Posted on May 17, 2013, in Episodes and tagged blip tv, chaosd1, cryptic, D&D, DDO, dungeons and dragons, mmo, mmo grinder, mmorpg, neverwinter, review. Bookmark the permalink. 54 Comments.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
MMO Grinder 
i’ve been playing this game a lot lately and I didn’t notice that much terribleness from the community… then again I do play when highschool students are at school so that may just be me.
I’ve been playing this since the open beta launch. The level 34 dungeon that ends with a dragon that you had in your footage seems to be about the free-to-play wall, from what I’ve seen. I don’t know if it’s just a lot of bad groups or what, but a sudden walled-off-by-difficulty boss tied with a reminder that you can pay $20 for a handfull of 1-ups and handily win every time you die doesn’t help their case.
I managed to kill it… At level 35.. when a 60 healer was helping us. I’ll admit it’s a spike in difficulty, but it’s not impossible. It just requires the amount of teamwork this community doesn’t have.
Scratch that, finally got it done with a team of around appropriate level (highest was 38, I think,) it seems that parties formed in zone chat are a lot better coordinated than those made in the dungeon finder utility. This isn’t a one-time thing I’ve noticed either, and it’s a strange phenomenon that just saying “I’ll go, this is my class” yields groups capable of doing hard tasks, or easy tasks quicker.
05/19/13 RIP economy of Neverwinter. It really is sad that it happened so soon…
We went over this in the most recent podcast. It’s not really as bad as the panic machine wants people to believe. The situation was dealt with and a rollback was issued.
I certainly hope it’s enough, I have a friend who didn’t get banned and still has LOADS of ad after the markets went nuts.
Oh, if anyone doesn’t want to be a Fartkiss Butthunder, I suggest Googling “Dungeons & Dragons name generator.” I’m surprised that thing wasn’t a mandatory part of the game.
It is. People are just generally dipshits like that.
Wow…this actually might be THE f2p mmo for me. You know, that one mmo everyone has that they stick with? I just booted the game up yesterday and I am hooked. I love the battle system, and how quests are relegated to your own personal instances. I feel like the hero of my own story. The voice acting is very tolerable and nice to listen to, plus the game is just chock full of lore (to be expected from a D&D game). Music and atmosphere is nice as well. Hopefully it just keeps getting better the more I level. I am quite hooked.
why do you think they chose not to have a zoom feature at all, aside from while being in observation mode? iv played multiple games that vaguely have the same type of target selection setup, and allow you to zoom without any issue. iv only started the game a little while ago, but to be completely honest, not being able to zoom in or out while in combat or just because i want too, is a rather big turn-off… more so than i thought possible. do you think it’ll be patched after/during open beta? or do you feel its even a issue?
I noticed that. I like to switch back & forth between 1st & 3ed person by zooming. Oh well, NWN 1 & 2 had no first person or zooming either.
i have played NVN, but not by any extent. i felt it worked in that game because ( if i remember right, its been a loooong time ago…) that point of view worked because it was more of a top-down art-style,was it not? i didnt have much issue there. but as a 3rd person goes for mmo’s i just feel its one of the first things to program. ” okay… first on the check list. walk.. run… move camera around.. and zoom! “
FYI there is a console command that allows zooming (or something like it):
/gfxsetdefaultfov xx, takes a number from 30 to 150
Set default Field of View (default 55)
So it’s there in the game now they just have to maybe enable it from the UI or something.
i know this is a rather late reply, but zooming and FOV are vastly different. set FOV too far in one direction and it really shows itself.
Surprised you didn’t talk about how horribly unbalanced PvP is as well, to the point if you don’t buy a mount, you become a serious hamper on your team. Which is depressing for me since I am stuck with the starter mount, at level 60. (Which also leads to problems later on with areas becoming mind boggling massive and taking half an hour to run back to town) Back to the PvP point, they really didn’t think it through, with maps literally designed to benefit teams with faster mounts and punish those without.
Hard to talk about it when no one plays it without afking.
Haha, that is so true, we got to the point where we would ask the party lead to kick AFK’s, unless we were unfortunate enough to have the lead be AFK =/
When it comes to name restrictions, no one does it better than LotRO.
Well if there’s one thing I’m really good at doing, it’s ignoring other gamers.
Glad to hear the story is good; it’s just not Neverwinter without a good story. I remember the premium mod from NWN1 that let you be an underwater zombie pirate. I wonder if that will pop up somewhere down the road.
