Neverwinter

[Dog Pants]

This is what I wanted my character to be in Skyrim. The evil witch with the army of undead, that is. Not the heroes.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKsyucxJ9sU[/media]

[HereComesPete]

And there I was thinking neverwinter had died out some time ago. Apparently release isn't too far away.

[FatherJack]

My German's a bit shit, but I think that says "The siege of Neverwinter" Free-to-play online role-playing game. Like the online Elder Scrolls and the recent Starcraft videos, it's a bit early to get excited without seeing what the games will actually look like when you are playing them.

[Dog Pants]

Well quite, but I gather it's building on the mission construction from City of Heroes, which could make it interesting. I've long said player created content is the best way to keep an MMONG fresh, but whether they can pull it off well is another matter.

[Anery]

So far, so meh.
The foundry is a nice idea, I agree with Pants that player created content is the way to keep an MMO fresh and keep people playing - and is cheaper than paying extra staff to generate smaller updates (cynicalmode /off) but I fail to see what else the game offers, the gameplay looks rather samey, it seems to rely on tried and tested methods and graphically is rather poor, their website offers very little in explanation of how the game will actually work. Too little information makes me hesitant, thankfully it will be F2P so I guess I will give it a shot - if it was pay there would be no way, and this is coming from an MMOHolic.

[HereComesPete]

Huuurgh! Trying to sign up to perfect world for beta, said I was registered, gave email for account recovery, said nothing was saved, found a faq about linking cryptic account and perfect world account together, went to chimps online, tried to sign in only to be faced with a perfect world login screen which unsurprisingly didn't recognize me, support ticket raised, rage generated.

I already give less of a fuck about this damn game and I haven't even played it yet.

[Dog Pants]

Less than perfect then? They really ought to put more consideration into their name, given how these things go.

[FatherJack]

Less than perfect then? They really ought to put more consideration into their name, given how these things go.

Perfect World was the name of a free-to-play Chinese RPG the owner of which bought up Cryptic Studios, which is where the name comes from.

[Dog Pants]

That makes it no less ironic.

[Joose]

It went open beta yesterday (I think it was yesterday. Recently, anyway) so I thought I would jump on and give it a go. Impressions so far are meh. Its not terrible to look at and everything seems to work reasonably well, its just all rather generic MMO. I'll give it a bit more time to see if it just needs to pick up some speed, but so far im not hugely impressed.

[Dog Pants]

John Walker wrote about it, describing how he loved it, but also describing the most vanilla of generic MMOs.

[Thompy]

John Walker wrote about it, describing how he loved it, but also describing the most vanilla of generic MMOs.

I know what he means. I stopped playing WoW because it was getting boring doing the same thing for more than 6 years not because I disliked the basic mechanics. A fresh setting that scratches the same itch would be welcome. GW 2 didn't manage it unfortunately and I doubt I'll play this, but maybe Wildstar.

Having said that WoW was (is?) a behemoth, and my first MMO, it was good to be a part of it but maybe I'm just over the whole genre now until someone does something much different

[Anery]

John Walker wrote about it, describing how he loved it, but also describing the most vanilla of generic MMOs.

I know what he means. I stopped playing WoW because it was getting boring doing the same thing for more than 6 years not because I disliked the basic mechanics. A fresh setting that scratches the same itch would be welcome. GW 2 didn't manage it unfortunately and I doubt I'll play this, but maybe Wildstar.

Having said that WoW was (is?) a behemoth, and my first MMO, it was good to be a part of it but maybe I'm just over the whole genre now until someone does something much different

That sounds blander than an evening of Saturday Night TV. The ONE thing that it has going for it is the Foundry idea, but nothing I have read sounds like it would have the hook that is required to keep me coming back to it day after day. WoW for me was about reaching end game, then about gearing up for raids, then about beating raid bosses - when I changed job and could no longer raid, I found my interest in the game was gone. Mechanics were too old and tired to keep me interested, Neverwinter just seems to take those mechanics juggles them with some F2P monkeys and add a healthy dose of aged graphics.
Hopefully Joose can tell us something about that Foundry that would be of interest, but I agree with Thompy - Wildstar looks like the only interesting thing on the MMO horizon.

[Joose]

Ah yes, the foundry. On the plus side it is an excellent idea; it's well implemented and reasonably flexible, meaning a potentially unending stream of new content at no cost to the devs. Brilliant all round.

Trouble is that all the content in the world is of no use if the game is just fundamentally boring. Why would I need unending player created content if I can't maintain interest enough to get through the professionally created stuff?

If you could somehow work a Forge like thing into guild wars it would be amazing. With this it's polishing a turd. It doesn't matter that its got a near mirror finish, it's still poop.

I'm going back to watching my inbox for a WildStar beta invite.

[HereComesPete]

Fail

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/05 ... back-time/

And whilst still in 'open beta' they charge real money, state no resets or wipes and this same bug existed in STO? Super ninja game release from couldn't give a fuck developer alert!

[friznit]

Installed this yesterday cos I had a spare weekend to kill. It's actually very good in an apologetically F2P MMO way. In fact it has cherry picked all the bits so carefully that it actually feels reminiscent of GW2 because it's clearly taken some inspiration from that for the open world instancing. A lot of it is very standard fair: classes are your standard triumvirate, helmets and mounts at level 20, and you can dye your sword bright pink. But it's all done well and feels very slick. There are some thinly veiled attempts to horse you to log in, such as certain special coins you can get once a day but need to renew every 24hrs to keep them - get 360 and buy super special thing (hurr durr).

There are some uniquely cool ideas: companions and pets are actually useful - I have a cleric who heals my dps fighter dude. She levels up too and I can give her extra gear. She also gets a a set of 'power dice' which I can use to play browser based game with my companions to level them up while I'm on the tube commuting to work. You can actually do all your crafting, auctioneering and whatnot through the browser account as well, which is a nice touch. Crafting is a bit different - you don't farm mats and hammer things yourself but hire minions to do it for you, which appeals to me.

Combat is fun. You have a limited number of action buttons (Tab, Q, E, R, L & R mouse) so you have to be quite selective about what you put on your action bar. You don't actually ' Tab lock' the enemy, but simply point at them and mash buttons. And finally you have to sprint out of the way of their various AOE or power attacks, which means you can jump round behind them and poke then in the bum. All this makes combat feel pretty dynamic and fun.

It's still F2P though, and there is obviously plenty of encouragement for you to part with your hard earned cash, though it's not in yer face like some other MMOs. There do seem to be about 5 different currencies though, which is confusing. For those who have played any other Perfect World games like Star Trek Online, your Zen account is shared (including the custom chat channels I had in STO, which was interesting).

If anyone else happens to play, look out for a pointy eared black man with bright pink armour and a huge weapon.

[Dog Pants]

Nice wordage Friz, sounds like a pretty reasonable game from what you've said. That kind of clarifies what I was hearing from journalists in the beta - they took pains to state how generic it felt, without actually condemning it.