Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 2: The Mid Game

The mid game starts in Blacklake and ends in the Northdark. It spans from level 5 to 60, which means it is the super-majority of leveling content. Ends up, that is most of what it is, and that is what I'm touching on here.


Part 2: The Mid Game
Pros:

• There are options to leveling - foundries, quests, dungeons, skirmishes, and pvp all award xp, so you can level any way you want (in theory).
• Zones have directed stories - you start near the entrance, progress through quest hubs, and eventually reach a dungeon at the end. Every zone has a corresponding big bad in a dungeon to kill, and all these dungeons have epic level 60 versions too.
• Power's are obtained quickly early on and peter out in higher levels to 2 - 3 new abilities every 10 levels with the bulk of powers early on. This means you get the majority of your ability choices quickly, and have actual skill choices early on.
• Most abilities are useful for something, at least on the TR, CR, and Cleric from my experience. There are few stand out "garbage" powers that are useless, but few and far between. In most circumstances, the powers you run are situational, which is good for the choice paradigm.
• Quest dialog and most mobs have voice overs, which help immersion.
• The graphics are great, and the game runs exceptionally well on Arch (which is where I'm running it from).
• Music is great.
• There really isn't much pressure in the pay to win direction while leveling. The level process is really fast so XP boosts are not necessary, and you can easily hit max level just doing the leveling quest content. You can't usually afford a mount as soon as you hit level 20, but you almost always can by 23, and the uselessness of gold for the most part makes it easy to justify the purchase. Bag space is the biggest offender, but you do get 2 bags (one at 10 and one at 30) that somewhat offset the bag pains, and proper inventory management lets you do entire quest hubs, visit the vendor, and repeat ad nauseam without really feeling a space crunch.
• PVP auto levels you to the X9th level in a bracket, so there is no level imbalance. Ability and gear imbalance can contribute somewhat to the experience, but each battle gives half a level and you can get max level pretty quickly through it, so it is pretty balanced leveling pvp. I feel like they learned well from both the failings of the no-balancing WoW and the everyone-to-max level TOR.
• Beyond the visuals, the environments are amazing. Being in the crater of a volcano, or climbing a massive Ice Giant's pick, or battling Gray Wolves beneath a giant flaming Wolf carved mountain all present epic landscapes. The look is great and really conveys strong atmosphere. A real standout was the Chasm, which progressively got more corrupted the deeper you went.

Cons:

• There are very few consistent characters and no overarching story arc in the leveling content. It means there is very little engagement with any zones story because you know the characters are fleeting.
• You don't change the world through your actions. You go places, kill monsters, they will still be there, Helm's Hold is still under demon control, Icespire is still covered in giants, etc - there is no real phasing, so the game doesn't change as you accomplish things, cheapening the engagement even more.
• Quests are rarely dropped, and always require running back to town. This is offset by having multiple progressive objectives in a single quest, but the need to go back to the Protector's Enclave to turn in a completion quest after each zone accentuates this issue - even though you do go back for a reason (usually when you finish a zone, there is another one to progress to).
• While the zones looked awesome, very few environments were manipulable or changed during progression. It was a very static world - besides the mobs standing around waiting to fight, the quest NPCs idling in camps, the world itself is fairly unchanging.
• There is a lot of "free" content here - the leveling process is still drug out, and these zones were all complex works of art that took a lot of effort, but they still reek of unnecessary.
• With the foundry nerf, the only ways to level now are quests and pvp. Dungeons and skirmishes give awful xp per run and for the time commitment, but the gear you get is so fleeting they often aren't worth doing outside the fun of seeing them the first time (which is really fun!). Foundries are almost never worth doing anymore, ever, which I feel hurts one of the games best aspects.
• When leveling up, powers have very nebulous descriptions, and a huge component of how viable an ability is is its animation - how long it is, where it goes, etc. You can't figure this information out yourself, and with respecs costing real money, there is no easy way besides lots of out of game research to figure out how to distribute your limited power points.
• Dungeon roles are questionable. Guardians aren't really needed because most boss mobs spawn tons of adds that a guardian can't aoe tank, barely do any direct damage, and often swing so slowly anyone else can dodge them. Clerics are absolutely mandatory for almost anything past the Crypts, but the dungeon queue system will stick 5 dps in a doomed group instead of requiring a cleric (at least).
• Aggro is very broken. For the most part, it is a combination of distance to target and damage done, but guardians can't outaggro healing aggro, which seems to apply from any distance. This means most mobs can't be pulled off a healing cleric, which makes combat a one dimensional kite rather than a coordinated utilization of classes filling roles.
• This might be a bug moreso than a hard negative, but the group travel mechanics are very annoying. You can't transport between solo player zones and dungeons in a group and it forces you to wait for your party to go almost anywhere. I feel like the entire mechanic is a pointless holdover from D&D proper, and letting people zone in places wouldn't hurt.

