Review the Neverwinter MMO for me!

[Rust]

If you enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion, you're going to hate ESO.

It's a WoW Clone of the most blatant sort.

[healix]

Rust, I hope it's not that bad. I am willing to give it a shot...but if it's a WoW clone, I just won't play. (Are you in the beta?)

[Rust]

Not in the Beta - I have a aversion to anything Elder Scrolls related that is Multiplayer that isn't simple Arena battling. Just everything I have read about the design of the game...they are borrowing heavily from WoW for the gameplay.

[Golden Girl]

This is known as the TORtanic Rule - when you have an IP strong enough to support a unique MMO, you absolutely must copy WoW.

[Rust]

I'd say TOR's failing was it's a beautifully done Single Player RPG experience shoe horned into the MMO market. Take out the MMO Trappings (The Flashpoints and Heroic Quests), rescale them appropriately, allow for another companion to join you on the field (By Max Level you'll have two companions "idle" anyway, even at maximum amount of crafting), and keep PvP as a Multiplayer component...you would have had the RPG experience of the decade. An RPG with not one, but eight unique storylines with moral choices to boot.

TOR's problem wasn't quality or even miming WoW's style...it's the fact there's nothing there to justify $15 a month to play it without serious handicaps (TOR's also an example of how to completely botch a F2P conversion).

[Taceus Jiwede]

I'd say TOR's failing was it's a beautifully done Single Player RPG experience shoe horned into the MMO market.

I agree completely.

-------------------------------------------------

I have never been a big fan of WoW.  But having played MMO's prior and post WoW and they had made serious improvements.  WoW is actually a very well designed game IMO, it is just too bad it has set the bar because while its a cool concept, I don't want every MMO trying to compete with it.  That is why Neverwinter is kind of nice.  It isn't trying to be a WoW killer, it wants the people who don't want to play WoW.

Now this is all my opinion but the boss mechanics WoW introduced into the MMO world is a thing of art before WoW "raids" and boss fights were either a group of people beating on a boss, or a large group of people beating on a very hard boss. WoW brought in the style of not just being high enough level but having to be completely aware of your surroundings and familiar with the fight.  Dungeons didn't use to be maps and instances they were just huge open dungeons that were very long and the enemies would respawn behind you, forcing you to fight both in and out of the dungeon.  While people were training giant groups of enemies to kill you and others so they could fight the bosses(and sometimes just to unicorn you into losing all your gear at the bottom of a dungeon that takes 3 hours to get to).  After WoW that concept quickly died, people saw how much better personal instance dungeons were.  Although I still think CoH is the true founder of instances

 The "hold onto your loot" when you die aspect was also a very welcome change.  Not losing XP when you die and just having to repair armor was also really nice.  Again I am not a huge fan of WoW, its the one of the few MMO's I haven't played much.  IMO they were the catalyst necessary to make MMO's start changing their ways.  MMO's use to require some pretty hardcore gaming attitude.  And WoW found a way to give people that but also remove the things that were plain BS in other MMO's.  That is why it was so popular, because it was an MMO that offered a hardcore playing attitude but with a game that is mostly kind to you (Not including the community of course)

[Aggelakis]

Let's go back to Neverwinter, guys. Take your comments about ESO and other games to the ESO thread and whatever other threads are applicable.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Let's go back to Neverwinter, guys. Take your comments about ESO and other games to the ESO thread and whatever other threads are applicable.

Oh ya.  Just about to hit 60 if anyone is on beheader looking to do hard mode dungeons.

[eabrace]

I just finished up in the Helm's Hold area of the game.  I sincerely hope that the player behavior I'm starting to see was isolated to that area and doesn't continue to plague me Ebon Downs.

Up until this point in the game, I had only died exactly once and that was from being a stupid new player at level 4.  Four times in the last two days I ended up on my face in Helm's Hold because I was in combat with a spawn and some jerk came running past me with two or three more spawns chasing after them.  And, of course, those trailers would then turn and attack me as soon as I became the nearest target.

Not cool.

[Mistress Urd]

I just finished up in the Helm's Hold area of the game.  I sincerely hope that the player behavior I'm starting to see was isolated to that area and doesn't continue to plague me Ebon Downs.

Up until this point in the game, I had only died exactly once and that was from being a stupid new player at level 4.  Four times in the last two days I ended up on my face in Helm's Hold because I was in combat with a spawn and some jerk came running past me with two or three more spawns chasing after them.  And, of course, those trailers would then turn and attack me as soon as I became the nearest target.

Not cool.

