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Neverwinter, Yet another sign of the death of the MMO era.
darkblight
Member UncommonPosts: 55
I am starved for a MMO like I have never been starved before. Ususally at most times there were new and interesting projects on the horizon, and several games worth playing to play. Unfortunatly the genre has taken a turn towards the notion that for some reason we want "action" combat.
Why?--- Tera was a flop and they did this best... game had to change it's sub status to survive. While some people do enjoy Tera it certinaly did not meet the expectations of the developers, and the content has been nerfed numerous times to make the game casual friendly.
Along comes Guild Wars 2, a game many flocked to as the mmo savior, and a game that most will not admit most have flocked away from now. While the action combat in GW2 is not it's most annoying feature, it certinaly detracts from what could of been a great release. The games which have tried to move away from the trinity have failed, believe it or not theres nothing wrong with a DPS/ Healer/ Tank role. Either that or allow players to be jack of all trades general skill development types. Instead GW2 tries to remove healing and in turn inspires fend for yourself combat.
Along comes Neverwinter, using a IP that many long time gamers look to fondly. I have heard many on these forums say to just ignore the Neverwinter part of the game and judge it on it's own merits. Of course this game would have maybe 10% of the people paying attention to it if it was not called Neverwinter, so you are stuck with the choice of using that IP for the good and bad elements it will naturally bring along.
I wanted to like Neverwinter, starved for an MMO as I am, logging in the last beta weekend I was excited to finally get my hands on the game and could of very easily sank into being a complete fan boy of the game, buying a founders pack, and going off to Neverwinters corner of the gaming market for the comming year. After rolling my control wizard and playing I suddenly came to a few realizations about the game.
1) The majority of your time in neverwinter you will be questing, and the questing is dated, borring, and does not offer any type of investment on the players behalf to become involved in any story. The static, generic NPC's stand around and hand out the most static, bland generic quests possible.
2) ok, so the quests suck.. they usually do, but once you are leveled it will be better.. this I find hard to swallow. The raiding cannot be more than zerg mechanics, as the dungeons are small and the interface/ combat does not allow for the sophisticated interations needed for advanced raiding. I am not sure if this game will have pvp or not, but I can see it suffering from the same fate.
3) bland character progression. I do not feel like anyones classes will differ much from others
4) small closterphobic world. traveling is instanced, everything is instanced.
5) people placing too much emphasis on the foundry saving the day. At the end of the day you still are left with the base mechanics of the combat/ interface system . While they may do better at getting people interested in the story, I find it hard to believe that anything worthy of any level of complexity will be spwaned from the foundry.
Fans of this game will defend it as all mmo's are defended. Saying things like " well thats the challenge of the interface"
I equate this to people sitting on the titanic before it's impending crash speaking of being tossed from the ship into the cold water is just part of the experience of going on the cruise, and that if you cannot handle it to get out. Well I will get out, gladly.
FInal score= Neverwinter 4/10
Comments
When do you people finally understand that its just a game...
Since this game is mainly instanced its aiming at the more casual crowd and not at the hardcore crowd. It will find its spot among totally different gamers then the typical oldfashioned pre WoW MMO crowd.
Hell, in my opinion its not even an MMO, yet its an online RPG, with both PvE and PvP. And might be fun for people that love that kind of more action RPG kind of gameplay.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Anyone who thinks Guild Wars 2 failed doesn't deserve to have me read their whole thread. Zones across the whole map are still heavily populated and fun.
Also, I and many others DO want action combat. So don't assume your opinion is everyones. Tera's faults were not its combat, not at all. The combat was it's only saving grace.
Personally, after playing action combat MMOs I have a hard time going back to something slower. It's just...boring and not fun now.
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
MMO's have never been more popular and the segment is growing.
Now...death of complex mmoRPG games that require thought and strategy over reflexes....well then you could make a good point.
Yeah i think its sad that D&D cant get themselves a good, deep, complex mmoRPG with intense character building and a good story. Not sure who decided all those years ago that D&D should be arcade style games while their lore and rulesets are used in every other massive mmorpg.
I should point out OP:
Your expectations are far too high as to what you expect from a game, which should be treated as only a form of entertainement..never anything more.
"The majority of your time in neverwinter you will be questing".
Thanks that's all I needed to know. I'll pass.
