I need to get a lot more leveling done in order to prepare a huge article, so I'll have to keep this brief. Neverwinter is a decent game if you don't expect it to be a Swordcoast-based WoW. Seriously, there is no Swordcoast here. If you're expecting some vast world to explore, to travel from Luskan all the way to Amn and back, you're playing the wrong game. In Neverwinter, you explore exactly that - Neverwinter. The various quarters of the city as well as its immediate surrounding areas. It's actually a lot like Stormreach in Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). You know, every sewer grate, every hut, every abandoned tavern is a dungeon, there should be monsters crawling out of every fucking mailbox, everything is divided into tiny instances, that kinda thing. It's... alright. I'm not a huge fan of it, I'm sure everyone would have preferred a vast, roaming game world to explore, but there's still plenty to see.
Here's a plus: The amount of FedEx quests (kill this, loot that, run an errand) is relatively small. There is an insane amount of dungeons full of cutscenes and voiceovers and hidden treasure chests, secret doors and traps. None of them are mazes, neither the layout nor the "puzzles" are anywhere near as complex as they were in DDO, but the stories, the boss battles, everything is a lot faster-paced, more spectacular and so far, I can solo everything, the obvious group-based instances and PvE events (fight back X waves of enemies) aside. I haven't died a single time, so far. Not sure if I'm good, my class is OP or the game is just too damn easy.
Character customisation (stats & skills, not appearance) sucks massively. I miss being able to fully tweak and upgrade my toon the way I could on DDO. Neverwinter has incredibly restrictive skill trees, which suggest some kind of free-form character development, but "you need to spend 10 more points on tier 1 abilities" crap prevents me from really doing what I want. Yes, each class gets three different feat trees to choose from in order to make them a tiny bit less like everyone else, but the feats are about as exciting as "1/2/5% more damage", "5/10/15% more threat generation", "Armor is 3/6/9% more effective". Massive yawnfest here.
Here's another big plus: The companion system! I'm using a tag team of pets. The founders' pets, to be more precise. I'm leveling up my direwolf, then whip out the panther whilst Mr. Wolf goes into training and so forth. There are tons of other companions ranging from flaming hawks to ghostly armors and swords to guardian angels and even a honey badger! People, too. You know, a cleric, a wizard, that kinda stuff. They all change looks and look bigger and badder as you level them up. I really like it!
As for the item shop: Yes, they're offering ridiculously overprized epic mounts and epic companions, healing stones and what have you. But you can buy mounts and companions with gold, tokens and many other of the 25 billion meta-currencies in the game. And in a game world, which has been instanced into countless tiny fragments, mounts really aren't all that useful for anything other than looking awesome.
Cash shop exclusive respec tokens are evil, but by the time you'd even want a respec, you will have made enough shop currency to afford respecs, simply by playing. And, once again, the feat and skill trees are so incredibly restrictive, there's simply not much there to warrant a respec in the first place.
My one big problem is this: The quests, while mostly fun and exciting, are entirely linear. There is one large chain of story-quests, interrupted by occasional bits of FedEx. I'm halfway through the leveling stage after only two days. If I roll a new toon, it's the exact same quests again. No alternative starting zones, no branching storyline, it's all linear. What's worse, you must grab every single quest and do all of them in order if you want to keep leveling up and avoid running into quests of a higher level than your character. And even then you'll want to do the occasional pvp match, pve event, instanced dungeon or user-generated quest to keep up with your leveling.
Oh yeah, those things! PvP feels more like an afterthought right now, it takes me forever just to get into a match and it's all just domination, i.e. capture and hold points on the map. Boring. But you get tokens for epic gear. PvE events are nice, you just thrash hordes of mobs for about 15 minutes and get awesome loot. The dungeons are great, BUT - the dungeon finder, well... think WoW. People don't talk unless there's an argument over loot or somebody dies and it's the cleric's or the guardian's fault. There's always that one dumbass rogue who rushes ahead to solo the entire thing, the cleric who is constantly AFK without telling anyone... well, you get the idea. Better play with people you know and love or prepare for a load of crap. And yes, you can inspect players to see their gearscore. Enjoy that!
User-generated quests... well, I've seen one or two really awesome ones, so far. Also, spelling and grammar is atrocious in every single one of them. It helps to imagine every single NPC to be talking with a Russian accent. Seriously, those awful user-generated quest texts! "I am slave trader!", "Go to forest!", "Kill big monster in arena!" it's Compare the Meerkat all over again! Also, 50% of the foundry quests are nothing but lame arenas. One small area, 3-5 waves of bad guys, crappy chest at the end, that's it. The kind of shit one can whip up in five minutes. To be fair, it's still early days, it's all beta, good things will come, proven by the foundry on Star Trek Online, which brought us quests so awesome, some of them were more amazing than the stuff made by Cryptic.
Now enjoy some screens, I gotta level some more!
-Cat
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