Reminds me of the time I was in Steel Canyon leveling up from Positron and someone pulled their high level spawn of DE over my low teens blaster.

[eabrace]

Reminds me of the time I was in Steel Canyon leveling up from Positron and someone pulled their high level spawn of DE over my low teens blaster.

Yeah, it feels a whole lot like that.  Difference is this was happening far more frequently this weekend.

[Mistress Urd]

My Coh brain is already fading it should be Valkyrie who I was leveling up at. Its just I recall Positron as the main figure there even though he doesn't actually "train" heroes.

While it happened in CoH, griefing was often dealt with a quick 1 star and doing such a thing on a small pop server could make life difficult for you. It just isn't part of the game or the community in general to do things like that.

[Heraclea]

I am heartily enjoying this game.  Dungeons can be iffy, and some have certain requirements.  But the skirmishes have all been some of the best, happily chaotic zergfest material I have found in an MMO.  The lower level material is especially entertaining.  Once you get the controls down, this is a pretty good action MMO.

Levelling content is more than adequate.  I am several levels above the current zone I'm playing through, which makes the game a lot more fun. 

The Foundry, in some ways, offers more depth than Mission Architect did, though you are currently limited to reskinning dev-made critters.  You can have multiple choice and fairly complex dialogue trees, at least.   I am back to my old self again in it there:

Spoiler for Hidden:

Short Code: NW-DEETO9XW8
Title: Smurf Nasties Must Die!
Author - @herakleia
Players - 1
Lore - Irrelevant
Tags - Story, Combat, Dungeon Crawl

May it please the Nine Hells, I have just published my first experimental adventure. "Smurf Nasties Must Die!" is a simple dungeon crawl, but it features betrayal from an unexpected source. You must stop the vile scheme of the Drow Smurfs to corner the astral rhinestone market.

Loosely based on my Neverwinter Nights 1 module, "Smurf Nazis Must Die!"

Made you look, didn't I?

and if you have a PW account, I'm back at it in this thread as well.  And so far, the cash shop has been quite inobtrusive, though I understand that changes at max level. 

This game needs work.  Tanking is impossible, largely because healing cleric aggro is out of control.  But I think it has excellent potential. 

[Tenzhi]

Simply running from aggro is hardly griefing regardless of incidental casualties.

[Minotaur]

Simply running from aggro is hardly griefing regardless of incidental casualties.

Actually in NW it's often incompetence rather than malice, particularly if you're on a mount, you can normally ride past stuff without aggroing it, but occasionally they follow for a distance.

[Tenzhi]

Actually in NW it's often incompetence rather than malice, particularly if you're on a mount, you can normally ride past stuff without aggroing it, but occasionally they follow for a distance.

And in CoH you could have aggro without even knowing it as an ambush gets spawned when you accept a mission.  And then a lost group of level 40+ enemies is left roving around Steel Canyon.

[downix]

And in CoH you could have aggro without even knowing it as an ambush gets spawned when you accept a mission.  And then a lost group of level 40+ enemies is left roving around Steel Canyon.

I call bully. The Lost only go to lvl 30.

[Tenzhi]

I call bully. The Lost only go to lvl 30.

Erm... a lost group, not a group of Lost.  An ambush aimlessly wandering about without the person they're ambushing to home in on - e.g. lost.

[eabrace]

Simply running from aggro is hardly griefing regardless of incidental casualties.

I won't disagree that if you're running around and don't know you're being followed that it's not griefing.  But when you're taking damage from the parade that's on your back ('cause we can all see the numbers flying through the air), and some of those enemies can zip their way across the screen into close combat in an instant, it's hard to claim you don't know you're being followed.

Even allowing for benefit of the doubt, it's hard to think that someone who is running in a straight line along a road and then veers over to jump up onto the cliffs where you're standing out of range of aggro, zips by you and leaves a couple spawns of demons behind, and immediately returns to the following the road did that "accidentally."

At any rate, it hasn't been an issue in Vellosk, so that's been isolated to Helm's Hold so far.

[eabrace]

Well, here's an interesting little quirk.  I'd file a bug, but it would appear that all I can do is search the bugs that have already been filed.

Last night I decided to start leveling up a Cleric companion for the hell of it.  When I logged out last night, I sent her off to train.

When I logged in today, she was back and running by my side, but I noticed her stat bars weren't displayed up in the upper left next to mine the way they usually are.  So, I tried to see if I could get them back by first summoning my dog, and then re-summoning my Cleric.  That did the trick, but now I have two copies of my cleric following me around.