Good call! The random dude that has played to level 7 in a closed beta weekend where 90% of the game is not implemented said it, so it's the best decission to make.
You know where I'll spend 99% of my NWO time? Doing dungeons with friends, and creating dungeons that tell stories for other people to play. I hope enough people buy the game so my stories can spread far and wide. Oh wait, it's FREE TO PLAY, so nobody has to pay anything to play it.
Anyway, bye bye, [sarcasm]you'll be really missed[/sarcasm]!
Some people, really. You don't get better MMOs because you don't deserve them, plain and simple.
My opinion is my own. I respect all other opinions and views equally, but keep in mind that my opinion will always be the best for me. That's why it's my opinion.
This "review" is horribly written and stinks of bias on what is already a free to play game. It's unnecessary to hate on a beta where most of the content is locked in the apparent hope to sway people into not playing it just because something wasn't one person's cup of tea when they played the bare minimum of it.
There is no public service in attacking a game that is in beta and going to be free; people will be able to access it and judge it by themselves, and instilling notions based on one's own limited experiences and perceptions seems vindictive. If not that, then it just appears to be greedy and rather self centered as all you are doing is irritating people who may actually like what they played and not helping anyone at all with your allegations (in the sense that if the game had a box price you might save someone money if you actually reviewed the full product and gave fair assertions).
If you didn't like the limited amount you played in beta, that's cool. You're an individual and you have different tastes than other people. But I would caution you from irresponsibly posting these threads in the future when we are all free to try something for ourselves and decide if it is something we enjoy or not. In my opinion there was no need for a new thread to be made about this; you could just casually say it's not your cup of tea in another thread if people are discussing if they enjoy it or not.
There are what, 200 or so MMOs that are geared for casual play that have cash shops and are easy to play. Why play this game? Guild Wars 2 does everything better.
Yet another 2 month MMO.
This is exactly why those that enjoy dungeon crawls and creating their own adventures will want to have games like this made available to them. There are too few MMO's that allow you the freedom to create an adventure, you don't go around crushing that under a sledgehammer response "This game sucks because all you do is quest"
The OP is entitled to their view, NWN will not be the game they want it to be, whatever that game really is, but there are certainly plenty of others out there that have a little vision, a little imagination and a little more patience for such a game.
As for the Op's remark about TERA and GW2, well if thats all they have tried and they believe NWN is sounding the deathknell then God help us all, the genre really has been taken over by some very blinkered players.
Take a good hard look at the games list on this site to gain some perspective over how many MMO's there are out there, and then you may just come to realise that the MMO genre is far from an early grave.
Age of Wushu is the rebirth of the mmo era.
If the Repopulation, EQnext, Malru, and World of Darkness can follow suit, we're in for some good times.
NW seems to be more of a tool. Not a bad thing, but hey.
I love how you assume "becuase I hate this MMO that means everyone else must hate it too". Ok we get it an OARPG(Online Action Role Playing Game which is what Neverwinter is) is not your cup of tea. but to go and claim that because you hate it means that everyone else should hate it as well is pure foolishness.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
No, no it isn't. Just the same Asian grinder in a shiny new package, and all the gameplay revolves around making people use the cash shop / buy gold or suffer. Just like every other Asian "F2P" game ever made.Maybe because a lot of us do want action combat? I'm sick of hotkey based tab targetting nosense. It serves no purpose, it is artifical as hell and makes for boring, static gameplay. You just Tab->4321111, Tab repeat over and over and over again till the sequence of numbers that peopel like to call with fancy name of "proper skill rotation" is embeded in your brain so hard you will remember it for years to come.
Is TERA's, GW2's or NWO's combat perfect? Far from it, they each have flaws but I'll take it over the old systems without a single doubt.
Im not going to argue just to argue, but I will make a few minor points.
1. Gamers who remeber the old school games and raids are still looking for that thing to devote their time to, but they are either not finding games to match up to the "glory days" or they are embrasing the changes in the genre, including Action Combat.
2. Some of these old school gamers are actually enjoying games like this because they are no longer playing Wack a Mole on the UI . Believe it or not back in the old school raids healers would never see the boss because they spent the majority of thier time clicking on health bars, or at least using F keys and still just watching this part of the screen.