I’m enjoying it sofar. The character creators might be stingy for Cryptic, but it’s pretty generous, I feel like I’m roleplaying in a story instead of just running around doing unrelated things, the camera controls are nice, my settings look & play well considering I have no graphics card (yet), the voice acting is good (even if the characters look stoic & barely move their mouths when they speak), I haven’t encountered any assholes yet, & the leveling isn’t too slow.
My only complaints are minor ones; I’ve become too accustomed to stand-&-heal, so I have to get used to potions again. It’s pretty stingy with loot too. Lastly I have a blatant preference for putting points into passive skills over moves & it has no passives.
I was wrong about the stingy loot. It’s only the first 4 levels when enemies don’t drop.
Ooh, & put on your headphones; the ambiance is great.
Anyone notice that this fantasy game doesn’t use “Blue” resource to use your spells/abilities? No mana/magic/energy points. All your non-at-will powers are on cool-downs or a special bar rises as you attack. Personally, I’m glad it’s not included. A lot of games seem redundant in how they limit your abilities with both an energy cost AND a cool down.
Also, a lot of ideas from Cryptic’s other 2 games (Champions Online and Star Trek Online went into Neverwinter. Such as:
Feat points are very similar to CO’s Specialization points.
Enchanting items by placing a magic rock into a slot is CO’s Mod system.
Improving your enchantments works the same way as Fusing Mods in CO.
The Profession system is an altered version of STO’s Duty-Officer (personally, I enjoyed that more than STO).
Have I missed any other ideas from Crypic’s other games that made it into Neverwinter?
Oddly enough, I got up to lvl 25 with a Guardian Fighter, but now that Champions is on my mind, I head back there. :)
I tried this game, but it ran like complete wet rotting garbage at the minimum settings in the first city you visit. It ran barely average when I reduced the resolution to minimum, but then everything was so blurry I couldn’t see anything.
Basically it was unplayable. Never had this issue occur in any other game, so I guess its not optimized for every setup yet.
Yeah, optimization is a bit busted. I didn’t have as much trouble with this as I did TERA, and I’m not sure what card they recommend. Also when I went to widescreen, I could no longer run the game on High setting without it being unbearably choppy. Lighting also seems to cause the most issue.
I’d like to note that Cryptic did introduce a version of the Zen exchange to Champions a few months ago. So all 3 active Cryptic games can have you trade their crystal currency (Questionite, Dilithium and Astral Diamonds) for Zen, but only Neverwinter uses the diamonds for the auction house.
You know, I never paid that much attention to the community as the people I play with are transfers from Champions and Star Trek Online, so I didn’t bother. I think I’ll be looking now and making my ignore list a LOT longer.
What I don’t like about this game is that is lacks some classes I really really need in an DnD type of game.
NO ranged classes other then magical is not fun. Also no druid is also kind of sad…oh where’s the prestige classes like Blackguard?
Needs much more classes+prestige classes to be appealing for me…Neverwinter Nights has so many great classes…but Tiefling is great! Really happy to see them as I liked them in Neverwinter Nights.
It’s rumored (and been datamined apparently) that the next class will be a Ranger class, and not that this helps with your issue of “no physical ranged damage” but the other class set to release is a Warlock. Also, it’s pretty early, so there’s the whole room for improvement thing I was mentioning. Cryptic seems likely to listen to the players, so it wouldn’t harm you to suggest the idea on their forums.
Well THAT would at least help a bit having a Ranger type class. I tried them all out and only the trickster was kinda neat but not making me want to play it often unlike Age of Wushu which hooked me on the Wanderer’s pretty much.
Thanks for the reply didn’t know there were rumors about a Ranger class.
Neverwinter is pretty fun so far, but I cant see myself playing it after I reach the level cap. The ability to convert AD into Zen is nice, but when the Zen prices in the cash shop are so high ($10-$40), and grinding enough AD to convert to Zen takes so long, the only people who will actually be able to buy cash shop items without spending money are people who play this game far too much. Anyone who wants to know more about the f2p model in Neverwinter should check out this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/1dry0g/neverwinters_f2p_model_what_you_need_to_know/
While the game isn’t blatantly pay2win, there are certainly alot of things that are unfeasible for players to obtain without grinding for months or dropping a fairly hefty sum of money in the cash shop.
