game NPCs giving direct access to high-quality gear shops that only use astral currency which are to real-money ZEN transactions in some sort of complex and clever currency scheme. Cryptic does seem to be taking it easy on store buttons and splash advertisements, but this is only the beta and these things can and will change later.