Neverwinter MMO to Hit Xbox One Next Year

[IanDavis]

Neverwinter MMO to Hit Xbox One Next Year

The D&D MMO casts Greater Console Polymorph.

The Xbox One's library will get a bit more diverse next year, as Perfect World Entertainment announced that it's bringing its F2P Dungeons & Dragons MMO [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/reviews/10443-Neverwinter-Review-Welcome-to-D-D-Infinite]Neverwinter[/a] to the platform in the first half of 2015

Unlike most MMOs, Neverwinter's fast-paced action would fit well on a controller. Aside from the entirely forgettable [a href=http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dungeons-dragons-daggerdale]Daggerdale[/a], it's the only other video game to use the 4th edition D&D rules (however loosely).

While the game is about to reach its fourth expansion module in a few weeks, the best part remains its player-made content. Using the Foundry, anyone can make their own missions and put them up for the world to play. They run the gamut from simple dungeon crawls to sprawling multi-part epics. Even better, popular map creators can earn a good bit of in-game cash for their creations in the form of tips.

As you might pick up from the name, Neverwinter takes place in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. The world's changed quite a bit if you've only played Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, as the Spellplague has altered life irrevocably.

While there's been no word about cross-platform play with the current PC version, we do know that it will (like most online games) require an Xbox Live Gold membership.

It seems that a lot of MMOs say that they'll do console releases, but few ever actually pull it off. We're still waiting on The Elder Scrolls Online, for example. Here's hoping that the current batch of consoles will prove more MMO-friendly than the last ones.

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[Riff Moonraker]

Hell. YES! Now, please let them keep their word and actually BRING it to the One. I would LOVE to see this happen!!!

 

[Remus]

Not a terrible MMO - with the limited number of skills you're allowed to use, much like ESO and Guild Wars, this seems like a great fit for consoles. I've played it a bit on PC but the cash shop integration became more overbearing the more I played the game. It wasn't exactly an interest killer - there were just better games out there so I deleted it to free space.

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, I don't know what to think on this being good or bad.

I'm a long time player of Cryptic's games and honestly in a practical sense I'd think STO (my favorite) would be the best fit with consoles. I say this because pretty much all of STO's content is soloable, and the endgame elite STFs so far are all quite doable with PUGs without slowing people down much.

Neverwinter is an odd bird where most of the content is pretty simple, and doable solo or with a PUG without breaking a sweat. It's endgame dungeons and grind though tend to be fairly nasty, and the number of times you potentially have to run some of that stuff to get everything can be fairly crazy. As a result it's one of those games that starts out easy and social, until you hit the endgame, and then you slam into the difficulty spike/grind combination which means you can no longer PUG like you were up until that point, and everyone who knows what they are doing ONLY wants to run with experienced groups that fit certain gear score requirements which can only be met by already being one of the elite (which is kind of the point) and the gear scores people ask for climb, specifically to chase away endgame newbs. It's not quite as bad as "The Secret World" can be, but it's fairly close... not that I've had many problems when I want to run the stuff in.

The point here is that I'm not sure if Neverwinter is really suited to the kind of play console gamers are used to. It seems to me that Cryptic is going to have to take a serious nerf bat to parts of the endgame, and sort of stop having an endgame and develop most of their later content with the console experience in mind.

See, while a console gamer can be expected to have a few buds they can play with and voice chat together, such groups aren't going to hold together for the massive elite grinds Neverwinter can require (I mean putting together a full set of armor from Malabog's Castle can take a long time depending on how cranky the RNG is, if you want an artifact like the Valindra's Crown Shard... well guess what, running Valindra's castle is likely your full time job for the next month).

The way around that is generally to get to know a lot of people so you can break into a lot of different groups, get your gear score up, and master things enough where you can sort of jump in with an elitist quasi-PUG (with people you probably know at this point). This requires being social on a level your typical headset doesn't allow since you can only converse with so many people on a channel at a time. I suppose in theory you could get lucky and wind up meeting a lot of people on the way up to hang with at the endgame, but that's only viable when the game is brand new to the format, and less so for sustained use when people are coming in at a slower trickle.


All also say that as much of a Cryptic fan as I am, unlike the article writer, I think "The Foundry" is a waste of space. The idea of player created quests is nice, but for obvious reasons stemming from potential abuse, the guys doing Foundry missions can't control what kinds of rewards you can achieve. Also while they can decorate, write awesome stories, and do all kinds of things with the triggers, at the end of the day your pretty limited in what monsters and groups of monsters you can use, you pretty much have set catagories (aberrants, undead, etc...) and groups set as like "weak melee group", or "strong mixed group" or whatever, and you can't always even control what your going to put down, though can make the monsters look different by giving them costumes. At the end of the day you run enough foundry missions you'll quickly see literally every combination of stuff that can be thrown at you. I mean sure, some dude might make his skeletons look like flaming suits of armor (which are the same flaming suit of armor you can assign to pretty much any mob) and call them something fancy, but at the end of the day it's the same pre-set, level-adjusting group of skeletons you've beaten up every other time someone started putting in skeletons.

If you play just for the story you'll like *some* of what people have done with the foundry (for every gem there are probably three turds), at the end of the day though if you also want to advance your character, especially once your max level, this won't help much as the loot is just going to be random garbage, and the biggest payoff is doing a "run X # of founry quests for an Astral Diamonds Payday" daily quest.

With some work "The Foundry" could be something really special, namely in terms of finding ways to make it more rewarding, but right now I think it's no replacement for company created content, and sort of misleading when it's presented as giving the game infinite amounts of things to do.

I created a rather terrible adventure called "A Bad Bid" once (if your in the mood to grown I can put it back up in Neverwinter sometime) it worked, but it sort of showed me the limits of The Foundry, people did far more with the allowed tools than I did, but I sort of gave up because I couldn't quite set things up the way I wanted or get them to work properly. I can only imagine how nightmarish trying to build a foundry mission on a console would be.

In theory though, you could level a character all the way to top without touching a piece of company content if you wanted to (other than the mandatory tutorial) I suppose that's something... but why would you want to?

Sorry, as someone deeply disappointed by the Foundry I couldn't help but hijack my own post with an opposing viewpoint. As someone who was really excited about this at one time, I don't want anyone to become heartbroken if they run right out to do Neverwinter to check this out. Some people like the article writer apparently love it, me, I wanted to but... well... it wasn't all that. Just know what your getting into.... and I hope you LOVE MMO jump puzzles (maybe you won't find any in the foundry missions you choose, but I'm just saying... for some reason they seem to have become popular).