Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 1: Intro & The Early Game

This will  be a 3 part series on the new MMO by Cryptic, Neverwinter. It entered "open beta" about 2 weeks ago, and I have been playing it with friends pretty much non stop ever since, until a few days ago at max level. This blog arc will be a story of 3 parts, I will discuss the "phases" of the MMO (the early beginning game, the mid game, and the end game). I will speak of what I like, dislike, what could be fixed, and what should be learned as a lesson for future MMOs.

Part 1: The Early Game
Pros:

• Excellent character customization, including an excellent cascade of customization complexity - you could go with a wide variety of presets, or tweak everything yourself.
• Excellent race selection, and excellent monetization scheme of having paid-for race choices (at launch, drow is locked for a month except for founders).
• Excellent initial class distribution, with a few questionable choices.
• Excellent CGI intro, defining the conflict and setting well.
• The dynamic patching is excellent, enabling players to obtain game assets when needed rather than in raw bulk patches, but the game keeps it an option in the launcher to update immediately everything, which I did overnight after a few days playing and tiring of the ~3 minutes of file patching per zone that was necessary. Excellent tech.
• The opening zone (and the entire game) is voice acted, adding to the atmosphere.
• Visuals are wonderful for an MMO, animations are usually good, soundtrack is excellent.
• Gameplay is good for an action mmo, the best yet in my opinion - animations lock your character in place to add weight, and you have 3 discretized classes of spells - at will (spammable), encounter (short cd), and daily (once per fight usually, require obtaining action points by doing your job to use).
• The intro zone has a dedicated story of getting into the city, introduces the main villain, and shows off the most important game mechanics.
• Visuals on the bridge (mortar fire, fire in general, crumbling expanses) are great.
• The dracolich corpse at the start is a direct tie in to the intro cinematic and is a really good story builder.
• Tutorials are informative - abilities are flashy as you level up and skills appear on your bars, tips tell you the specifics well.
• You are able to write your own story for when people inspect your character.
• Character titles, including two right off the bat from your god and home.
• Moderately good server stability for an MMO launch.

Cons:

• The characters introduced in the cinematic are never touched on again, and the game seriously (in the long run) lacks persistent characters besides Jonas and his wife throughout the spellplague storyline. This starts here with your companion on the bridge, who dies. Barely any other characters are persistent (and the Sargent you constantly report back to in Protector's Enclave is barely characterized after the start).
• The ability scores are really stupid to have in character creation - they aren't actually rolled, there are just ~8 presets of score rolls to pick from. While mousing over them tells you what is "good" for your class, you have no idea what really is the best for you, and any new player is going to be completely lost on what to pick here. Ability scores also matter a lot. The consequence is that a major mechanism of the player is defined off the bat, remains unchangeable forever, and can cripple a character before its even made.
• Abilities are slow to come by - it takes a while to unlock all of your (outrageous!) 8 ability binds (counting the tab class ability). It makes combat really lackluster at the start since you really are only spamming one at will and one encounter and doing nothing else.
• The paragon system in conjunction with the "specialized" classes like great weapon fighter and trickster rogue rather than just fighters and rogues means down the road the game is going to either focus on providing classes with paragon paths (good) or adding excessive classes (bad).

Overall, the beginning is a resounding positive. The combat is sound, the graphics and audio are good, nothing is glaringly wrong - in most bad MMOs, right off the bat bad textures or broken models or crappy combat or lag would hint at flawed games off the bat, but that doesn't happen here. The game has some polish.

My primary criticism of the introduction is a lack of engrossing story - you land on a beach with a hand waived boat crash, you progress through a battlefield doing things for random people, you find a guard who goes with you across a bridge, you find the necromancer from the cinematic, fight a hulk, finish up, and never touch on any of this again. It is a pervasive issue in MMOs that the stories rarely carry weight - the effects of the intro only lead you to the Enclave in the city, and while NPCs will remark you were the one who fought on the bridge, it quickly evaporates and the impact on the story is negligible.

Also, the presence of prerolled sets of ability scores to choose from in my opinion is an unnecessary hold over from D&D proper - yes, ability scores are essential in D&D, but making every class have a forced preset of ability scores (plus a forced level set allocation of scores) would help mitigate a newbie from putting all their points in intellect as a fighter (or taking a sub-optimal initial score roll at character creation). Considering there is no way to re-roll your ability scores even with zen, it becomes an early game core mechanic that can make or break your character.

The issue with class distribution is two fold - for one, your ability to tailor your character to your job is limited if they release classes as specialized roles in combat rather than paragon paths. I've argued in the past why providing few classes with discrete role customization that isn't on the fly changeable like a wow spec is the best way to make each character unique but keep everyone capable of doing a useful job.

In Neverwinter, this is the principle reason there are so few guardian fighters - because they are pure tanks, and no matter what their paragon paths are they will still be a sword and shield fighter, they don't give off an epic appearance like the dps roles, cleric, or gwf. If there were a single fighter, where one paragon path was great weapon fighting and the other was guardian tanking, the shortages of both classes would almost certainly be less severe because more people would have rolled a class that had options in their role.

It seems apparent the reasons for the decision - paragons are about a few powers, not class function in combat. The classes are defined by the weapons they use, and the various styles of using any given weapon set falls into a paragon path (I anticipate at least, given that every class only has one paragon path at launch). But like I said, this means role customization is lacking, and it means everyone is pigeonholed into a single function, and while the cost of leveling alts isn't nearly as bad as it is in other games, the lack of any heirloom-esque items to speed up the process of a reroll (which since the foundry nerf means you are going to be repeating the same content over again each time) which isn't very fun for anyone.

But overall the early game is great. It is probably why the MMO is popular right now - you do get a good impression besides the blemishes. In part 2, I'll be harsher, have no fear.