3. Having 40 skills that you hardly ever use does not always = fun. In fact some players enjoy this and some do not, and even in most of those games that give you 40 + spells to put on your bars, you only really use 8-10 of them on a regular basis anyways, and many players set those bars up for verious situations. Neverwinter really is no different other then thats, the fact that you will not be able to use all of your skills at a moments notice only makes you prepare for conflicts and encounters more.
4. Trion did put out a true to D&D rules game that made for a very complicated and in depth character development. This had its own issues in that people would gimp the toon very easily and would cause players to re-roll often just to mid/max, and as such DDO is not a mainstream MMO.
5. DDO was one of the best attempts to stay true to D&D rules and as such has made a very complicated game, its great for some reasons but other players dont want to take the time to understand games that seem this complicated (like reading a 3rd edition Player Manual).
6. The Foundry very will be the saving grace for Neverwinter and we do not say that as a cop-out but because its something we feel is true. I am done expecting Devs to make great quest content and or dungeons. I have been let down time and again by Devs, but players seem to always have some of the best ideas. Players like us will be making quests, dungeons and even raid like content for us to play. Players who know what it is that we are looking for and the foundry beta testers are already posting up teasers to the things they are doing on the Neverwinter forums and I must say some of it is looking crazy good.
Just to close, the idea that Neverwinter is killing a whole Genre is rediculous to the max, Its a game, just like any other game, just like the games that made the genre, no way this can be that Appocoliptic for MMORPGs and I might add has a full powered Foundry for gamers to make material for other games. This in and of itself will make for some extra life for Neverwinter.
Honestly, I see more people and there's more map chat than I've EVER seen in the game (my pc was down for a few months last year though). And I still see more people running around at random than I typically saw in WoW. Probably because they're not just standing in cities saying "Look at this armor, don't you like my armor?"
Exactly. After playing GW2 and even TERA, I just CANNOT deal with moldy old school combat where you trade blows without even knowing you're hitting each other other than health bars changing.
Yeah, like I said. I watched the TESO gameplay video posted in another thread and due to the combat, I may not even enjoy the game. Such is life.
Agreed. I've been craving for a more action based combat system in mmos, and luckily I found that in GW2. It's a change that the genre has needed for awhile. The old tab targetting system is like the old turn based combat system of RPGs from years ago. It was a good system for the time, but many gamers eventually want something new.
After really delving into GW2 and even DCUO (to a lesser extent), I have a hard time playing games like WoW (which I quit recently). The action combat systems, I find, create more immersion, since I can't exactly chat while waiting for cooldowns to reset for my next set of skills (like I could in WoW).
Hard Trinity and Tab targetting have their place, but many of us are outgrowing the old mechanics and are liking the newer mechanics. With each new iteration of loose trinity and action combat, we see improvements over the older systems. As long as designers can keep moving forward and create some new and interesting experiences. I'll keep playing.
Think you have AoW confused with Tera. It's the most innovative mmorpg on the market. You should try it.
No, no it isn't. Just the same Asian grinder in a shiny new package, and all the gameplay revolves around making people use the cash shop / buy gold or suffer. Just like every other Asian "F2P" game ever made.Think you have AoW confused with Tera. It's the most innovative mmorpg on the market. You should try it.
I have, for weeks of gameplay, and a dozen "Asian grinders" before that. It has some new things, but the formula is fundamentally the same: grind/farm forever for everything and/or buy gold. As such, it is not fundamentally different than half a dozen other games I could name. It has some nice points, but nothing that will appeal to Western audiences. Were I a S.Korean teenager playing it as a part time job, I might like it, but as I am not their target demographic, I don't. Big grind, meh game.All good mate, Seems like we're playing 2 different games. I for one who couldn't stomach a korean game, is saying this, heck I was raised "buy American. Must be because Wushu is from China.
So many anti-grind features built in, plus you are not forced to do ANYthing you don't want to. It's by far the most wide open mmorpg on the market with people instead of spaceships. It's everything sandbox gamers have been asking for, minus teraformming. We wont see any mmorpg with more this year.
btw - would love for you to name 6 games anything similar to AoW. Start a thread in the AoW forums.
you said the same about The Secret World.
lol:P
nw is a fun game and has made some good improvements since the last beta.. hopefully they will continue to listen to the feedback as they seem to of been doing a pretty decent job so far which should show in this beta
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
I self identify as a monkey.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"