Another problem I have with Neverwinter is that it feels like it was built from the ground up around its f2p model. Things that could normally be obtained with regular in-game currency in other MMOs, such as respecs, mounts, bags, etc, have to be bought with either AD or Zen in Neverwinter. Personally, when I play a f2p game, I don’t want to feel like the game is pressuring me into buying things by making the vanilla experience unnecessarily grindy, inconvenient, or time-consuming, which I feel Neverwinter does constantly.
they did have alot of crashes however they quickly remedied those right away they took all three games down to fix the login server so they didn’t have that problem for very long.
If they had handled it like Anet handles bugs I’d see a problem there. Every game has launch issues including pricing in stores and such, I am sure that if people vote with their wallets there won’t be a problem. People didn’t do that with GW2 and now that company has mismanaged that game into the ground with so many issues, they’ve actually talked about working on an expansion as the only means of fixing those issues.
Cryptic isn’t like that. They are working on an expac but theirs will be free with all of the upgrades and non-romulan improvements intact.
And the economy in GW2 is awful they have 1 currency 1 and then cut off people from farming mats even in events so they basically have 0 gold all the time. It’s criminal or should be because they don’t want to change this in order to ensure that new players who have reached level 80 won’t have enough gold to buy the items they need from their super inflated TP (auction house) where that’s the only place you can get enchants for your gear.
NWO practically throws enchants and gear at you for cheap and for playtime only, you don’t have to buy stuff from the store and you can farm for mats anywhere.
You know, I’m kinda surprised you didn’t mention all the crashes Cryptic has been having, as they not only came out of nowhere, but completely crashed all the Cryptic games, including STO and CO.
Rhix last name wouldn’t happen to be Scalesinger?
The Foundry system looks interesting enough for me to give this game a try when the Paladin and Avenger classes have been added.
I have a foundry quest : Vorex Crypt . check it out
NW-DRX6KJSW3 is the short code
why are all your videos low rez now i have fios and i am sick of looking at low rez low def crap , love the show
That is the fault of Blip. The max rez I can upload is 480p even though I render in 720p. Originally you could pay for a Pro account to upload in HD, but since the Blipocalypse the removed the Pro account option, and I don’t see an HD option yet.
If you want to see the vids in HD, my YouTube channel is ChaosD1 and those vids are available in 720p. At least the eps I rendered in HD.
Aah, that explains why it looks like the entire Channel Awesome staff appears to have switched to cheaper cameras.
ok , thanks for letting us know i will check out the youtube CH.
Yanno, I just want to say… Neverwinter is NOT released. This is an open beta that everyone is treating as release. Because it’s always been intended as a F2P game, most people don’t understand why they’d even have an Open Beta. Some might even think this would be an attempt to release an unfinished game and whenever anyone complains they can just fob off the excuse “Open Beta!”.
I haven’t seen anyone who thinks that, and I don’t necessarily think that, but it seems like something people would think.
My time in playing up to 40 has really shown how it’s an open beta too. The class and race labled “Coming Soon!”, the messages sent in other languages, the mailbox duplicating messages after deleting one, the Helm’s Hold map being askew (Really, hit M when there and just try to navigate.), the constant, near-daily shard maintinences, the fact that only one paragon path is available for any class, Foundry bugs that are mentioned in the description, the missing Foundry tutorial, minor bugs and glitches that popped up a few times but I’ve forgotten about now… this is Beta, not release. I just feel the need to clarify that whenever I see someone say “Neverwinter was released!”
In addition, while you don’t NEED the cash shop, for people who don’t grind dailies or play the Auction House the Astral Diamonds drop very rarely and can be a bother to get. I’m level 40 and only have around 20k diamonds, nowhere NEAR enough to get ANYTHING on the cash shop. But this is me, and it might be a somewhat minor complaint.
In addition, while you CAN get by without buying anything in the cash shop, that’s all you can do… Get By. Like you said, inventory space is painfully limited, your only reliefs (so far) being a bag early on, and a bag in a level 30 quest. You’re limited to white-rarity companions, which stop levelling up at rank 15. As far as I can tell you can’t get any profession gear or crafters without either buying some in the shop or spending 18 hours waiting for a white-quality item. Mounts are expensive (Although as someone who picks up everything and sells everything I pick up that wasn’t a huge problem for me) unless you buy it in the cash shop. The game is not “Pay to Win” it’s “Pay to More Than Get By”.
Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoy this game (And I’m someone who’s in the middle-ground between those two sides you mentioned. I make names that are actual names (I’d say look for Mekel Galasarn, but I’m on Mindflayer… which I think might have less stupidity due to it not having the “cool” name of Dragon, but maybe I’m oblivious), but I don’t RP in MMOs very much. I’m also a casual gamer who games hard, plays the game to completion, then moves on to the next one… er, maybe that’s not casual) and I might continue playing it towards the end. There’s just various issues and the like that can come up.
And of course, this is just my opinion. Everyone’s free to their own.
Oh yes, and DEFINATELY play Neverwinter Nights, it’s great. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia in me talking (It was the first RPG I played, the first D&D-based game I played, and the first Bioware game I played, and I love them all) but still, it’s good. And if you play the expansions you’ll find out why discovering there was a “Deekin Street” in Neverwinter just made me squee a little in fanboyish delight.
NWN1 is the best RPG I have ever played storywise, & I will play any RPG you toss at my head.
I bore very easily, but I replayed it 3 times in a row.
Cryptic and PerfectWorld have a tendancy to turn an open beta into a release without telling anyone. Further, since there will be no more character wipes this really does seem like its going that route. So that is why people are calling it released.
They do? I did not know that. Huh.
Doesn’t seem like the best of practices in my opinion, but maybe that’s just me…
I’d noticed that about the community as well. I remember specifically seeing someone whine about “casual players”, and seeing as I consider myself a casual player who generally tries to act civil, I went off on them. Unfortunately, I’d neglected to set the chat channel to Zone, so I was basically talking to myself. :|
Still, as far as the dungeons go, I haven’t really had any negative experiences even in defeat.
And if I may highlight a counterpoint, I’ve noticed that at times whenever I’m having trouble with a larger monster in the field, passing players will stop and give a hand, then leave the loot for me to pick up. No snarky commentary on my playing ability or insults. I’ve tried to thank people for such acts and occasionally pay it forward, because honestly? If more people in MMOs acted like that, I’d probably play more MMOs.
Also, I forgot to mention, but I did fix up my Foundry quest “Cult of Watdefaq”, and it’s been published. Though I realize that with a name like “Cult of Watdefaq”, it might have gotten flagged. (I swear, the name is the only thing awfully punny about it; it’s otherwise a very serious quest, if linear.)
The name didn’t turn up anything. Do you have the shortcode?
Actually, it seems that loot drops are per char. They leave the loot for you to pick up because, as far as I can tell, they can’t see it. In dungeons where everyone picks up everything people will run around snagging up gold and greens, but sigils and white trash and other stuff like that ends up just laying there.
I was about to reply to him with the same thing. The fact they didn’t “take his stuff” is because on their screen his loot drops didn’t exist. We found that happens even in party mode, as when the BT groups was running through closed beta, we’d often say, “Oh, a potion dropped, does anyone need it?” which was always followed by “Where?” “What potion?” and “I don’t see anything.”
This is actually why I say the gameplay lends itself well to the solo player. There’s no KS. No stolen drops (save for the rampant loot ninja-ing, of course.) and no stolen quest credit. Those people likely aren’t just helping you out of the goodness of their heart, it’s because in a manner similar to Guild Wars 2, they’re also being rewarded for doing so, and it doesn’t penalize you. Trust me, this practice in some other MMO games isn’t considered “helping” and when you’re dealing with games that use the tagging system, good luck getting anyone to just help you out of the kindness of their heart. Compare this to the incident I spoke about in my Raiderz review, where a player and his friend watched me die so they could steal the weakened quest mob I was fighting away from me, and you’ll see what kind of asshattery could potentially exist.
Even so, it’s kind of cool that people can do that, whatever the reason.
I swear, this review makes me simaltaniously want and not want to play the game. On the one hand, a game that obviously wants to have a huge rping community. I love rping and a big reason I love your reviews is that you mention that aspect of the games. On the other hand…. The community makes me feel like I should… wait. Maybe in a few months the good players will be left and the others will move on. That’d be nice. I wouldn’t mind playing this game if that happens.
Pingback: Tell us how you really feel (Episodes 41, 42, and 43) | MMO Grinder
Pingback: The MMO Grinder 2013 Year In Review | MMO Grinder
Pingback: Backtrack: Neverwinter | MMO Grinder
Pingback: (Long overdue) Off-Week Update (5-26-2013) | MMO Grinder