The biggest issue with the mid game is the needlessness of it all - the story is too static to be deeply engrossing besides a few rare characters like the lovers that show up in both the Plague Tower and deep Chasm. Because your actions don't have a lasting impact on the world, and the overarching story of catching Valindra takes a backseat after the tutorial and rarely pops up even in passing except in engagements in the city or in the Ebon Downs, the plot is all over the place and leaves players wanting.

This contributes to a greater sense that way too much development time and effort was put into this leveling content - from voiced over quests, to well realized zones, to all the different monster models and animations, a lot of this seems like a poor allocation of resources when launching a f2p MMO - people will level once, experience this content once, maybe twice if they level the single alt the game lets you roll without paying money, and then they expect a repeatable end game to keep them playing.

And f2p depends as much as any game on their persistent players to bring in the new players to spend money and to consistently buy new trinkets as they enter the store. Your hardcore audience is your best money sink, but you don't win them over with a lot of well designed questing zones, because they do those once and never come back.

I feel like the game would have done significantly better on a slashed budget with level 20 as the cap, with you getting 3 power and feat points per level, than having the level 60 cap, all these excessive leveling zones (and let us be honest, the Plague Tower quest chain would have been a great point to finish up at a level cap, and then just add a few levels at a time as new zones are introduced, and have early access to these zones for a few days - of course, deleveling players that go in them and get higher levels so they don't get a power advantage in PVE or PVP until after everyone can enter them). All these zones are just massive developer sinks that absolutely took lots of development time and will produce very little return on investment both in player time engaged in them and in income as a result of them. Like I said earler in this post, there is little incentive to spend money while leveling (the lockboxes I feel are a good exception, and while even the box keys are radically overpriced, a $1.50 a key is much more reasonable for most players to shill out at a whim).

This is even more pronounced at a neutered end game - and, in praise of Cryptic, the leveling content is not short but it isn't excessively long either. It might wane on some players but it won't on most, and the ~60 hours to hit max level finishing the quest content (which many players might not even touch while pvping) is acceptable. My arguments against the quantity of it is directed towards Cryptics bottom line - they spent a lot of time making these beautiful zones with forgettable one off plot threads that few people will be paying money to experience, since they gave it away for free. Kind of like how TOR gave away the best part of that game by making it f2p.

Another issue is the routes to 60 - any group content gives awful XP per run (I feel like completing a dungeon should give at least an entire level in XP, and a skirmish at least half for the time commitment and awful XP returns just killing mobs) but doesn't give enough gear per run or time to justify doing them between quests. If you follow the actual progression the devs laid out in terms of questing content, which is to run a zone, reach the end, do a dungeon, and then move on to another zone, you will outlevel zones in no time and end up being unable to queue for dungeons whose quests at the end of some zones you just reached. Nerfing XP gains isn't an effective tactic either because some people just want to get to end game and making them grind there, even with solid quest content, isn't making them happy paying customers any time sooner.

The foundries were fun and interesting apart from the normal quest content. They would mix a lot less fighting or a lot harder solo content into an otherwise monotonous zoned questing experience, and if not for the exploits around knocking mobs off platforms or farming ogres, they would have been a great complement to the leveling experience. In the next part, I'll go into why the foundries are now completely useless besides the fun they provide (and remember, games are about having fun - and I can't forget to mention I only write this much crap because Neverwinter is, at the end of the day, quite fun. Flawed, which is I what I'm getting to, but still fun).